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Raistline on 31 August 2016
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This discussion is not a new one at all in gaming or in PC vs Console. It has been around for as long as I can remember and likely will never go away.

One of the first times that I came across it was during the release of Quake III. At this time all PC monitors and TV's were 4:3 aspect ratio and all panels were CRT (With the very small exception of some very ugly, both picture quality and style, 4:3 TN panels). During this time the big push for resolution was 1600x1200. I got lucky enough to have one of these 19" 1600x1200 CRT monitor that was gifted to me.

Now in the Way-Back machine we go to 1999/2000 when the PS2 and Dreamcase had Quake III Team Arena released. The PS2 could run Q3 at 480i at 60FPS and the Dreamcast lagged behind running it at the same resolution with 40-50FPS. In the mean time people in forums everywhere were debating this very thing we are now discussing, how much FPS really matters, which system looks best, is resolution or features more important... and so on. Still, there was a similar divide as there is today, half the people, like myself at the time, would argue that higher resolution and lower frames was better than lower resolution with higher frames. The other half would argue that higher FPS at lower resolution was best.

At this time, for me to play this game at my monitors massive peak resolution of 1600x1200 I had to have a monster video card named the Voodoo 3. I only averaged between 30 and 45 fps but was happy because I could play it at max resolution with all features enabled. The game looked so good that I didn't care about the decrease in fps but still bragged about how well it ran while in game.

For those younger folk an here an additional thing to note is that on a CRT monitor having a lower frame rate is not as bad as it is on an LCD panel since CRT monitors act very similar to GSync/FreeSync. You would still get screen tearing at lower FPS but you would not see the jutter effect that you see now, or at least not as bad. Oh and Native resoltuion is not as important with CRT as it is with LCD or OLED. You could run lower resolution and it would still look nearly as good as it would on another CRT monitor that had a lower and matching resolution.