analogies always fail when computers and humans try to intermix terminology

anything higher than your refresh rate is just unnecesarry strain on your hardware

This is stupid, you have two eyes so what you see are two frames _all_ the time.

I've played counter strike competitively for most of my life and cs players care a lot about frames and I've researched it a lot personally. My understanding of the facts is that the purely visual aspect of refresh rate (independent of frame rate) has diminishing returns past 240hz or for some people 360hz. I play at 240hz and can only see a slight difference between 144hz and 240hz, but 60hz is atrocious, suggesting a non linear falloff at least for my eyes.

The relationship between frame rate and refresh rate and how this affects the look/feel of a game can be confusing. The status quo used to be to never cap your frames and always get the highest frame rate possible and just ignore screen tearing, the advantage of this was that the game felt more responsive, although in some games the physics can break down after a certain point. In csgo I've had this happen at around 1000fps in 1v1 servers since the maps there can be comically small.

The problem with uncapped frames however is that, as someone just said, it stresses your hardware, and that can actually increase input delay. It can also mean your frames vary wildly from moment to moment which, for cs players, makes aiming feel inconsistent. Another related issue is poor 1% lows and frame time variance.

The new status quo is to always cap your frames slightly below the minimum that your pc can produce so it's always stable and doesn't incur input lag. Ideally using an external program like nvidia control panel or rtss, special k, etc. In CS your only option is nvidia control panel though.

However, adaptive sync entered the picture and changed things slightly. If you have gsync (nvidia) or freesync (amd) then you can sort of get 'the best of both worlds' meaning you can get the smoothness of vsync without the input delay. Personally I can still feel some delay with gsync, but CS2 for whatever reason is almost unplayable without it, looks like an episode of robot chicken all choppy and shit.

But there's more... the behavior of gsync is such that when the frames exceed its sync range it behaves like normal vsync and you get input lag again. So if you want an optimal experience you have to cap your frames below your refresh rate and force vsync off in nvidia control panel, but turn gsync on in-game, or whatever the amd equivalent would be.

For me it kinda doesn't matter as long as it's above 30 though I have played some games at 25 and it was fine-ish. 60 is the sweet spot for what feels smooth and anything above that while nice cost disproportionally to what you're gaining. Same goes for resolution. 4K is nice but honestly 1080p is enough.

i remember playing tfc and cs beta and seeing people discuss graphics settings. it seemed the consensus was you wanted around 90-100 fps. Its noteworthy because before native resolution people were more free to tweak resolution as just another video setting, so people felt that hitting 100 fps was worth lower resolutions, but that more than that was not worth lowering your resolution. This was how i always did it and when LCDs became capable of displaying higher refresh rates it held true. 100 definitely feels a lot more 'present' than 60, but i dont notice 140 over 100 so much.
For slower paced games ive always felt anything above 30 is good, the slideshow effect kicks in somewhere in the 20s