The rates and resolutions for frames rendered in a computer game directly impact the player performance, influencing both the overall game playability and the game's enjoyability. Insights into the effects of frame rates and resolutions can guide users in their choice for game settings and new hardware purchases, and inform system designers in their development of new hardware, especially for embedded devices that often must make tradeoffs between resolution and frame rate. While there have been studies detailing the effects of frame rate and resolution on streaming video and other multimedia applications, to the best of our knowledge, there have been no studies quantifying the effects of frame rate and resolution on user performance for computer games. This paper presents results of a carefully designed user study that measures the impact of frame rate and frame resolution on user performance in a first person shooter game. Contrary to previous results for streaming video, frame rate has a marked impact on both player performance and game enjoyment while resolution has little impact on performance and some impact on enjoyment.

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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number CNS-0423362. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).