Like I’m not one of THOSE. I know higher = better with framerates.
BUT. I’m also old. And depending on when you ask me, I’ll name The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask as my favourite game of all time.
The original release of that game ran at a glorious twenty frames per second. No, not thirty. No, not even twenty-four like cinema. Twenty. And sometimes it’d choke on those too!
… And yet. It never felt bad to play. Sure, it’s better at 30FPS on the 3DS remake. Or at 60FPS in the fanmade recomp port. But the 20FPS original is still absolutely playable.
Yet like.
I was playing Fallout 4, right? And when I got to Boston it started lagging in places, because, well, it’s Fallout 4. It always lags in places. The lag felt awful, like it really messed with the gamefeel. But checking the FPS counter it was at… 45.
And I’m like – Why does THIS game, at forty-five frames a second, FEEL so much more stuttery and choked up than ye olde video games felt at twenty?
Two things that haven’t quite been mentioned yet:
1) Real life has effectively infinite FPS, so you might expect that the closer a game is to reality, the higher your brain wants the FPS to be in order for it to make sense. This might not be true for everyone, but I imagine it could be for some people.
More likely: 2) If you’ve played other things at high FPS you might be used to it on a computer screen, so when something is below that performance, it just doesn’t look right.
These might not be entirely accurate on their own and factors of these and other things mentioned elsewhere might be at play.
Source: Kind of an inversion of the above: I can’t focus properly if games are set higher than 30FPS; It feels like my eyes are being torn in different directions. But then, the games I play are old or deliberately blocky, so they’re not particularly “real” looking, and I don’t have much trouble with real life’s “infinite” FPS.