In the early days of networked gaming (I mean, the days of Doom- (not to things like imaginet)) connections were slow.

If a game or application tried to pump too much data over the connection- it would take time. Also, sometimes the architecture itself and the hardware involved introduced a sort of “time-delay” into the equation. This was called “network lag”- a doom game might not be enjoyable due to network lag, for instance.

As Online gaming has become more prevalent and requires less PC familiarity, the term has started to be used completely erroneously in all sorts of situations.

For example- if your PC is underpowered for a new game, or you set the detail to high and it runs slowly, it’s not “lag” because there is no actual lag between your actions and what you see on screen. the term “lag” was originally used to indicate the time difference between when you pressed a key and when the server acknowledged you pressing that key. since even with the lowest framerates your key presses are being sent to the buffer in your local machine immediately. The term practically redefined itself when games such as quake implemented client-side prediction- you could see another player moving forward, and, instead of stopping dead as your PC is awaiting game state information, the client continues to draw that character moving in that direction.

The short story is- “Lag” is completely unrelated to framerate. they are separate. You can have a high lag/ping and a low framerate, or vice versa, or both, but that doesn’t suddenly make them interchangable.