You'd think matching the in game FPS cap to the max refresh rate of your VRR range would be the way to go, but some games still produce a few extra FPS regardless, resulting in screen tearing.
you are within your VRR windows, therefore nothing. If you had a game that would reach over 165 fps you should cap the fps at 162 (below the threshold, that way VRR tech can work. @@koloved1
There is situations when your game goes 180-240 fps, you lock fps to 120 for example for consistentcy and it starts to drop frames to like 100 fps. Whyyyyyy
I disable the in-game frame rate cap and then re-cap it via GPU control panel instead on nearly every game I play because of this. It's certainly not always necessary, a lot of games are have a perfectly fine in-game limiter, but when it _does_ make a difference the difference can be very noticeable. Often times you end up with much more stable frame pacing, so even when comparing the exact same frame rate between in-game cap and GPU cap the latter can be noticeably smoother.
RTSS has the best frame limiter, almost no input lag and perfect frametimes. It's the best of both worlds. NVIDIA's frame limiter adds around 20ms of latency from my testing.
That’s always been my biggest complaint with 30 fps, the damn latency is wild… I don’t mind the visuals not being as smooth but it’s hard af to play games when everything feels delayed
@@braukwood925, i am late but i can relate to this, the only reason why 30 fps is unplaylable for me is mouse latency issues , if latency is not terrible i can get used to it on singleplayer games, unless it extremely fast paced like doom
Now to be fair, I'm using a gaming laptop so thermal constraints are part of the reason I do this, but I globally cap my framerate to 60 in the nvidia driver now and I was shocked that a lot of the games I play doing so felt transformative compared to any in game measures.
I didn't have to scroll down much for find a console user complaining about a self-inflicted pain on PC in a video about PC. And I am no disappointed. Haha.
@@CeceliPS3it ain't self inflicted. Even when having a flat frametime and having more than enough power on your hardware, games on PC will micro stutter for no apparent reason because some games on PC just tank the 1% lows. I own a decent rig myself.
@@LianCasablacks It runs fine on my PC. It's just a handful of bad coded games that stutter. I just avoid games like this. It happens more on ported games too.
@@LianCasablacks Maybe we're no playing the same games. Because all games that I'm playing are just fine. Even Alan Wake 2 that people cried their hearts out ran just fine on my PC. lol
Pretty ridiculous that this is still an issue, especially on consoles where airtight frame-presentation is kind of the main reason for existence; at least from a purely hardware perspective.
I gave Special K a go based on your mention and I'm glad I did. Trust me I've tried every possible way for my 6700 XT to get a locked 60 experience on RDR2; in game options, Radeon chilli, RTSS and all its sync methods but the solid locked frametime I got from the framelimit option on Special K is just on a different level.
I remember several Digital Foundry videos talking about games technically outputting a stable frame rate, but handling mouse movements or controller input wrong. Basically if the camera just stops for a frame, it looks like stutter even though all the frames are properly rendered.
@@HapPawhere You can't, that's the problem. It's just the way games handle input signals. If that isn't implemented properly, you're basically lost until the game gets patched. :-/
I cannot play 30 fps games on my computer monitor, it looks way too jittery even with all the suggested tweaks I could find on the internet. However, 30 fps console footage looks fine. It looks surprisingly smooth for 30 FPS imo. Why is that?
I'm busy working now and the only little free time I have I want to just play games without fiddling settings. Played many games on a PS4 and they were great. I notice slowdown, fps drop, motion blur, ugly textures, etc but surprisingly those didn't annoy me like it was on PC
idk, I've tried everything, after playing on a 60 FPS monitor for years, going to 30 FPS feels like hell on earth, regardless of how well it is suppose to be configured, even streaming 30 FPS footage from gamepass ultimate looks like shit, but RUclips videos of games played at 30 FPS look just fine to me. Maybe RUclips just smooths it out with some interpolation trickery, idk...@@dagstar84
They say it's just frame time but I've tried playing 30fps on PC and even with perfect frame time according to RTSS it still didn't look right. There's got to be some kind of secret sauce that we just don't have on PC.
The worst offender in recent memory for me was Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. It was performing a bit rough uncapped and in trying to fix that I discovered that using the in-game cap caused large periodic frametime spikes, which got bigger the lower you put the cap. RTSS completely saved the day there.
