I started out playing Doom on a 386, in a tiny tiny viewport, and until recently my hardware was apways behind the curve. I remember playing Oblivion at 640 x 380. And enjoying foggy weather in San Andreas because the reduced draw distance made my fps a lot better.
Over the years I’ve trained my brain to do amazing real time upsacaling, anti-aliasing, hell, even frame generation. nVidia has nothing on the neural network in my head.
But not everyone has this experience and smooth FPS is always better, even if I can handle teerible performance if the game is any good.