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?
Examples: Virtua Racing on the Genesis or Star Fox on the SNES. they were slow and quite laggy. sure they were essentially pushing the limits of what the console could do and in the case of Star Fox had to have the FX chip in the cartridge but I wouldn’t call racing around on the Genesis in Virtua Racing a “smooth” experience.
Other games are like this too with loading. Mortal Kombat CD on the Sega CD. you get to the Shang Tsung fight and the game has to load every time he morphs. Other games would also slow to a crawl if there was a lot on the screen. To your point Ranger X on the Genesis had these little tadpole enemy things that could quickly populate the screen if you didn’t take them out quickly it would slow the game down. Same would happen on the PSX with the game Loaded.