So I'm not the only one?
In my much younger years, I honesty did find joy in the tweaking and benchmarking of games. Given how long most of us have been on this forum, I'm far from the only one who started their game tweaking days by brutally optimizing config.sys and autoexec.bat. Sure any dipweed could drop himem.sys, emm386.exe /noems and a dos=high,umb into config.sys and pick up a decent 580kb of low memory. Then you'd get the intermediate folks who would build boot options into config.sys which also permitted branching in autoexec.bat so you could pick-and-choose for which drivers made sense to actually load. Then you got us voodoo ninja badasses who would override emm386.exe's attempt at autodiscovering empty upper memory (640k -> 1mb region) blocks, forcing the inclusion of upper memory regions where (hopefully!) the various bioses weren't shadowed into which inevitably would crater your machine (i=b800-bfff x=c000-c7ff i=d000-d255) Then the real massochists would reorient the load order of DOS drivers to optimize how they all fit into the newly recovered upper memory region space to exactly get smartdrv crammed in there alongside ansi.sys and mouse.drv and oakcdrom.sys and mscdex, you could even loadhigh the entire command.com if you were balsy.
Remember when overclocking was a static-speed soldered crystal, eventually augented by jumpers to select from several base speeds with divider jumpers for ISA and VLB speeds, only eventually to finally start permitting clock multiplier jumpers? I remember the very first 83MHz capable motherboard I owned and I ran my Pentium 166MMHz with a 3x multiplier like a badass -- it took me days to get it perfectly stable, and then like a month later I cooked a cheap PCI network card because the PCI bus was running at 41.6MHz lol.
Thirty years later, I'm not there anymore. Yeah I run an overclocked rig, yeah also spent like 30 minutes testing it and then started turning it down a little each time I found a game that crashed. No matter that I'm too old for that shit, I'm never going to begrudge anyone who wants to spend hours, days and even weeks tweaking their rig over and over, benchmarking the same dumb shit over and over, just to finally get that last little half-perecent performance increase they stumbled into to now remain stable.
To those who find joy in benchmarking and tweaking instead of playing: good for you. No small part of where I've landed professionally came from those days doing that same shit.