Yes, that's exactly the sort of experiment I was suggesting. Thanks

For me, 30fps is OK but I prefer to play at 30+fps. Because I feel the gameplay is more smooth and less laggy. Maybe it's just my delusion or 30+fps is better for my eyes and brain.

It can affect most games, but is most prominent of course in games that are FPP/TPP where rapid side to side motion of objects in-frame and/or rapid side to side head movement causes lack of smoothness to what is being animated. With other games that are overhead view from a distance or isometric view or similar the effect is less pronounced and thus less noticeable. It also depends on just how much animation and effects are happening on screen too. In general with RTS type games and other games you can get away with lower frame rates as long as there isn't a lot of motion happening. They tend to mostly be foreground animation motion and less noticeable.

It is true that everyone's eyes vary in their persistence of vision which more or less acts as a form of analogue motion-blur which can play down the noticeability. The result of that is just a variance in sensitivity to the exact frame rate where it becomes very noticeable and undesirable to an individual person. It can also vary from game to game depending on the amount of motion/effects and other factors. For me, the motion blur effect which I generally don't care for personally, turns out to be more beneficial than not to me at lower frame rates so I enable it if the only other option is reducing resolution and lopping off other GPU hungry effects for example.

I used to play Battle for Middle Earth 2 at 1600x1200 multiplayer on a 2.8GHz single-core P4 with other low specs and it just crawled at times. When the "Army of the Dead" spell was cast in particular because that flooded the map with hundreds of new units all of which have transparency and thus need to be alpha-blended into the scene when compositing. That ground my GPU into the pavement and sent my framerate plummeting. When that happened, it resulted in an increase in input latency also, and of on-screen reporting of the mouse cursor which started to jump around randomly and became increasingly difficult to point and click somewhere specific. It ruined the game experience when it happened both visually jerking and input lag etc. The only solution that worked reliably was lowering the resolution to 1024x768 to keep the framerate just high enough to be functional. I'm not sure what the exact FPS was though as I didn't measure it and just went by visual "yes works/nope, sucks" comparison when setting it up.

Apparently this is something that affect people a lot differently. For example it seems to be like people with a good sense of smell can't be near places that those with a bad one doesn't mind at all.
-Your farts smell like roadkill!
-I don't smell anything. You're exaggerating!

I posted some links above that detail some of the answer to those questions. The totalbiscuit link is a good place to start if you want a simi-technical, and obviously, pro-high fps argument that goes through most of the whys.

As an example, there is one kind of game that almost always gets locked to 60fps and that's fighting games. The high end players actually break the games down to the individual frames to build strategies that gain favor by a single 60fps frame. There is also some additional input lag when running at 30 that isn't appreciated by action gamers. The fps usually limits how often a game gets updated, which includes input. Even if the input was processed more frequently, the viewer is only getting new information 30 times a second and can't start responding to something that would be occurring between frames.

The players ability to respond in a timely manor is delayed by the frame rate, how long the output device takes to display new data, and how long the input device takes to respond to user input on top of the 10th of a second or whatever it takes the brain to process what it is seeing. The little delays add up, and it makes logical sense to try and reduce the amount of time a player is actually playing out of phase with what is going on in the game. Especially when one of these factors is very apparent to a large part of the gaming world.

I see, thank you for putting it so understandably. ;)

why, I do indeed have horrible eyesight (I can't discern a face without my glasses on in a normal conversation).

But I can imagine, as gently explained a few posts above, that that split difference might mean something in fast "twitchy" games, especially at a higher level of play.

I tend to stay away from those however, I prefer a more relaxed offline experience with equally slow-witted AIs ;)

Oh I'd imagine something like this could be trained. Say you play a lot of really fast competitive FPS games you'd certainly start to notice it after a while I believe. If someone plays like you they'll probably not notice no. :)

Personally I try to get enough FPS to not feel any input lag. After that I don't care. I have no idea if that's 30 or 60 FPS since I only adjust the graphic settings until it feels alright.

Do the majority of PC gamers actually care though or is it just a minority ?

I mean its one thing to complain about it but quite another to decidedly stop buying games at below 60 fps.

I know its a very popular topic on forums and all that, but from what I see in the gaming world the majority of gamers don't seem to care that much since they are still buying and playing games with fps lower than 60.

Initially the reviews for these games are often very negative, with 1/5 scores or the equivalent, as people somehow expected 60 fps despite there usually being no confirmation nor evidence of it prior to release.
The scores then tend to even out as the people who play these games for more than hour give their reviews of it.

Most seem happy just to have something that runs smoothly on their rig, which for a PC port is quite an achievement in itself.