I discovered this (in the actual episode) after struggling with Ghost Recon Wildlands. In game 60 limit in windowed mode caused horrible frame drops, up to a second or two pauses. Very bad. Had to force Nvidia to limit frames, now it's fine. Digital Foundry is great.
Because windowed or borderless mode are mostly dependant of the windows desktop sync (that cause terrible frame times when framerate is close to refresh rate) but yes nVidia built in limiter can overcome those issues
@@mck8292 get on windows 11 and use optimised for windowed games, fixes all those issues using new flip model, borderless on dx11 works great now same with windowed, to compare its using the same flip model as newer dx12 games
My favorite video playback fail of recent times it Control, where you have to actually disable ReBAR to avoid absolutely awfully broken video playback. I don't know how that is even possible.
limit frames via playing windowed mode and set the windows environment to limit refresh rate. Its flawless. Set manual refresh rate to 50hz via Nvidia custom refresh rate and then apply it through Windows settings. Hard limiter and the frame interpolation with Gsync is awesome.
Playing some of the Wolfenstein games locked at 30/40fps on Steam Deck is terrible. I think people really need to call this out, as these games are listed as Verified.
Alien Isolation is notorious for poorly paced FMV. So are the cut scenes in the X-Com Enemy Unknown game. It's just terrible. I wonder if they actually record the FMVs at 29.97 FPS which used to map properly to old NTSC television sets. But this is 2023 and most displays can do a clean 30 fps. But this is just a thought I have. Could also be something inherent in the playback software they use. Who knows.
Everyone with an RTX 40 series, use RTSS and on Setup choose the option "NVIDIA Reflex" over the default "async", it works perfectly fine. It is revolutionary!
If I'm capping my FPS @ 240 (Monitors refreshrate), and it's constantly hitting 241, should I just cap the frame rate at 239? Weird thing, my HP Omen X 27 isn't actually 240Hz, it's 239.98 or something like that. Do I have to worry about being @ 240Hz when my monitor is locked at 239.98? Or would it be better for me to cap the frame rate at 238 so it tops out @ 239?
Make a custom resolution for your monitor and make it do 240fps instead of 239.98. Then get rivatuner (you gotta install msi afterburner to get riva tuner) and make the global fps 240. This should all work out
If you want variable refresh rate then cap it to whatever will be under your monitor's max refresh rate. If you're not chasing VRR then just set it to whatever you see fit. Screen tearing on a 240 Hz panel shouldn't be that visible anyway.
It's showing 239.98 or maybe 239.970Hz because of the CVT timings standards. It requires a pixel clock rounding that's a multiple of 250, so it's adjusted to meet that.
Doesn't AMD have frame rate target control and chill when min/max is set the same to limit framerate? I wonder what the frametime pacing and latency difference is between those and in-game limiter?
There's a fix for it, but video playback in Batman arkham origins are absolutely terrible. The cinematics are totally broken, stuttery choppy messes that are painful to watch. also as to John's point on Unreal, when I was working on my Unreal Slender remake I tried to use a video file for the static in but had to resort to a scrolling texture because video playback in UE5 at the time was just broken, it wouldn't play at all.
I have vsync on via the Nvidia control, I have vsync off in game. Thats all well and all and its very smooth even though my game is running all around betweeth 70-110 or so. The thing that irks me is the noise and and GPU running at like 99%. If I use Rivatuner and cap the FPS to 80 for example....am I messing something up? It kind of feels smooth still but I'm paranoid that I'm introducing stutter/latency by FPS capping it via rivatuner.
It's the opposite, by capping the FPS lower to a stable framerate your GPU can maintain, you do lose a little latency, but most importantly, you trade that for a consistent one. Going from 6ms latency to 20ms and anywhere in-between can feel like stuttering in-game
John makes a good point about videos in games, contractors out there might do well to learn how to do it properly, in game cinematics will almost always be more difficult then implementing something pre-rendered properly and late in a dev cycle companies usually need people with skills like this
I have a 244 hz monitor, but I turn it down to 144, then cap every game at 72 fps with nvidia control panel. Just a constant, buttery smooth experience, no fluctuations. Simple. And since I don't play any multiplayer stuff, I've got no need for higher frames. The only game i've found that hates being frame limited is Metro Exodus. No idea why, but that game chugs if I try to limit its frames.
