Out of curiosity, did you have an actual N64 hooked up to a modern TV? A lot of those old games meant to be played on a CRT will look like absolute dog shit on a modern LCD panel. Text is harder to read, it is harder to tell what a shape is supposed to be, it’s really bad.
Part of it is about how close you are to the target FPS. They likely made the old N64 games to run somewhere around 24 FPS since that was an extremely common “frame rate” for CRT TVs common at the time. Therefore, the animations of, well, basically everything that moves in the game can be tuned to that frame rate. It would probably look like jank crap if they made the animations have 120 frames for 1 second of animation, but they didn’t.
On to Fallout 4… Oh boy. Bethesda jank. Creation engine game speed is tied to frame rate. They had several problems with the launch of Fallout76 because if you had a really powerful computer and unlocked your frame rate, you would be moving 2-3 times faster than you should have been. It’s a funny little thing to do in a single-player game, but absolutely devastating in a multi-player game. So, if your machine is chugging a bit and the frame rate slows down, it isn’t just your visual rate of new images appearing that is slowing down, it’s the speed at which the entire game does stuff that slowed down. It feels bad.
And also, as others have said, frame time, dropped frames, and how stable the frame rate is makes a huge difference too in how it “feels”.
For what it’s worth, I switched 2 years ago and have yet to run into a game I wanted to play and couldn’t. There are some glaring holes, mostly around “serious e-sports” games that have overly invasive anti-cheat (or devs that specifically choose to block linux) that won’t work. Riot and Epic both seem to have a hard on for blocking linux users, as an example.
But here’s the neat part. You can make the switch and see, and it costs you nothing. If you are in the minority that it just won’t work for and have to switch back to windows, you are in the exact same spot you are in now, with nothing lost but a bit of time.
Does your neighbor look like Farva? (Kevin Heffernan) Cause that picture looks a lot like that dude.
That’s true, but I didn’t say that was the native “frame rate” of the TVs, just a very commonly used frame rate at the time. And, at least in my experience, desync’ed frame rate and refresh rate is less of a problem on CRTs than LCDs - you don’t “feel” it as much generally.