AFAIK: fixed/stable time between frames vs. "frame jitter".

Frame times, or the pace that frames are displayed. Frame rates are all well and good, but 30FPS with good frame pacing or frame times looks better than 90 FPS with inconsistent frame times.

I have hope that something good will come out of this.
Depends on a game. Higher fps the better in general though.
Static 2D games with limited movement, e.g. turn based games or slower paced games - any fps goes pretty much.
2D flip-screen games (fixed screen/room) with low-res characters moving about are ok around 30fps if slower paced.
2D with fluid scrolling, esp. if faster action oriented and/or requiring decent timing, then 50+ fps.
Anything 3D from 1st person perspective is migraine-inducing under like 48fps for me. After like 30-40 minutes I get a noticeable eyestrain. I don't find much reason to go beyond 120fps, for me personally.

Anyway, at no point should the game logic cease to work properly. That's why the practice of tying it to frames is long gone. Thus the gamespeed won't change with increased framerate, though the perceived fluidity most certainly will - so there is no max limit considered to be playable. There are diminishing returns the higher you go though.
Too high fps can be limited by engine inbuilt framerate limit, if it is required for some calculations or physics acting weird past certain point. In competitive games highest possible framerate is desired (much higher than the refresh rate of any display) because it reduces input lag (input as registering player's control input) and gives a slight advantage + increases timing precision.
Game shouldn't give up if ran on much weaker hw than min required, the user should however if experiencing discomfort or unsatisfactory experience. Minimum and recommended hw configurations are a thing for that reason too. The rest is about the art of neverending optimisations.

I might be fine with 30 FPS depending on the game. I grew up with an N64 and later a GeForce 2 PC that we had for ages, so I got used to substandard framerates early. I now have a decent system but little time and a huge backlog, so I'm unlikely to encounter performance issues anytime soon.

There are only really two issues which cause that - one would be the user running with insufficient hardware and the other would be that the programming, optimisation or design of the game is poor. If you've properly specified minimum and recommended systems and the users have appropriate hardware and set appropriate graphics settings, rendering so much that you're getting a frame a second or worse - or putting so much load on the CPU that you've got the same problem - is poor programming.

The best solution is to playtest to ensure that you don't end up with engine overloading situations for the hardware that it's designed to run on and to also optimise as much as possible to maximise the amount that can be on screen without issues occurring.

I played on consoles longer than I did on PCs, so I'm used to lower fps. While there are PS1 games that ran at 60 fps, most of them fall in the 20-30s. I never experienced anything higher than 60 fps, so I don't know the upper limit, if it exists.

Around 25-30 avg. Especially if it's a fast paced 3D game, but yes, depends on the game.

Indeed. Board games and puzzles can likely have very slow frame rates, like 4fps and be more than playable. Though i'm recalling 8bit chess where it blips the piece moved back and forth a few times to specify the move the you ro the computer made.

TIS-100 while programming has no framerate, but when it's actively running seeing the activity is less important, so anything would probably be fine. (And stepping is likely 3 per second...)

As for things you have to react to... *sigh* I can't see going under 24 fps myself anymore. More active games, say Skyrim or Horizon Dawn Zero, i'd prefer higher to 50-60 simply because you can react to changing your aim. I thought it was 24, to match the TV refresh rate.

But yes, smooth even at a slow speed is good, jittery and variable framerates are what's annoying.

Mhmm... Honestly the Nintendo games of old always felt good somehow at their framerate.

Though Playstation games likely got shafted more for having 3D games but not quite the horsepower and being one of the early games to use CD's for media so you had subpar framerates plus slow loading times.


Guess you get the options. frame rate, resolution, post processing/effects. Without a competent GPU, choose one, and with one, choose 2. (And if you can blow $20k on a computer, then maybe all three)

Agree, it really depends on the game. But for me 30fps is lowest I'll go on games.
I think Syphon Filter was 20 FPS and I love that game.

If the game is running so slowly that it takes too long for the player to be able to exit out of the game, then there's a problem.

There's a third possible situation: The game, as the result of a glitch, some unintended behavior, or a mod, creates so many objects that even modern hardware struggles with it.

As an example, I'll look at a situation in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind that I have seen in a youtube video. There is one mod installed: Racer Recursion, which makes it so that, when a Cliff Racer is killed, two more immediately spawn. Now, the player can overload the game as follows:
* Create a spell that hits a large area, and is strong enough to kill Cliff Racers in one hit. (Cliff Racers have 45 health each, so on default difficulty a 45 point damage/drain health will do the trick.)
* Find a Cliff Racer in the wild. This shouldn't be too hard, particularly since there being too many of them is a common complaint.
* Kill the Cliff Racer, which will then cause 2 more to spawn, and repeat.
* Once there are a fair number of them, start using the spell, which will kill them and cause twice as many to spawn.
* Repeat until the game becomes a slide show, and repeat further and eventually the game will crash due to running out of memory. This can happen even on high end systems, due to the exponential growth involved.

30 fps. But it can feel very different from game to game.
But I hate the fact that even dropping to 30fps (when my rig can't handle 60) doesn't work so well anymore with many newer games. Nowadays you get tons of asset load hitches (UE games...) regardless of framerate, TAA ghosting, mouse lagging and whatnot.

Yes, but those are all subsets of bad programming. The glitch or unintended behaviour usually results from a programming bug not picked up by testing.

In the case of the mod, someone has built something that can overload the game engine - i.e. bad programming and no optimisation of the mod. While spamming cliff racers is an amusing outcome, as the original developer of a game you cannot programme out the stupidity of modders (unless you lock down the game completely, which is an option)

I'd say 30fps is playable, but not pleasant. 60fps is really kind of the minimum, with more being better. From personal experience I can say that once you get used to 120fps, going back to 60 suddenly doesn't seem so smooth anymore.

Though I can see a turn-based game on a completely static screen could get away with less than 60 and still be fine, but those are very rare. Mouse cursor movement is typically handled by hardware and is independent of the game refresh rate so that wouldn't be an issue in this case, unless the programmers used a software cursor, which is generally bad practice.

Since I've beaten the first couple of Ultima and Might & Magic games I'd say that the lowest playable framerate lies somewhere between 0 and 1 FPS for me.

25 - 30 for me