I don't think it really benefits you to do this unless you're either specifically looking to limit power draw/heat, or your system is struggling to consistently maintain frame rates above 72fps on a specific game. In the latter case it is a good idea to limit your frame rate below the level of any FPS drops a game experiences, that ensures a smoother experience. I do that all the time too. But if you're able to run a game locked to 144fps without drops, or even 244 in your case, and you're happy with the GPU power draw etc, why wouldn't you? Also is there any benefit to reducing your monitor's refresh rate to a lower than maximum value? I've never heard of that before.
@@yewtewbstew547 The only benefit I know when lowering monitor's refresh is to specifically set it to an even multiple number of 24 and 30 so you can play most content with no judder. Like 48Hz, 72Hz, 96Hz for 24fps or 60Hz, 90hz for 30fps and 120Hz and 240Hz for both.
The problem with relying on vrr is that most of the displays that have it have a minimum frame rate requirement of 48 fps in order for it to work. If the frame rates are lower than that it’ll refresh at 24 fps instead. You can thank the movie industry for that issue btw.
Not with LFC monitors. If the frames are lower, it doubles/triples the refresh accordingly with the current fps being rendered. That way it ensures it keeps in the VRR range.
Literally can't hear your casts on most of my listening devices. Brand new echo 5 from 2 feet away nope volume 10. Nope. Every other cast volume 7 is fine.... sure in my car with an amp ok. Heck even brand new ear buds don't help at work with some noise around. Like listening to Jim Nantz do golf on volume low. Easy to sleep to...
Again reason why is developers are cutting corners getting lazy for online multiplayer in games as a disservice. So they are effectively by planned obsolescence cutting single player offline story-driven games so people will play less of them and go more to online multiplayer trash.. you can tell me I'm wrong all you want but you can't prove me wrong Unreal Engine is bad unless the game is linear shorter or online. Yet again developers are moving towards that knowing it is bad but planning more and more online multiplayer crap.. Basically it'd R.I.P GAMING INDUSTRY
Series x is definitely not rocking hardware that old. Also it makes zero sense to say the x is holding everything back when the s also exists and even that is somewhat arguable.
The thumbnail makes it look like Alex has *major* beef with fps limiters.
Bro looks like he has been traumatised by fps limiters and is now contemplating life.
You'd think matching the in game FPS cap to the max refresh rate of your VRR range would be the way to go, but some games still produce a few extra FPS regardless, resulting in screen tearing.
Yes, it’s why I cap to 110 fps in the Nvidia control panel. Not ideal, but it’s needed because of the random extra frames.
you are within your VRR windows, therefore nothing. If you had a game that would reach over 165 fps you should cap the fps at 162 (below the threshold, that way VRR tech can work. @@koloved1
There is situations when your game goes 180-240 fps, you lock fps to 120 for example for consistentcy and it starts to drop frames to like 100 fps. Whyyyyyy
I disable the in-game frame rate cap and then re-cap it via GPU control panel instead on nearly every game I play because of this. It's certainly not always necessary, a lot of games are have a perfectly fine in-game limiter, but when it _does_ make a difference the difference can be very noticeable. Often times you end up with much more stable frame pacing, so even when comparing the exact same frame rate between in-game cap and GPU cap the latter can be noticeably smoother.
I heard Rivatuner works better and is less janky to pull up mid game and adjust fps cap, that’s my experience anyway.
RTSS has the best frame limiter, almost no input lag and perfect frametimes. It's the best of both worlds. NVIDIA's frame limiter adds around 20ms of latency from my testing.
This is good to know, thanks.@JoshNautes
@@JoshNautes Special K frame limiters are great to! Sometimes a game that does not work well with RivaTurner works perfect with Special K.
I use rivatuner to cap the framerates and it works very well
Steam Deck’s 30 fps cap is really smooth, but wow the added latency is rough.
That’s always been my biggest complaint with 30 fps, the damn latency is wild… I don’t mind the visuals not being as smooth but it’s hard af to play games when everything feels delayed
Yeah use in-game limiters when possible.
