Dont try EyePet then. Theres almost more loading than actual playing

It would be interesting to see how many people actually can tell the difference betwen a solid 30 and a solid 60fps if they're not told which is which beforehand.

I think the perceived difference might be largely psychosomatic

I agree 60 is not really necessary, 40 is enough to avoid the game looking like a slideshow.

30 fps is yuck

Booooo! Stop stealing my frames so you can jazz up your still images, developers.

maybe because you were slowing down the time?

Smooth as in graphics depends a lot from postprocessing. Carefully crafted motion blur will make a solid 30 fps a pleasure to look at: I can barely notice the framerate dips in KZ2 under 30fps because of this, and all the movies are at 24fps.

Latency in controls is a very complicated question, and frankly the fact that in Halo 3 the latency between pulling the trigger and the shooting action is of 3 frames instead of 4 like in KZ2 has little to do with its mass success. "Smooth controls" are somewhat of a subjective feel and depend on acceleration curves and responsivity in movements, which are in turn tied in with the physics, more than on those extra 33ms when shooting.

Ultimately, nothing says that you can't have your model running faster than your rendering. It's done in simulators and racer games. It can be done in other genres too.

Good, that's what I advocated many years ago (even wrote an article about it). For most games a solid 30 FPS is more than enough to provide a silky smooth gaming experience. If not smooth enough in cases (like specific parts of a game) adding motion blur would help more than a higher framerate.

Framerate merely has to do animations being fluent or not for human perception. Less than 16 frames per second can cause problems depending on the game, 24 frames per second has for a long time been the standard for hollywood movies.

Many cartoons on TV are only 6-8 frames per second.

I prefer better framerate to graphics most of the time. 30fps isn't too bad but you do get a lag here and there.

Maybe you are referring to framerate fluctuations? If an animation is shown in a slower framerate than it was designed for, it can look like slow motion or/and with frame skips will look less fluent. A solid locked framerate usually doesn't have this problem (nearly all 3D PC games have fluctuating framerates).

That means graphics > gameplay, not a smart move.