60 FPS vs 120 FPS: Is the Upgrade Worth It?

Going from 30 to 60 FPS is a change almost everyone notices. Going from 60 to 120 FPS is more subtle, and whether you see any difference at all depends on your screen. This comparison explains what 120 FPS really adds, who benefits, and the trade-offs – especially when the extra frames are created by interpolation rather than recorded by a camera.

The short answer

• Choose 60 FPS if you or your audience watch mainly on standard 60 Hz screens, if the video is going to an online platform that tops out at 60 FPS, or if you want faster processing and smaller files.
• Choose 120 FPS if you will watch on a 120 Hz or faster display – many recent phones, tablets, laptops, TVs and gaming monitors – and the content has plenty of fast or sweeping motion.

Side-by-side comparison

Your display decides

A screen's refresh rate sets an upper limit on how many distinct frames per second you can see. On a 60 Hz monitor, a 120 FPS video has half its frames discarded during playback, so it looks identical to a 60 FPS version. On a 120 Hz display, each of the 120 frames gets its own refresh, and motion is visibly smoother.

High refresh rates have become common: many phones and tablets now run at 90 or 120 Hz, many laptops and TVs support 120 Hz, and gaming monitors commonly run at 144 Hz or more. Some devices lower the refresh rate to save power, though, so it is worth checking that yours is actually set to its highest mode when you compare.

What the extra frames change

The improvement from 60 to 120 FPS is most noticeable on:

• Fast panning and tracking shots, where 60 FPS can still show slight stepping.
• Scrolling in screen recordings and UI demos, which looks remarkably crisp at 120 FPS on a high-refresh screen.
• Fast gameplay, particularly first-person and racing games.
• Sample-and-hold blur. Modern displays hold each frame until the next one arrives, which makes moving objects look slightly smeared as your eyes track them. Halving the frame duration reduces that smear.

On slow or mostly static content – talking heads, presentations, landscapes – the difference is small to non-existent.

Diminishing returns

Doubling from 30 to 60 FPS cuts the time between frames by about 17 ms. Doubling again to 120 FPS only cuts it by about 8 ms. The perceptual gain is real on suitable content and hardware, but it is smaller than the first jump, and it comes at a cost in file size and processing time.

Native vs interpolated 120 FPS

Native 120 FPS footage, recorded by a camera running at that rate, contains 120 real samples of motion per second. When you interpolate to 120 FPS, many more of the frames are estimates:

With steady motion, those estimates look excellent. With fast, overlapping or erratic movement, any warping or ghosting appears across several consecutive frames instead of one. That is why starting from a 60 FPS source gives the most reliable 120 FPS result, and why 30 FPS footage often looks best taken to 60 FPS instead.

The usual limitations of interpolation apply at any frame rate: scene cuts, repeated patterns, text overlays and animation with held frames are difficult, and no new detail is added. For more on why, see what motion interpolation is.

Processing time and file size

Interpolating to 120 FPS means generating twice as many output frames as 60 FPS, each with motion-compensated rendering, and then encoding them all. On SmoothMotion.video that makes 120 FPS jobs considerably slower than 60 FPS jobs, especially at 1080p, and processing can take longer than the video's own running time.

File size increases too, though not proportionally, because consecutive frames are so similar that H.264 compresses them efficiently.

Using 120 FPS for slow motion

A 120 FPS file contains enough frames to be slowed down to a quarter speed in a video editor while still playing at 30 FPS. SmoothMotion.video keeps the playback speed unchanged, so the file plays at normal speed – but you can import it into an editor and slow it down there. Bear in mind that interpolated slow motion exposes artifacts more than real-time playback does.

Which should you pick?

Ready to try it? Use our tool to convert video to 120 FPS, or read the 30 FPS vs 60 FPS comparison if you are still deciding on the basics. You can also learn more about video frame interpolation in general.