@@braukwood925, i am late but i can relate to this, the only reason why 30 fps is unplaylable for me is mouse latency issues , if latency is not terrible i can get used to it on singleplayer games, unless it extremely fast paced like doom
I think not-native games can get hooked to Special K, so you could reduce the latency
Now to be fair, I'm using a gaming laptop so thermal constraints are part of the reason I do this, but I globally cap my framerate to 60 in the nvidia driver now and I was shocked that a lot of the games I play doing so felt transformative compared to any in game measures.
Rich: What do you think about this? John?
John: I remember this happening in games. It’s strange.
Uneven frame pacing and micro stutters are really getting on my nerves when playing on PC. Main reason I mostly play on consoles these days.
I didn't have to scroll down much for find a console user complaining about a self-inflicted pain on PC in a video about PC. And I am no disappointed. Haha.
@@CeceliPS3it ain't self inflicted. Even when having a flat frametime and having more than enough power on your hardware, games on PC will micro stutter for no apparent reason because some games on PC just tank the 1% lows. I own a decent rig myself.
@@LianCasablacks It runs fine on my PC. It's just a handful of bad coded games that stutter. I just avoid games like this. It happens more on ported games too.
@@CeceliPS3 A handful = about 60% of current games
@@LianCasablacks Maybe we're no playing the same games. Because all games that I'm playing are just fine. Even Alan Wake 2 that people cried their hearts out ran just fine on my PC. lol
Pretty ridiculous that this is still an issue, especially on consoles where airtight frame-presentation is kind of the main reason for existence; at least from a purely hardware perspective.
I’m not at issue anymore
I gave Special K a go based on your mention and I'm glad I did. Trust me I've tried every possible way for my 6700 XT to get a locked 60 experience on RDR2; in game options, Radeon chilli, RTSS and all its sync methods but the solid locked frametime I got from the framelimit option on Special K is just on a different level.
I noticed that using frame rate limiters like RTSS can have stuttering still but the frametime graph doesnt show them, anyone knows why that happens?
I remember several Digital Foundry videos talking about games technically outputting a stable frame rate, but handling mouse movements or controller input wrong. Basically if the camera just stops for a frame, it looks like stutter even though all the frames are properly rendered.
Is there a way to fix that@@NeovanGoth
@@NeovanGoth How to fix that?
@@HapPawhere You can't, that's the problem. It's just the way games handle input signals. If that isn't implemented properly, you're basically lost until the game gets patched. :-/
I cannot play 30 fps games on my computer monitor, it looks way too jittery even with all the suggested tweaks I could find on the internet. However, 30 fps console footage looks fine. It looks surprisingly smooth for 30 FPS imo. Why is that?
Motion blur perhaps? Motion blur helps dramatically on PC 30fps in my experience, but to me 60 is the minimum I’d even play a game on.
I'm busy working now and the only little free time I have I want to just play games without fiddling settings. Played many games on a PS4 and they were great. I notice slowdown, fps drop, motion blur, ugly textures, etc but surprisingly those didn't annoy me like it was on PC
frame pacing is the issue
idk, I've tried everything, after playing on a 60 FPS monitor for years, going to 30 FPS feels like hell on earth, regardless of how well it is suppose to be configured, even streaming 30 FPS footage from gamepass ultimate looks like shit, but RUclips videos of games played at 30 FPS look just fine to me. Maybe RUclips just smooths it out with some interpolation trickery, idk...@@dagstar84
They say it's just frame time but I've tried playing 30fps on PC and even with perfect frame time according to RTSS it still didn't look right. There's got to be some kind of secret sauce that we just don't have on PC.
The worst offender in recent memory for me was Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. It was performing a bit rough uncapped and in trying to fix that I discovered that using the in-game cap caused large periodic frametime spikes, which got bigger the lower you put the cap. RTSS completely saved the day there.
Lol, this game is the reason why I downloaded RTSS.
I discovered this (in the actual episode) after struggling with Ghost Recon Wildlands. In game 60 limit in windowed mode caused horrible frame drops, up to a second or two pauses. Very bad. Had to force Nvidia to limit frames, now it's fine. Digital Foundry is great.
