Lol GTAV was dated when it came out. It uses PS2 era open world design and logic. It also has a glaring issue making the open world bit seem moot. You have to do missions in the specific order the game wants you to. The real concept of open world or at least the old term SANDBOX is you can do things in whatever order and how you want to do them. Ever play Elder Scrolls II? Guess what that's what BOTW & ToTK do.GTAV isn't very vertical. It has invisible walls everywhere. A very PS2-era design. Not to mention the shooting in that game is awful.

Yes, that's why it's just as possible to make the perfect lap at 30fps compared to 60fps. As long as it's steady and the simulation is tuned to deliver the next frame exactly on time. The advantage of using v-sync is that you know exactly when a frame will be displayed to the user, so you can fine tune your sim engine to advance exactly 17ms or 33ms per frame.

With VRR you display the frame as soon as it's done. The problem with that is, the engine doesn't know in advance when the frame will be displayed, and thus can't finely match car movement with frame placement. Missing v-sync is worse as your frame meant to be displayed now with car movement based on 'now' is displayed a frame later, screwing you up.

And yep, you mostly drive on feeling, muscle memory. But to fine tune that feeling you need a steady delivery, either 30 or 60. Racing sims simulate at a higher frequency btw, most run at 240hz. This fine tunes input and sampling the track, not to skip over any bumps in the road. A bit like surround sound where sampling at 192khz has zero benefits to your hearing from one speaker (humans can't hear tones over 22khz), but the human ear can detect differences between sounds arriving as small as 10 μs. 192kz makes it possible to space sounds over different speakers as close as 5 μs (0.0052 ms).

I prefer frame rate on consoles. The difference between Ray Tracing visuals in consoles vs PC is so drastic even as you go lower down the GPU stack that it ends up being kind of nutty. We have had quite a few cases where RT settings on consoles were "lower than low" vs PC settings so I think it's best for consoles to either push visuals in Raster or give us those juicy frames. Especially with the capabilities of VRR as the VRR window defined by the HDMI 2.1 spec works with 48Hz and above which a lot of TVs follow.

I default to playing at 60 fps. 

Currently playing Bloodborne at 30 fps of course, and that's fine. It was a little bit of an adjustment, but I don't feel like 30 fps is bad.

But I think that is the only 30 fps game I've played in the past 2.5 years.

I would not be bothered if a game was locked to 30 fps with ray tracing. But given the option, I've been preferring 60 fps.

I'm not comparing games. I agree gtav gameplay is very dated and mission structure. but when it comes to detail and making the most believable real life modern city, they still have not been matched the amount of things to do is just staggering and is huge reason why it's at 180 million units sold.

https://youtu.be/_XZZdOLghlE

In the audio case I think you confuse bit rate with sample rate. 

Outside a production setting there is no point of sampling above 44.1 kHz (video usually use 48 kHz) to recreate a wave form with all overtones audible to humans (bellow 25 years)

You need that higher sample rate to space your samples as close as 10 micro seconds apart. At 44.1 kHz you can at most place them 23 micro seconds apart, which is 2.3x more than the human mind can distinguish. 44.1 and 48 kHz can recreate all audible wave forms, but the spacing is limited by the sample rate as well. It's relevant for creating the best surround sound field.

Hence the comparison to higher frame rates where you also don't see 120/240 fps, but you do see clearer motion since your pupils can track moving objects more easily. With sound it becomes more precise to locate where a sound (pretends to be) is coming from.

I don't exactly know what Ray Tracing is. Something to do with lighting I guess?

I primarily play Nintendo games, so hyper realistic graphics are not important to me. Just has to look aesthetically pleasing, which is possible on pretty mediocre hardware. A higher framerate is better, but as long as it doesn't dip too low, I'm fine.

For me FPS doesn't matter on a console if its 30 or 60 as all gamers will experience the same framerate for that game so no one has a competitive advantage anyway. Is it nice to have 60fps? sure but it isn't a deal break for me

 Developers have been good at faking reflections and global illumination and such. RT does it for real. Like in the past, a reflection of a city in a window isn't a real-time reflection but a fake one put there. A character's reflection in a mirror was simply done by displaying 2 characters and 2 rooms just reversed to give the appearance of a reflection. I'm probably oversimplifying a lot.   Nintendo funny enough cares a lot about lighting. Even on N64 with Chrome Mario and the light puzzle with OoT shield. Nintendo is often playing with lighting in their games so even if Switch 2 had limited RT support you can bet your ass Nintendo will take full advantage of it in gameplay. Puzzle in Zelda or maybe a level where you can only see Mario's reflection. Things of that nature.