I don’t like this line of thinking because especially now where new games seem to always suffer from performance issues, it lowers the bar that these developers feel like they’d need to set as far as the experience they’re offering for their games.
I think the minimum standard should be at least 60fps, in cases with steam deck and other low-end hardware of course concessions must be made, so either lower graphics settings or deal with lower framerates.
But there’s no reason a new game should be suffering poor framerates on modern desktop hardware (looking at you Dragons Dogma 2).
Lower frame rates can be perfectly fine, I find I’m far more bothered by inconsistent frametimes.
The main reason 40fps feels fine on the deck is that the display can come down to that same Hz and operate in lockstep.
I’ll take consistent 60 over hitchy 165 most of the time, though VRR means you can occupy kind of a middle ground. But even there frametime inconsistencies can make for a shit experience.
My point is that game developers should aim to deliver games that render at similar framerates throughout.
So many of these recent games do hit decent framerates, but then there’s that one in-game location, enemy type, player ability, or particle effect, that just makes the framerate completely shit itself.
It’s like these studios are designing each element with a given GPU budget, pushing things right up to the limit, and then do a surprised pikachu face when things run like shit once they try to put more than of these elements together to make an actual game.
165 that dips to 100 is unquestionably better than 60 with no dips, especially with GSync.
165 that dips below 60 is very bad.
