Since we're discussing Elden Ring choppies...
I stop my 165hz display down to 60 for Elden Ring and it is... consistent. I don't really see stutter - it is truly consistent, but I wouldn't call it 'normal 60fps' smooth, either. That said, I do have actual stutter for the first 3 minutes of playing the game. I see it hovering on 52-53 and the screen is just choppin away. But I also have no space and am running it on a 'backup/overflow' HDD
I do still wish it was smoother overall, but these days, I'm used to 80+ with most any game that is not FO4. Man, I bet ER would be awesome running at over 100FPS. For me, with all of the camera turning and fast action, fatigue can be a thing down at 60. I start to get that feeling like when you turn your head with a bad sinus infection and get a little zap. I don't get the zap, just a headache like I might. It's tolerable, I mean, I play the crap out of FO4 with friggin injection mods that just obliterate frametime. I'm no stranger to that experience. But it's generally nice when I can avoid it. I can play for hours longer. ER is nothing compared to a modded-to-heck Fallout that still manages to be very noticeably choppy while reading nearly a flat 60.
But why exactly is it capped? One thing I notice about Elden Ring (other souls games too, but ER especially,) is the hitbox accuracy. I swear, it is nearly frame-perfect the majority of the time (minus a few cheesey outliers) and I think that has a lot to do what makes the combat work so well. I'm wondering if maybe there is some tradeoff when it comes to the scripting for combat and hit detection that gives it that visual strangeness when it comes to the look and feel of the movement. I'm going totally outside my knowledge pool, but from a layman's perspective, I presume it has to do with how combat works in those games. The most common reason for a 60fps cap is a combination of physics and scripting constraints, right? A lot of things are easier to line-up if you just tether to a hard-capped frame rate. Elden Ring combat is all about precise timing of highly varied movesets that involve bigger, yet much more complex hitboxes that must also be very dynamic when it comes to how their envelopes are shaped and what parts of the space they occupy - down to millisecond changes in those variables. Consider that although there is camera/movement lock-on, you can fight without it and every part of that animation still has to accurately register a hit at any point in the sequence - the blade could hit early/late, proud/short, and there are physics and damage calculations that need good information to corroborate in a way that makes sense for what you are seeing - the animation is predetermined but the damage and reaction aren't on rails - it's dependent on how and where in the animation they detect a hit. And outside of the more 'open' side of the combat, there still has to be a TON of scripting involved in everything happening. That much more to keep it feeling open, if anything. I wonder how that factors into frametimes. I'm betting cranking it over 60FPS breaks the combat system, and it's probably more integral than say... a Bethesda game on havok.
I truly don't know... just a thought. A lot of games nowadays have gotten away from tying things to frametimes in that way, but I think it's probably a lot harder to sync up all of that action in a game like Elden Ring than it is in most games. Most games do not have a combat system this deep and heavy in its focus on moves and movesets, while STILL only minimally restricting actor movement the majority of the time. That must come with different challenges than most games with much simpler (at least on a technical level) combat.
I mean, to win against a higher level boss can involve threading your needle through movement/positioning/triggering openings that only span tiny slivers of frames - and it's not like counting simple projectiles in a shooter - there's a lot more animation and stuff going along with each attack. In a shooter, the player simply won't encounter the effect of not seeing what they're *actually* getting unless they find themselves in one of those projectile calculation blind spots, such as the classic '3rd person shoot through cover' trick or the opposite 'invisible wall' problem. It still lines up with the reticle. I'm betting quite a lot of people have been shooting through cover in some 3rd person shooters and *never* noticing it. And then when it comes to things like melee and sneak attacks, there is no hit detection after triggering the animation - the hit has been 'read' before you see the animation of it being drawn on the screen. That doesn't work for deeper Souls-style combat,. If hit detection worked like that in Elden Ring, shit would majorly suck. You'd just be missing/getting hit and never seeing why or how. Everything's kinda got register as close to what's drawn on screen as possible. Your weapons simply must track with what they hit, where and when. So I can sort of understand there maybe being a need to sacrifice frame rates and overall fluidity in order to facilitate consistent precision in the combat. I'm betting that's what gives the combat that sense of fine timing granularity that can put things right 'by the edge of the blade' and keep it really exciting and rewarding. It won't matter how smooth things look if hitboxes can no longer track with what's on screen with enough granularity to deal with all of these different swinging attacks coming in at all sorts of different angles in tight, intricate patterns where timing and placement are everything.
A big part of that is a popularity contest, being part of the in-crowd even if the content isn't entirely your thing. The vast majority can't finish the game without carefully following a walkthrough, I doubt 'everyone' is having tons of fun with it. It sure isn't a relaxing experience 
