Regarding frame rates and the reason certain games perform adequately with reduced FPS.
Regarding frame rates and the reason certain games perform adequately with reduced FPS.
Game QUALITY visually is mostly tied to the game settings. A game can look amazing at a low FPS.
Motion blur?
Unless you have a shitty monitor in which case all games would likely have blur from a slow (high) pixel response time then this sounds like an in-game setting you can disable.
Dishonored 2 looks great on my 8-year-old IPS monitor.
Now STUTTER has different causes but a common cause of games just not feeling SMOOTH is due to missed frames which is often the CPU being too slow but it varies a lot.
Longer stutter may be due to insufficient VRAM but other reasons exist.
VSYNC ON will also cause stutter (due to missed frames) if you can't output frames fast enough. For a 60Hz monitor if you can't output that FPS most of the time then disable VSYNC or alternatively force on Adaptive VSYNC to leave VSYNC ON but then auto-disable VSYNC if you can't output 60FPS... that trades some screen tear for stutter.
I have Adaptive VSYNC enabled for a few Assassin's Creed games an GTAV. It really helped. And I tweaked my game settings so I get a solid 60FPS roughly 90% of the time or more.
So you need to be very, very specific when asking about game "looks" and performance.
LOOKS for people with the game settings should look the same if they have the same monitor. Performance and game smoothness however would be different for different PC's attached to the same monitor running the same game settings.
*If Dishonored 2 runs crappy then options include:
a) VSYNC OFF (will cause screen tearing)
b) VSYNC ON (but drop game settings to maintain 60FPS)
c) Adaptive VSYNC (for infrequent drops below 60FPS... assuming a 60Hz monitor of course)
d) Adaptive VSYNC Half Refresh (locks to 30FPS which would be sluggish but may give a much smoother experience and with no screen tearing).
Perhaps you have some other issue. I don't know.
I have a GTX1080 and Dishonored 2 is either maxed out in settings at 2560x1440 or really close to maxed out and the FPS at the very start of the TUTORIAL (so not much going on) was at the maximum allowed at 120FPS as the game caps... I'm sure it would have dipped a lot later but I just enabled VSYNC so it locked to 60FPS.
I thought a GTX1060 or RX-580 could do roughly 50FPS on Ultra at 1080p resolution.
Anyway, again if VSYNC is on first try it OFF to see if game is smooth (but with screen tearing) and if so I'd try enabling Adaptive VSYNC:
NVidia CP-> manage 3d settings-> add game... (setting)-> save