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. "Feels smoother" is a starting hypothesis, not a result; the frametime graph settles the argument.
The Compy Blackbook holds 174 graded entries like this one, judged against your hardware — and every change it does make is reversible, with the receipt to prove it.
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