> I often see people targeting frame rates way beyond their display’s refresh rate. I’m not sure whether this actually provides a real benefit or whether they’re chasing a placebo effect.

If they are chasing a placebo effect, it's a really powerful one, since all the actual competitive people are often willing to sacrifice all detail and quite a lot of resolution to get those stupid high frame rates.

I can see the difference too, but the diminishing returns usually make it not worth it, since I prefer the eye candy better details and higher resolutions give me.

Also, some games can adjust the resolutions on the fly to keep a consistent frame rate. It's only become a feature on modern games, but I believe that's mostly a historical accident. PC games could often run on much worse hardware than they were actually designed for (with minimum requirements often being absolute minimums, and not 'this is what we developed for'), so people played them on low frame rates, so that kind of jank was often more culturally accepted on PC, and if you didn't want that experience, you could always upgrade. While on console, there was no upgrade path, and games were optimised for that one config, and thus never allowed to drop too far into the red (and dropping resolution is often a better option in those cases).

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drdexebtjl 2 hours ago | parent [-]

There’s an argument to be made that dropping all unimportant detail could make professional players react faster even if it doesn’t improve end-to-end latency in the PC.

This is something that could be tested experimentally, but isn’t, because the subjects we would need to test this on are all sponsored by hardware vendors.

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Telaneo 2 hours ago | parent [-]

A fair argument at least for some games.

The games I have in mind though still have those details present on lower settings. Instead they just look like shit rather than disappear. To be fair though, that just might make those details have higher contrast and not fade into the background as much.

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drdexebtjl 37 minutes ago | parent [-]

Yeah. I think there are so many hypotheses we could test if professional players were willing to do these experiments.

For example, it used to be popular among competitive CS players to use 4:3 resolutions on 16:9 monitors. Since the target’s vertical position is much more predictable than its horizontal position, it’s supposedly easier to aim if the image is stretched wide.

But these games only presented 4:3 options at low resolutions. This might have introduced the notion that low resolutions provide an advantage in general.

	▲	Telaneo 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's become less common to play in 4:3 over the years. The additional peripheral vision has become too obvious a benefit to not make use of. It's probably mostly a habit thing. Most of the pros started to play these games back in the 90s, when 4:3 was the standard. Add in that playing all the low resolution options are 4:3 (and the 16:9 equivalents will add resolutions rather than take it away; the 1080p is usually 16:9, so 1920x1080, but 4:3 1080p does exist, and it's 1440x1080, which is a lower resolution), it's no wonder 4:3 stuck around as long as it did.