I’ve been wondering this recently. I grew up on atari/nes/snes and so of course almost all of those games (pretty sure all) are written in assembly and are rock solid smooth and responsive for the most part. I wonder if this has affected how I cannot stand to play badly optimized games eith even a hint of a laggy feel to it. I’ve always been drawn to quake and cs for that reason: damn smooth. And no, it doesn’t just need to be FPS games either. I cant play beat saber with a modicum of lag or i suck massively, but others can play just fine and not even notice the lag.
Its odd. I feel like a complainer but maybe I just notice it more easily than others?
The other way around. I grew up playing games on PCs that were quite underpowered for a long time. I played Doom like this. Hell, I had to reduce screen size even in Wolfenstein 3D. I loved fog in GTA San Andreas because it reduced draw distance and when it was raining in Las Venturas, I had to look at my feet like I was speedrunning Goldeneye. I played through Oblivion in a 640 x 480 window and thought it looked amazing. I still have to fight not to turn off AA completely first time running a game on my RTX 3080 because it was the first thing to go for so long.
All of this trained my brain so now I have bulit-in antialiasing and frame generation. I don’t give a shit. Give me good art direction and gameplay loop and I can just generate smooth graphics in my head.
I had a super underpowered PC I grew up with and it influenced my imagination. For a long time stuff I’d imagine also ran at like 15-20FPS. Really weird effect.