Because windowed or borderless mode are mostly dependant of the windows desktop sync (that cause terrible frame times when framerate is close to refresh rate)
but yes nVidia built in limiter can overcome those issues
@@mck8292 Interesting. Thanks for these details.
@@mck8292 get on windows 11 and use optimised for windowed games, fixes all those issues using new flip model, borderless on dx11 works great now same with windowed, to compare its using the same flip model as newer dx12 games
I doubt that QA on these games didn’t find this, more likely that it was not considered important enough to fix.
Not all bugs get fixed.
exactly, it's not worth the resources for them
My favorite video playback fail of recent times it Control, where you have to actually disable ReBAR to avoid absolutely awfully broken video playback. I don't know how that is even possible.
What is special about "half rate vsync"? Couldn't you achieve the same thing with regular vsync and capping to 30 with any of the mentioned tools?
limit frames via playing windowed mode and set the windows environment to limit refresh rate. Its flawless. Set manual refresh rate to 50hz via Nvidia custom refresh rate and then apply it through Windows settings. Hard limiter and the frame interpolation with Gsync is awesome.
Playing some of the Wolfenstein games locked at 30/40fps on Steam Deck is terrible. I think people really need to call this out, as these games are listed as Verified.
Alien Isolation is notorious for poorly paced FMV. So are the cut scenes in the X-Com Enemy Unknown game. It's just terrible. I wonder if they actually record the FMVs at 29.97 FPS which used to map properly to old NTSC television sets. But this is 2023 and most displays can do a clean 30 fps. But this is just a thought I have. Could also be something inherent in the playback software they use. Who knows.
U should see the wo long fallen dynasty fmv's lmao
Thumbnail goes hard bro
Holt on. Ive never NOT used Riva. Riva is excellent
Everyone with an RTX 40 series, use RTSS and on Setup choose the option "NVIDIA Reflex" over the default "async", it works perfectly fine. It is revolutionary!
I use half vsync and in 99% of all cases it's as smooth as consoles...
Texas chainsaw massacre was a stuttering mess for me until I capped the frames in the Nvidia control panel and that's with gsync on.
If I'm capping my FPS @ 240 (Monitors refreshrate), and it's constantly hitting 241, should I just cap the frame rate at 239? Weird thing, my HP Omen X 27 isn't actually 240Hz, it's 239.98 or something like that. Do I have to worry about being @ 240Hz when my monitor is locked at 239.98? Or would it be better for me to cap the frame rate at 238 so it tops out @ 239?
Make a custom resolution for your monitor and make it do 240fps instead of 239.98. Then get rivatuner (you gotta install msi afterburner to get riva tuner) and make the global fps 240. This should all work out
If you want variable refresh rate then cap it to whatever will be under your monitor's max refresh rate. If you're not chasing VRR then just set it to whatever you see fit. Screen tearing on a 240 Hz panel shouldn't be that visible anyway.
It's showing 239.98 or maybe 239.970Hz because of the CVT timings standards. It requires a pixel clock rounding that's a multiple of 250, so it's adjusted to meet that.
Doesn't AMD have frame rate target control and chill when min/max is set the same to limit framerate? I wonder what the frametime pacing and latency difference is between those and in-game limiter?
AMD need built-in driver adaptive sync like what Nvidia has
There's a fix for it, but video playback in Batman arkham origins are absolutely terrible. The cinematics are totally broken, stuttery choppy messes that are painful to watch.
also as to John's point on Unreal, when I was working on my Unreal Slender remake I tried to use a video file for the static in but had to resort to a scrolling texture because video playback in UE5 at the time was just broken, it wouldn't play at all.
I have vsync on via the Nvidia control, I have vsync off in game. Thats all well and all and its very smooth even though my game is running all around betweeth 70-110 or so. The thing that irks me is the noise and and GPU running at like 99%. If I use Rivatuner and cap the FPS to 80 for example....am I messing something up? It kind of feels smooth still but I'm paranoid that I'm introducing stutter/latency by FPS capping it via rivatuner.
It's the opposite, by capping the FPS lower to a stable framerate your GPU can maintain, you do lose a little latency, but most importantly, you trade that for a consistent one. Going from 6ms latency to 20ms and anywhere in-between can feel like stuttering in-game
RTSS is the only limiter I know that produces stable frametimes.
