Factorio is a worst case scenario for LCD sample and hold displays when it comes to eye tracking motion blur during the full screen panning motion when moving around. With Factorio I'm almost always trying to look at something other than the character when moving around, and it's a hot blurry mess on my Dell U3011 until I stop moving. To be clear I'm not talking about blur from slow pixel response times. I'm talking about eye tracking motion blur (see: http://www.blurbusters.com/faq/oled-motion-blur/).
I'd been eyeing new displays with mitigation technologies such as Lightboost, ULMB, or the BenQ motion blur reduction all of which rely on backlight strobing (sometimes called black frame insertion). One problem with this technique is that you can't really apply it at anything less than about 85Hz (ideally 100+ Hz, really) without introducing significant flickering.
Up until I started playing Factorio I didn't really consider blur much of a problem; at least not enough of one to justify the expense. However, since 2D panning brings out the worst of any monitor I really started noticing it when playing so started looking around. That led me to information on the 85Hz and 100Hz cut off's common in monitors that employ the technique, and that led me to think "well, then I'll play with the monitor set to 120Hz and voila!" However, that then led me to descriptions of how backlight strobing causes double image artifacts if frame repeating is used so, 60fps @ 120Hz + backlight strobing would not actually work out so well.
So, with that said, allowing Factorio to support at the very least panning at a higher framerate would be a real boon to people with displays capable of this style of blur reduction. Would high FPS panning be doable without too much trouble? Internally the game can still operate at 60 ticks. Then, maybe later down the line, specific fluid animations like items on belts could also be supported.
Really, I just dream of a blur free Factorio experience. That would be really awesome and achievable, but >60FPS is a requisite.
Also, even outside of backlight strobing fps/refresh mismatches do still cause some artifacts that are unavoidable for people with high refresh rate displays. To help understand what 60fps on a 120hz or 144hz display would look like you can use the 60/30fps comparisons in the following pages on a 60Hz display:
http://www.testufo.com/#test=framerates
http://www.testufo.com/#test=framerates-text
So no, Factorio is not CS:GO, but that doesn't make it immune to bluring problems on basically any LCD display and stuttering and double image problems on higher end displays. Those of us who have or want to get such displays to help with the blur would just like a little love is all.
I hope the devs haven't given up on the idea of completely decoupling output from game logic.Thanks for hearing me out.
*EDIT* The blur busters site is down at the time of this writing. The google cache page is here:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/s ... clnk&gl=us
Also, the topic is OLED, but the same principles apply to LCD.
