Just to clarify, it's not that CoD4 competitive players are idiots who succumb to placebo effect. I'm well aware of the 'industry standards' i.e. film 24fps, NTSC 29.97fps drop frame, etc and the fact that no matter how high your ingame FPS goes, your monitor still displays at 60Hz/75Hz/whatever the refresh rate is.

The higher 125/250 FPS target is due to a peculiarity in the CoD4 engine, which derives from a peculiarity with its parent engine, the Q3Arena engine, where physics is calculated with the same precision as the rendering FPS. 125 and 250 are the 'peak points' just due to how the engine works - you jump higher/further, can move at a slightly faster speed before making footsteps, and actually take less fall damage when your FPS is solidly one of those two. Incidentally Q3A patched the issue so that it calculates physics at 125 ticks per second regardless of FPS, but Infinity Ward never bothered.

Probably because they already considered CoD a console franchise back then. Fagggots.

This may be outside the realm of practical discussion but people can easily tell the difference between 60, 200 and 1000 distinct still frames per second when we're talking about pre-rendered footage (i.e. when rendering for animated film, or more related to the discussion, CoD4 engine rendering for frag movies) even if the final output is 30 or 24fps with each of those being a composite of several frames of footage.

60/75fps is visually acceptable in our culture today as 'smooth' because that's what monitors have been running at for decades, i.e. what we're used to. Or maybe they became the standards since that's what people perceived as smooth. Whatever works.

I said "people", not "everyone"

Like, in the "people have climed Mt. Everest" sense.