Interesting... I never cap the framerate so this is new to me
Radeon Chill Works perfectly fine for me.
Does riva tuner not work? 😭
I cap my framerate with Nvidia control panel. I use fast sync and cap the framerate at 100fps.
why?
I've found that most in-game frame limiters are far better for input latency. Battle(non)sense did a great analysis of this.
Thumbs up for terrible FMV playback. Vast majority of games with FMVs have issues
Well, it depends on how it is implimented. Some frame limiters are TickBased. Which has its own set of dumb problems.
Always wondered this myself.
John makes a good point about videos in games, contractors out there might do well to learn how to do it properly, in game cinematics will almost always be more difficult then implementing something pre-rendered properly and late in a dev cycle companies usually need people with skills like this
Alex looks like he wants to kill someone in the thumbnail. Bro chill
I have a 244 hz monitor, but I turn it down to 144, then cap every game at 72 fps with nvidia control panel. Just a constant, buttery smooth experience, no fluctuations. Simple. And since I don't play any multiplayer stuff, I've got no need for higher frames. The only game i've found that hates being frame limited is Metro Exodus. No idea why, but that game chugs if I try to limit its frames.
I don't think it really benefits you to do this unless you're either specifically looking to limit power draw/heat, or your system is struggling to consistently maintain frame rates above 72fps on a specific game. In the latter case it is a good idea to limit your frame rate below the level of any FPS drops a game experiences, that ensures a smoother experience. I do that all the time too. But if you're able to run a game locked to 144fps without drops, or even 244 in your case, and you're happy with the GPU power draw etc, why wouldn't you?
Also is there any benefit to reducing your monitor's refresh rate to a lower than maximum value? I've never heard of that before.
@@yewtewbstew547 The only benefit I know when lowering monitor's refresh is to specifically set it to an even multiple number of 24 and 30 so you can play most content with no judder. Like 48Hz, 72Hz, 96Hz for 24fps or 60Hz, 90hz for 30fps and 120Hz and 240Hz for both.
They work under Linux and Steam
Lol dude is asking about qa in Ubisoft :)
The problem with relying on vrr is that most of the displays that have it have a minimum frame rate requirement of 48 fps in order for it to work. If the frame rates are lower than that it’ll refresh at 24 fps instead. You can thank the movie industry for that issue btw.
Not with LFC monitors. If the frames are lower, it doubles/triples the refresh accordingly with the current fps being rendered. That way it ensures it keeps in the VRR range.
Literally can't hear your casts on most of my listening devices. Brand new echo 5 from 2 feet away nope volume 10. Nope. Every other cast volume 7 is fine.... sure in my car with an amp ok. Heck even brand new ear buds don't help at work with some noise around. Like listening to Jim Nantz do golf on volume low. Easy to sleep to...
god alex looks so fkn sexy in the thumbnail
Again reason why is developers are cutting corners getting lazy for online multiplayer in games as a disservice. So they are effectively by planned obsolescence cutting single player offline story-driven games so people will play less of them and go more to online multiplayer trash.. you can tell me I'm wrong all you want but you can't prove me wrong
Unreal Engine is bad unless the game is linear shorter or online. Yet again developers are moving towards that knowing it is bad but planning more and more online multiplayer crap..
Basically it'd R.I.P GAMING INDUSTRY
The real problem is that the weakbox series x is holding back the gaming industry. Weak 2014 hardware is pathetic in 2023
XSX is more powerful than PS5 though.
Your 2014 must've been 🔥
Series x is definitely not rocking hardware that old. Also it makes zero sense to say the x is holding everything back when the s also exists and even that is somewhat arguable.
Please stay in school, your brain needs help...
@fcukugimmeausername there is zero evidence that it is. 99.9% of games run better on ps5. Weakbox series x has terrible frame rate
Because pc gaming is trash
Delusional
@@datonederpguy1005 Yes all pc guys are
Console fanboys truly are a special breed.
@@mungojerrie86 Says the no soap user
@@mrX666-s9p Not sure if you are actually delusional or if it's your inane attempt at trolling.