Word.ws English Dictionary

buttery smooth

buttery smooth adjective: having a high refresh rate so that the subjective experience does not include flickers or pauses as the video changes frames.

Adjective

buttery smooth (comparative more buttery smooth, superlative most buttery smooth)

  1. Having a high refresh rate so that the subjective experience does not include flickers or pauses as the video changes frames.
    • Today I hear gamers using the words “buttery smooth” to describe the effect of high refresh rates.2008, Bernard Perron, Mark J.P. Wolf, The Video Game Theory Reader 2, page xii
    • In today's parlance, Rosenthal's Space Wars was “buttery smooth” full frames presented at 30 frames a second, full frames containing glowing sticks of light that you felt you could touch.2012, Mark J. P. Wolf, Before the Crash: Early Video Game History, page 141

Examples of buttery smooth in a sentence

  • One technique for buttery smooth footage is to edit high frame rate (60 or 120 frames per second) footage to play back in slow motion by changing the frame rate to 24 or 30 frames per second.2017, Jordan Hetrick, GoPro KARMA: How To Use The GoPro Karma Drone:
  • In addition, thanks to its highly-optimized game engine Doom ran buttery smooth even on the primitive PCs of the era.2017, David Snyder, Matthew Wilhelm Kapell, Speedrunning: Interviews with the Quickest Gamers:
  • Every game has a target frame rate to hit so that the gaming experience is buttery smooth.2021, Paul Jones, Game Artist: The Ultimate Career Guide:

Forms of buttery smooth

comparativemore buttery smooth
superlativemost buttery smooth

Questions about buttery smooth

What does buttery smooth mean?
Buttery smooth means having a high refresh rate so that the subjective experience does not include flickers or pauses as the video changes frames.
How do you use buttery smooth in a sentence?
One technique for buttery smooth footage is to edit high frame rate (60 or 120 frames per second) footage to play back in slow motion by changing the frame rate to 24 or 30 frames per second.
What part of speech is buttery smooth?
Buttery smooth is an adjective.

Words near buttery smooth in the dictionary

  1. buttery
  2. buttery bar
  3. buttery bars
  4. buttery hatch
  5. buttery hatches
  6. buttery smooth
  7. Butterys
  8. buttes
  9. Buttevant
  10. buttface
  11. buttfaces

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: buttery smooth (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-buttery smooth.wav.

Cite this entry: “buttery smooth.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/buttery_smooth. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.