120fps Video Testing: Can Your Display Handle It? (Patreon)

Hi everyone, Rich here. 

We've had some feedback suggesting that as we can capture at 120 frames per second, we might like to share some 120fps video downloads with Patreon supporters. It's worth stressing that YouTube doesn't support this, so any endevours we undertake will be limited in nature and for supporters only, but before we plough on into this, the question is: can you display handle it?

First of all, if you have a PC attached to a high frequency display and you run your desktop at 120Hz, you can download the video and take a look, but I don't expect you to encounter any problems - just ensure you have a video player with hardware acceleration and I think you should be fine. No problems here with my LG CX running at 2160p120 connected to my PC.

I'm more interested in what happens when you take the download, stick it on a USB drive, plug it into your TV and run it. First of all, does it work? Secondly, are you actually getting 120fps playback? On the second point, I've made things easier by including a frame counter in the bottom left. 

If you have a 'slow motion' video option on your smartphone, record the video playing and take a look at some stills from that video. If you see odd and even frames blend together you should be good to go. Here's what that looked like for me using the LG CX's media player: with consecutive frames present, I know I'm playing back at 120fps: https://cdn.gamer-network.net/2021/screenshots/VID_20210516_195530.mp4_snapshot_00.01_[2021.05.16_20.00.26].jpg

If you don't have such a mode on your phone, just continually pause and unpause the video as you play it. If you always get odd or always get even frames, the player is likely skipping frames and running the video at 60, not 120. The only caveat to this is that console 120fps is actually 119.88fps so it may swap between odd and even every 1000 frames or so. The YouTube on the download page has YT disregard every other frame, so it's basically running at 60. With the pause/unpause technique, you can see how a decimated video output looks.

OK, so how can you help in the testing? Simply report in the comments beneath what screen you have, whether the files play (I've included 1080p, 1440p and 2160p) and whether you're getting 'true' 120fps playback. I guess if you're streaming over network, that's another viable test option but if you're doing that, please let me know. As mentioned, the 2160p120 video is confirmed as working on an LG CX.

Here are the files: https://www.digitalfoundry.net/2021-05-17-mad-max-120fps-test-video