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?
Much of this specifically is devs implementing MSAA, which once upon a time was cheap, efficient, and looked fine. Nowadays with RT added into the mix MSAA just simply can’t function well on modern hardware, to the point where even city builders like Cities Skylines 2 will crawl to 14-15fps on low settings if you haven’t overridden the graphics pipeline to remove msaa and replace it with one that actually functions.