Yep and that difference is perceptible to me, but I bounce between 60hz, 120hz, and 240hz displays and I adjust to each almost instantaneously. The 240hz display is naturally the gaming one but I only ever try to push FPS that high in shooters. In (MMO)RPGs the extra frames do almost nothing, so I prefer eye candy there.
G-Sync Ultimate/FreeSync Premium makes that mostly moot since they make the monitor match your FPS within a pretty broad range, eliminating problems like tearing. My current gaming monitor is a G-Sync Ultimate model so games can just run at whatever FPS and it’ll still look good.
Using GSync/Freesync to eliminate tearing certainly does help the gaming experience, but tearing is not what I was referring to. Being able to use GSync/Freesync certainly doesn’t mean that there are no other benefits to a higher FPS.
My main monitor is a 144Hz monitor but my side monitors are all 60Hz. At one point there was a bug where if I was watching a movie on one of the side monitors while playing the game on my main monitor, the video on the side monitor would get choppy. The short-term fix was to limit my in-game FPS to 60fps, so it would basically match the side monitors. The slower FPS was definitely noticeable, even with Freesync. Thankfully that issue was fixed with a driver update, but it really made me appreciate having more than 60 fps in most situations. It reminded me of when I got my first 120Hz monitor ~10 years ago, and how everything seemed so smooth, even just simple things like how much smoother the cursor was as it glided across the screen on the windows desktop.
I disagree with this on a fundamental level. You seem willing to acknowledge that it makes a difference for first-person shooters, but you think that same benefit doesn’t apply to a game like WoW? Why exactly? There are plenty of chaotic, fast-paced situations when I heal and I appreciate every extra bit of performance I can get. At 60fps the time between each frame is 16.67ms, at 144fps that drops to 6.94ms. That is nearly a 10ms decrease, enabling me to see things faster, and potentially react to them faster. Whether I’m trying to aim a virtual gun, click on a healing bar, or reacting to fire that just spawned beneath my feet, the benefit should be exactly the same.
And, of course, I love eye candy also. My goal would be to have a card that allows for eye-candy AND high-FPS at the same time.
Like I said, I notice the difference, I just adapt quickly. Similarly, a lot of people get annoyed with the different mouse acceleration curves between Windows and macOS, but in my case I’ve forgotten about it within a minute of jumping from one OS to the other.
Sub-60FPS on the other hand can get on my nerves if it’s not a cinematic mode cutscene or something like that.
You’re describing higher tiers of group play, which I don’t participate in much (don’t mind challenge stuff like mage tower and horrific visions, just not really into difficult group content as it current exists). In some situations like PvP any gain from higher FPS is quickly undone by server latency, especially in battlegrounds where the baseline latency is heightened (and doubly true in epic battlegrounds where teamfights regularly bring the server to its knees).
It’s not nearly as bad as that would imply. The majority of what you do in-game is an interaction between you and your game client (not affected by server latency). The game client then turns around and attempts to synchronize your actions with the game server. So in most situations you are not limited by your server latency unless your latency is so bad that there are conflicts between your game client and the server when they attempt to synchronize.
Biology plays a factor too. I notice sub 60fps but going to 144fps is not much of a difference for me.
I do notice image quality. A Nvidia card in Windows, for example, looks awful with the color problems vs Nvidia on Linux without it. For the 2% or so perf hit I’d def take the better looking image.
