Yeah. 60FPS with a quarter-second stutter is still 45FPS, but you'll definitely notice that stutter, a lot more than you'd notice a consistent 45FPS.
like... "30 frames, each of which take a 30th of a second" is technically a lower framerate than "44 frames at a 60th of a second each and one frame that takes a quarter-second" but I'd rather play at a smooth 30FPS than a stuttery 45.
Bingo.
Personally, I think that a lot of the bickering on these here fora comes down to our subjective opinions of what "acceptable" performance is. We're all different in that respect. My own benchmark for "acceptable" is "60+ constant FPS in 1080p", and I don't think that's excessive. As a matter of fact, I can already hear the eyerolls from others who expect more, and that's perfectly fine! Horses for courses.
As you say: "a smooth 30 is better than a stuttery 45." I found that out with a recent game that, for the first time, really challenged my admittedly ancient PC (it's 9 years old, but up until the past 6 months or so, I've never had an issue with running new games with all the bells and whistles at 60+, so I consider that PC a great investment. But it IS, no argument here, in need of an upgrade, because it's definitely not "current tech" anymore.)
Said game I ended up with the situation that I could either run it with gorgeous graphics at 60+ 90% of the time, with drops to 38-45 occasionally, or tone down the graphics to "less than impressive" and get 60+ constantly. I accepted that, given the ancient specs of my hardware, but it got me thinking: Years back, I was a console/PC gamer both at the same time, my last console was a PS3, and I played the heck out of games on the PS3 and never, ever had an issue with the lower framerate of it. 30 fps never felt "janky" or "stuttery" to me, or I'd have stopped playing and gone all PC, all the time.
So I, as an experiment, kept the graphics at "gorgeous" on said PC game but capped the frames to 30, fully expecting that I would hate it because, dued, if you're not getting 600 fps in 8K at Ultra, you just can't enjoy yourself! And I was utterly, completely wrong. The experience was 100% better, and at no point did I perceive a reduction in gameplay quality due to having cut my frames in half. I should mention that I'm talking about an FPS shooty game and not a spreadsheet simulator
I had
expected that I'd enjoy it less but, even with a massive preconceived bias going in, it turned out that I didn't. At all.
As to EDO: Well, I suppose I could do much the same with EDO, but I simply won't as a matter of principle. That a game like EDO should required RTX card territory in order to produce, graphically, what it does (although I'd be the first to say it's beautiful when the various bugs aren't showing up) can never be "acceptable" to me. There is absolutely NO excuse in my mind for its performance as of right now because, beautiful as it is, it's nowhere near as impressive compared to some other recent titles that aren't even as demanding as EDO is.
So I wait, and I'm fine with that too, I guess, even though I very much desperately want to join the fun. In the meantime, since I'm not the kind of gamer who is terribly fussed (if at all) about others getting to play something sooner than myself, I'm just enjoying myself the same way as I would have if FDev had announced, back in April, that they were postponing the launch until later this year. Horizons is not in any way less enjoyable to me because other people are playing EDO and I can wait.
I just hope the poor devs cleaning up management's muck don't burn out before they can finish the job they weren't allowed to finish in the first place.