When steam hit its stride last gen as we pushed further into the hd cycle PC gaming was pushing the limits of framerates. When you saw reviewers judging thirty fps console games (where most gamers don't even care) the influence of expectation slowly trickled in.

When graphics hit the steep exponential hill of diminishing returns.

It's never been important to anyone but fanboys.

FPS was always important, you could play Doom like this on a slow 386, or not at all


I still managed to play Elite Dangerous for months with frame rates going down to 8fps (my laptop didn't like driving on the planets). Still playable on a screen, would not do it in VR. Consistent fps and responsive controls help a lot. What I can't play on my laptop is Ori and the blind forest due to wildly fluctuating fps affecting control and timing.

FPS become more talked about when DF started analyzing ps3 and 360 performance in detail. Then a bit of screen tear and a few frame drops became game killers. I wish they would analyze load times in more detail, far more annoying than a few frame drops.

Couldn't care less about it really..... and I swear I didn't even really talk or hear about it until this gen. You sghould have seen the look on my face when I found out sometime this year that I was playing SoTC on the PS2 at around 22-26fps.

The way I see it, FPS became so important when it became the only real way to differentiate between PC and console versions of a game..... or and of course the rez. Or to give validity to yet another $1000+ GPU. Mind boggling if you ask me......

When you were a kid with your NES and SNES, did you even know or care what FPS was? Exactly. Now, even with these classic games, there was a difference. For example, Ghosts n' Goblins on the NES. I never liked that game, mostly due to,the stiff, unresponsive controls. Replaying it later, I now understand why the controls are so unresponsive: The framerate is god-awful. Compare it to something like Super Mario Bros and its smooth 60fps. It's like night and day.

I thought this was going to be thread about Cod and DOOM.

For me fps is relevant since late 90s, when I started playing also on PC, when I saw the same games running on JAP version vs PAL version and when I saw the difference between playing 50hz VS 60hz.
Thankfully now fps gets the right attention, though for the wrong reasons (console war).

So it should be mind boggling that Ps4 has diffetentiated itself form Xbox One for being able to play the same games at slightly better framerate and resolution.

I dont play many shooters/fighters, so Im with you on fps not really mattering too much.

If your super into online competitive games, or shooters/fighters, it can matter though.