Placebo effect
Also searched as: placebo · placebo effect · feels faster
What it means
When a change feels like it helped because you expected it to, not because anything measurably improved. After you spend effort on a tweak, your brain really wants it to have worked.
More detail
It's the most important idea in this whole library, because most "FPS boost" tweaks live and die on it. The cure is measurement — a benchmark doesn't care what you were hoping for. …
In the Blackbook
The deeper explanation continues inside the app. The Blackbook publishes its verdicts here — the full write-ups stay in the book, on your rig, next to your own measurements.
The Compy Blackbook holds 191 graded entries like this one, judged against your hardware — and every change it does make is reversible, with the receipt to prove it.
See Compy →