Why does Quake Live look crazy smooth?

[monitor_butt]

I recently got Quake Live, I increased the refresh rate, and capped my fps 2-3 fps below my refresh for G-Sync, and this game looks like it's running ULMB! All my other modern games don't look even close to being this smooth with the same settings. Is it some visual trick, or is it maybe my hardware struggling with newer games?

I have a i5 2500k @ 4.2ghz and a GTX 1060, 2560x1440 @ 165hz. For newer games like Overwatch, I drop the resolution down to x1080 and can maintain a stable framerate, but the game looks nowhere near as smooth as Quake Live. Can older hardware somehow affect the smoothness of the picture, even if it can maintain a stable fps at the refresh rate?

[RealNC]

Any resolution other than 2560x1440 is going to look very blurry on a 1440p monitor. If you also drop the resolution in quake live, you should see the same blur.

Another factor are graphics of the game. Modern games have a softer look to them compared to old ones, where everything had sharp edges.

And there's also frame rate, of course. With g-sync, the closer your FPS is to your max refresh rate, the lower the motion blur will be. (Unless you're on an IPS 165Hz monitor. On those, you reach maximum clearness at ~140Hz. Anything above that does not result in clearer motion.)

[Chief Blur Buster]

I recently got Quake Live, I increased the refresh rate, and capped my fps 2-3 fps below my refresh for G-Sync, and this game looks like it's running ULMB! All my other modern games don't look even close to being this smooth with the same settings. Is it some visual trick, or is it maybe my hardware struggling with newer games?

There are many explanations:
-- The game engine is old, so frames render ultra-fast -- motion feel tends to be extremely synchronous to the mouse -- your mouse microstutters is massively reduced, frametimes don't vary as much and doesn't fudge the input-read-to-screen-presentation times.
-- Textures in Quake Live is extremely low resolution, so the motion blurring isn't nearly as dramatic
-- Quake Live has often fairly dark environments (dungeons) which doesn't show as much visible motion blurring (on TN panels).
-- Quake Live works very well on single-threaded systems.
-- ULMB benefits mainly affects gaming tactics that require lots of eye tracking. Quake Live often encourages you to fixate your eyes on crosshairs (which lessens benefits of ULMB).

I have a i5 2500k @ 4.2ghz and a GTX 1060, 2560x1440 @ 165hz. For newer games like Overwatch, I drop the resolution down to x1080 and can maintain a stable framerate, but the game looks nowhere near as smooth as Quake Live. Can older hardware somehow affect the smoothness of the picture, even if it can maintain a stable fps at the refresh rate?

Yep, older hardware will introduce factors that makes motion less pure-looking even at the same framerate:

-- Newer games have higher detail textures, which gets much more noticeably motionblurred.
-- Frame rendering times will vary much more.
-- Longer frame rendering times will mean more input lag. 140fps capped on PUBG will have more input lag than 140fps capped on Quake Live, for example -- because it took longer for each frame to render. This could produce some of the "less responsive" impressions.
-- Heavily-varying framerates during VRR can also result in heavily varying motion blur during heavily varying framerates.
While GSYNC/FreeSync massively reduces microstutter, the framerate variances can still produce things like random-length motionblurring trails (a sudden variance from 140fps down to 70fps will double the motion blurring suddenly). Frequent massive framerate fluctuations can show as "flickering" motion-blur-trails. If a game alternates between 140fps-100fps-140fps-90fps-140fps-80fps etc many times a second, this can result in a flickery motion blur trail -- not common but can sometimes happen. Variable-amount of motion blurring is less objectionable than variable-amount of stuttering/microstuttering, but this is a known subtle effect of heavily variable framerates on variable refreshrate monitors that can be noticed when comparing to super-smooth games like Quake Live.

To make your framerates much more consistent (and reduce input lag at the same frame rate) you may wish to:
-- Reduce detail levels. Turn off AA.
-- Get a more powerful CPU & GPU to make the frame rendertimes more consistent (less wildly swinging)
-- Get a very smooth 1000Hz gaming mouse, even 1000Hz is still a microstutter weak link (especially if also exacerbated by other factors)
-- If you're using HDD, put your games on SSD. This will reduce stutters caused by content-loading from disk.
-- Use a lower cap to force framerate variances into a tighter range.
(Or if you want to eliminate microstutters during fixed-Hz ULMB -- then use VSYNC ON for ULMB for certain games such as fast RTS panning -- and adjust your ULMB refresh rate optimally for the framerates of the game you want to play -- since ULMB 100fps@100Hz always looks much better than varying 105-115fps@120Hz).

Not all games will go ultrasmooth like Quake Live, but several games manage to do it (or come really cloise) -- for example all Bioshock and Crysis series games manage to go supersmooth (albiet not as low-lag as Quake Live) once configured appropriately.