I think jitter is more important than FPS and until software has caught up (likely never) I would rather cap the frame rate at 60 FPS and experience that somewhat consistently rather than have such disparate performances.
It’s the same thing with retina/HiDPI. It’s amazing when everything is retina, but all the random bits and pieces of UI, let alone entire softwares, that appear blurry make for a worse experience than a strictly low dpi UX.
However, you are definitely correct when it comes to GUI productivity applications. Drawing text in boxes is apparently much harder than rendering an immersive world in real time. The implications are too disturbing to consider, so I do not.
https://github.com/GNOME/vte/blob/master/src/vte.cc#L10543
It's another harmful effect of mobile-first design. A trivial power saving gives measurably improved battery life, but the horrible latency is ignored.
...if you're playing with v-sync :-P. I got a (rather expensive too) 165Hz monitor recently and the main benefit is to lessen the lag that Windows' forced composition (which also does v-sync) has. But in games i always played with v-sync turned off (i do not mind the tearing, unless it only happens at a fixed position i never really notice it) and the responsiveness was already very high. And on Linux and older versions of Windows where i could disable the compositor, i already had high responsiveness on the GUI too (if anything i feel like even with the 165Hz monitor, the Windows 10 desktop is still not as responsive as Windows 7 and previous versions of Windows were with the compositor disabled).
Though a large issue with that is how modern monitors work. I also have a CRT connected to an older computer here which can do 120Hz and the motion feel is considerably better to the point where i wonder what the hell was wrong with people in the mid-2000s to switch away from CRTs when in pretty much every other area except size and weight, the CRTs were superior - especially at the time (better image quality, better and true dark colors, better responsiveness/no 'response time', higher refresh rates, higher resolutions, variable resolutions with no scaling artifacts, etc). In fact a reason i decided to try a 165Hz monitor was because i recently connected that CRT to a machine that can do 120Hz and have some games to run at 120fps and wanted that experience for my main PC too.
(sadly i do have a feeling that if i hadn't used a CRT the last few years i'd be more enthusiastic about my new monitor since i do not think the currently technology can do much better - at least without going to something like that gigantic $3k OLED monitor though even that would annoy me for its size)
High refresh rate monitors tend to support freesync or Gsync. For minimum latency disable vsync, enable free / gsync. Only enable vsync if your fps is above the monitors refresh rate. Alternatively you can enable a framerate limit just below the refresh rate.
Even supports VR. '80s Cyberpunk matrix here I come!
pulls out a virtual gun to kill a process dead
Take the same idea and put it into Unreal Engine. Add further OS interactions like files, maybe a floating virtual window for web browsing etc.
The UX has to be done very well though otherwise you are a prediction by TV show Community:
A lot of software, especially websites, have annoying waits for Vsync that are not needed in them.
When you update styles that triggers a reflow or repaint, then you can introduce a wait for VSync in your website thats stalls flow until it is finished.
If you add 3 frames of delay at 60fps then it's 50ms of delay, and only 25ms at 120fps. It doesn't sound like a lot, but that 25ms can be the difference between feeling totally fluid and not, and a lot of websites are even worse than that.
Software can be IO bound, Network bound, CPU bound, memory bound.
Modern software is Vsync bound!
The very, very first thing I did at my last company after migrating to a retina Macbook Pro was go into our monitoring systems and configure it to render the graphs at 2x size and then scale them down on the client.
This improves both motion quality and latency. When poorly designed software makes you wait multiple frames, halving (or better) the frame time makes a noticeable difference.