I’ve been wondering this recently. I grew up on atari/nes/snes and so of course almost all of those games (pretty sure all) are written in assembly and are rock solid smooth and responsive for the most part. I wonder if this has affected how I cannot stand to play badly optimized games eith even a hint of a laggy feel to it. I’ve always been drawn to quake and cs for that reason: damn smooth. And no, it doesn’t just need to be FPS games either. I cant play beat saber with a modicum of lag or i suck massively, but others can play just fine and not even notice the lag.
Its odd. I feel like a complainer but maybe I just notice it more easily than others?
There are only a few reasons I can surmise that this would be the case:
Because most older games are extremely badly optimised by today’s standards. The original Metroid slows to an absolute crawl when there’s more than about 4 sprites on the screen; the dragon boss in Mega Man (2, I think) was such a laggy, slippery mess that I gave up trying to beat the game; Ocarina of Time runs at 20FPS (worse if you’re in a PAL territory like I am), and that’s one of the better playing N64 games.
I think you’re either noticing one of these extra sources of delay, or you’re blinded by nostalgia.
Yes there’s definitely processing lag on some of those games where they were pushing it.
Then you have joust on the 7800 which is ridiculously smooth.