That's because VS Code is hiding everything behind a bunch of non-real-time tricks of perception. Zed is giving you actual real-time feedback.

"Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give real-time data."

The overwhelming majority of the population cannot perceive anything over 90 Hz. Those that can are overwhelmingly skewed towards under 30 years old. Fighter pilots have a floor of something like 200hz for an idea of how rare it is. Just fun info.

I have 3 different displays on my desk, and they are 60hz 120hz and 240hz.

The difference between them when scrolling is.. obvious. I'm in my 40s. I'd love to see a study demonstrating that my ability to perceive this is some rare capability - that's very hard for me to believe.

As I've aged, my ability to see tiny text has diminished, but I can still see 60Hz vs 120Hz perfectly well.

I spent an admittedly tiny amount of time looking into the Zed scrolling stutters after experiencing them myself and I think it's just a matter of their line layout caching not being as good (perhaps unsurprisingly) as the Chromium/WebKit layout engine. It's especially noticeable if you have word wrapped files with lines >10kb in length (yeah, don't ask).

> The overwhelming majority of the population cannot perceive anything over 90 Hz

This isn’t true. Unless you’re saying I’m some kind of fighter pilot at 35!

I personally avoid Visual Studio Code as much as possible due to the scroll latency, so I think it is noticeable as long as you know what to look for.