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Technically, anything over your screen refresh rate is overkill, as the intermediate frames are just thrown away. But in the real world, other programs get in the way and steal clock cycles, so it's handy to have a frame in reserve so that it's not necessary to wait for another trip through the render loop. Thus, if your monitor is set at 60hz, a computer generating 100 fps will look slightly smoother than one which is matching the monitor at 60 fps. On MA2.6, you can see this phenomenon as very slight jerks of the bubble column.
Yes, movies are 24 fps and TV (in the U.S.) is 30 fps. So, why do they both look so smooth, and the Aquarium looks so jittery at 24 fps? It's because film and video are captured at shutter-speeds which blur moving objects from one frame to the next. The Aquarium draws each object in one clear, distinct position every frame, which gives a visual-staccato effect at slow speeds.
On very fast systems, it's possible to generate several intermediate positions of an object and blend them into one picture before the next frame gets drawn, creating an artificial motion-blur. Fish don't usually move fast enough to need this, but I may have to use the effect when I do the Butterfly Habitat.
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