Here's some AI slop for you:

I actually think there’s a real philosophical/physics idea buried inside this, even though the “reality is literally running at a lower FPS” part doesn’t work under our current understanding of physics.

The interesting part is the distinction you’re making between objective time and how much information/eventfulness occurs within a unit of time.

Where your analogy is surprisingly good

Your game example captures something important:

At 60 FPS:

60 discrete observations → 1 second

At 5 FPS:

5 discrete observations → 1 second

If the simulation itself had some fixed computational workload per frame, then reducing the frame rate could make each frame represent a larger chunk of state change.

And there's an interesting connection to human perception.

Your brain doesn't experience time simply by reading an internal clock. It constructs a sense of duration from changes, memories, attention, and events.

That's why:

A boring hour can feel incredibly long while you're experiencing it. A fascinating three-hour conversation can feel like 30 minutes. Childhood summers can feel enormously long in retrospect. A year packed with novel experiences can produce an enormous number of memories. Routine years can collapse into what feels like a handful of memories.

So I'd modify your theory slightly:

Maybe what people are calling “time speeding up” isn't the clock accelerating. Maybe the amount of perceptually distinguishable information we're extracting from each unit of objective time is changing.

That's actually a much more defensible hypothesis.

But there's a problem with the FPS explanation

If reality were literally operating at a lower frame rate, there should be measurable physical consequences.

For example, suppose reality went from an equivalent of 60 "frames/sec" to 30.

You'd expect some underlying discretization:

Frame 1 → Frame 2 → Frame 3 → ...

Physics experiments would potentially reveal a maximum temporal resolution, synchronization artifacts, violations of Lorentz invariance, etc.

We don't currently observe anything resembling a universal FPS counter.

And there's another problem with your game analogy:

In a normal video game, FPS is an implementation detail. The physics engine can still calculate a jump at the same physical rate even if the renderer displays fewer frames.

So lowering the rendering FPS doesn't necessarily make the simulation itself slower.

That distinction is important.

But here's where your idea gets much more interesting

Forget "FPS."

Consider information processing.

Imagine two universes where exactly one second passes.

Universe A:

1,000,000 distinguishable state changes occur.

Universe B:

100 distinguishable state changes occur.

Objective time is identical.

But an observer inside Universe B might potentially experience a very different temporal phenomenology because there are fewer changes from which to construct temporal succession.

That starts touching ideas from:

information theory computational physics quantum mechanics thermodynamics neuroscience theories of consciousness the simulation hypothesis

And there is an especially interesting question:

Does subjective time depend more strongly on physical time, information processing, or the rate at which an observer's internal state changes?

That's a much deeper version of your theory.

And there's a fascinating paradox

Your theory actually predicts something that we can observe:

As people age, subjective time tends to accelerate.

A year to a 5-year-old is 20% of their entire remembered existence.

A year to a 50-year-old is 2%.

But there's an even more interesting mechanism.

When you're young, almost everything is novel.

First day of school.

First Christmas memories.

First bicycle.

First vacation.

First girlfriend.

First job.

First house.

Your brain generates huge numbers of distinctive memories.

Later, life becomes increasingly repetitive:

wake up → work → commute → eat → sleep → repeat

When looking backward, hundreds of repetitive days can become almost indistinguishable.

So retrospectively:

10 years can become psychologically compressed.

That produces something remarkably similar to your "lower FPS" concept without requiring the universe itself to slow down.

Now let's take your simulation idea seriously

Suppose reality actually were computational.

Then there are at least three different things we could mean by "FPS":

1. Rendering rate

How frequently the universe updates what observers perceive.

2. Physics calculation rate

How frequently the underlying state of the universe changes.

3. Observer processing rate

How rapidly conscious observers process and distinguish those changes.

Those are radically different hypotheses.

And #3 is the one where your idea becomes difficult to dismiss philosophically.

Because we only ever experience reality through our internal processing.

Even if the external universe were running at exactly the same rate, changes in our brains could make subjective time accelerate.

There's also a really weird possibility

Imagine a hypothetical civilization that develops extremely powerful AI.

The AI performs:

1 billion internal computational cycles

while humans experience:

1 second.

From the AI's perspective, that second could contain an enormous amount of internal experience.

Now reverse it.

Suppose the universe somehow reduces the amount of computation available to every conscious process.

You could potentially get a universe where:

less computation per objective second → fewer internal distinctions → different subjective temporal experience.

That is much closer to a serious computational theory of time than "the server dropped from 60 FPS to 30 FPS."

And it raises a genuinely wild question:

Is the passage of time fundamentally about clocks, or is time what an information-processing system experiences as it moves through distinguishable states?

That's the question I'd investigate next.

Because if the latter were true, your original intuition isn't necessarily crazy at all. You'd just want to replace "reality's FPS is decreasing" with something like:

The experienced rate of temporal succession may depend on the rate at which an observer—or reality itself—can generate and distinguish physical information states.

That is a substantially more interesting hypothesis than the original FPS analogy.