Survey: 60 fps still reigns for half of PC gamers, but 120 fps loyalists are growing

Half the room is still fine with 60

For years, the 60 fps mark has served as a kind of handshake agreement between PC hardware and the people who buy it. Hit 60, and most players will call it a night. Drop below it, and you will hear about it. According to a reader survey published by PC Gamer, that informal contract is very much still in effect. Roughly half of the publication’s readers still identify 60 fps as the de facto minimum frame rate they expect from their games.

That number is not nothing. It reflects a huge installed base of hardware that tops out around that performance tier, as well as a generation of players who grew up treating 60 as the gold standard. For a lot of people, silky and stable at 60 still beats choppy and inconsistent at higher numbers.

But the survey also makes clear that the floor is rising, at least for a vocal slice of the PC gaming population.

The 120 fps crowd is digging in

More than 10 percent of PC Gamer readers, as reported by the outlet, identified 120 fps as their personal minimum. Not their preference. Their minimum. These are players who, having experienced the smoothness of a high refresh rate monitor, have essentially closed the door on going back.

It is a smaller group than the 60 fps majority, but 10 percent of a large readership represents a meaningful and growing segment. High refresh rate monitors have dropped considerably in price over the past several years, and the mainstream availability of displays running at 144 Hz and above has given more players a chance to experience what that actually feels like in practice. Once you have played a fast-paced shooter at 144 fps on a compatible monitor, 60 can start to feel like watching a film through a screen door.

The gap between those two camps is not just about hardware. It is also about the kinds of games people play. Competitive shooters, fast action games, and anything requiring precise, quick inputs tend to benefit most obviously from higher frame rates. Someone who primarily plays slow-burn RPGs or strategy games may never feel the absence of those extra frames. Someone grinding ranked matches in a tactical shooter almost certainly will.

What the numbers actually tell us

Surveys like this are useful not because they tell us what the ideal frame rate is, but because they show where the real-world expectations of players actually sit. Hardware manufacturers, developers, and platform holders all pay close attention to benchmarks like these when deciding where to optimize performance targets.

The fact that 60 fps still commands majority support among a readership as hardware-literate as PC Gamer’s is genuinely significant. These are not casual players without opinions on specs. Many of them have invested in capable rigs. And yet half of them are still drawing the line at 60, which suggests either that chasing higher frame rates past that point has diminishing returns for a big chunk of players, or that the cost-to-performance ratio of consistently hitting 120 fps or above is still steep enough to give people pause.

The 10-plus percent on the 120 fps end represent where things appear to be heading. As GPUs get faster and monitors get cheaper, that number will likely grow. The real question is how quickly the majority threshold shifts, and whether 60 fps will still be the dominant answer when a similar survey runs five years from now.

For now, the data suggests that the PC gaming audience is genuinely split between two very different expectations, and building a game or recommending hardware that satisfies both groups at once remains a real and persistent challenge.