I tend to play stuff at 40fps because my experience of it is that I feel like I’m getting 90% of the way to 60 (playing a lot of 30 until mid-20s will do that to you!), and then shift up to 60 if I have headroom or the game in particular feels rough at 40. My main machine has a 120Hz monitor and it’s lovely for some games, but it’s something I ‘feel’ on the mouse more than I ‘see’. I just can’t imagine using it on my deck for the vanishingly few games that can hit 90 on the Deck and then caring.
But, I’ve seen claims like ‘setting it to 40Hz will make it run 40 in an 80Hz container’ (some Nerd Nest video or the guy on it who does a lot of battery testing), or the PCGamer review which states the OLED can take “a game locked at 30 fps and triple each frame so it runs like butter at 90Hz”.
Is this just referring to, say, response time / latency?
A higher refresh screen will always feel smoother and more responsive regardless of frame rate because the screen is refreshing more often. Playing TW3 at 60fps on the Ally’s 120hz screen feels really, really good. The downside of this SD refresh is that the device won’t perform any better, it’s still going to push 30-45fps in a lot of games. But that experience is going to feel tremendously better on the new screen because (1) it’s OLED with amazing colors and contrast, (2) OLED has near instant response time leading to a faster and snappier experience, and (3) 30Hz more refresh rate will be noticeably smoother compared to 60Hz.