Not the OP, but yeah that used to bother me when I was younger.

As did any CRTs running below 75hz

My “super power” used to be that I could tell what refresh rate a VDU was operating at just by looking at it. Well, I couldn’t tell past 80hz. But anything below that I could.

Most lights try to avoid flicker in the design, but bad/failing ones can drive one nuts. E.g. fluorescents flicker at 120 Hz (2 crossings per cycle) but the phosphor coating carries some glow and that they stay on for ~80% of the cycle time anyways makes it a lot more bearable that if it were an idealized instantaneous 50% duty at a 60 Hz rate.

God bless LEDs with some capacitance though...

Fifteen years ago I started to develop mild neurological symptoms. Mostly headaches, some minor muscle twitches, and some weird vision issues. I started working with first my GP and then with a neurologist to try to get to the bottom of it. The investigation was leading towards some form of optic neuropathy. In parallel I moved to a new job. All of my symptoms went away and in retrospect at the time all of the symptoms had started when I'd started that job. The fluorescent lighting near my desk there was terrible and as far as my doctors and I could figure out that was likely the cause of it.

It should be running at 0 fps, then when there is movement it should run at refresh rate.

Wouldn't it look stuttery if the user tried to drag windows or other widgets with a limited framerate?

> What you actually want is low latency

High frame rates directly contribute to lowering latency.

I guess I'm the polar opposite of you here, I heavily prefer low latency/high refresh rates over low CPU/GPU usage, as long as the machine is plugged in to a power source.

> This is the exact opposite of what I want, actually: imgui keeps promising an official mode that doesn't totally melt the machine from running at peak refresh rate the entire time

I don't know what to tell you when you're fucking with an immediate mode UI library...

I promise it’s coming eventually but I don’t believe the custom version is hard to make to work either.

I would agree with that for desktop apps. Not refreshing unless needed. And this is not too difficult to do. But still, when other editors are refreshing at 240Hz, simply scrolling text or hovering over the file list seems sluggish at 60Hz.

And the worst thing is that with GPU rendering it's pretty easy to introduce extra latency - if you buffer too much, miss sync events etc - and there's inherently more latency to the rendering process than just writing a pixel color into a framebuffer and having it scanned out to the screen.

The whole point of >60FPS would be to able to reduce the delay between the user action and the results appearing on the screen.

The irony is just like with manufacturing and CPUs, the secret to getting high throughput necessary for high FPS is deep pipelining - meaning more delays compared to just drawing stuff.

The parallel of this in games has been frame generation, and fake frames - the way this is implemented that the game waits an extra frame's worth of time, then starts generating an interpolated frame between the two states, which adds extra time as well.

I propose, that instead of FPS, gaming benchmarks should move to the metric of action-to-pixel (ATP). For this metric, the FPS(or frame time) is a lower bound - if your game runs at 60FPS, your frames take 16.66ms to render - so by definition you can't react any faster than that.

Not sure if anyone's working on this, but this would be a nice way to combat the framegen BS that's going on in the games industry right now.

Yes I am aware that IM UI's are popular for games - level editors etc.

Just nice to see other possibilities.

100%

I have recently tried it again and it seems to have gotten worse that what I remembered. The interface was really hard on my eyes. I spent a little time trying to tweak the theme but I don't think that was the problem but the font rendering. I also noticed some weird layout bugs in the tab buttons. So not as smooth as I previously remembered.

I do appreciate they have the option to disable the big sign-in button however there are other account related UI I still can't disable.

The main feature that keeps me from moving to any other editor is the vscode/vscodium feature of clicking and dragging files to insert links and embed images in markdown files. Weird that no other editor has this.