Widescreen Gaming Forum

Smooth Frame Rates is usually a FPS cap with performance scaling. It should list a min and max framerate. If it is set to your refresh there is probably no point in disabling. But maybe TERA has an ass-high tick rate.

If you set the min frame rate to zero and it should disable the auto-throttling.

There was a nice article by Cranky about fov vs camera position here but I cannot find it anymore.

Smooth Frame Rates is usually a FPS cap with performance scaling. It should list a min and max framerate. If it is set to your refresh there is probably no point in disabling. But maybe TERA has an ass-high tick rate.

If you set the min frame rate to zero and it should disable the auto-throttling.

I disagree, a higher framerate is always better, let the engine breath.
Vsync causes input lag so that's a no no and capping your framerate at your monitors refresh rate can accentuate tearing.

I personally don't notice any greater degree of smoothness and fluidity over about 120fps so I'm happy for a games framerate to be limited around there.

Call of duty is a perfect example of this, you play cod 4 multiplayer with your maxfps set to around 120 and it's smooth as silk, you play one of the recent IW abortions, mw2 or 3 with the framerate capped to 90fps to smooth out their horrible p2p system and you'll notice the difference straight away (yes, even on a 60hz monitor), looking around is jerky and unclear, you will be playing slower and worse because of it.

I've always uncapped my framerate, even when I had a 60hz monitor (I'm just making this distinction in case people assume that having a framerate over your refresh rate at 60hz is none benificial) but I can't recommend 120hz monitors enough, they are amazing.
It's the next best thing to a CRT as far as monitors go at the minute. Sickly smooth and you'd be hard pressed to notice any tearing with vsync off.
If you're into competitive first person shooters, they're essential.

This is all just my personal opinion of course :D I know everyone has their own ideas of what's right and wrong, loads of people swear by vsync even though it's the spawn of the devil ;)

Just to clarify, I think 3d is the worthless flash in the pan gimmick it's always been. I've no doubt it'll be amazing one day with holograms in your room and stuff.
What pc gamers want and what hardware manufacturers think that we want aren't usually the same thing. It's taken the resurgence of 3d for us to get higher refresh rate lcd's, dual link DVI has been available for more than ten years.
You see them advertised, "Wow flash bang mega 3D! oh and it's 120hz in 2d, happy side effect"
No, it's "Wow flash bang mega 120hz mega! Oh, and if you like running games at half the framerate and washing out all the colour and wearing some big daft geps in order to give the very slight illusion of depth before having a seizure after 20 minutes then ... knock yourself out."

[quote]Smooth Frame Rates is usually a FPS cap with performance scaling. It should list a min and max framerate. If it is set to your refresh there is probably no point in disabling. But maybe TERA has an ass-high tick rate.

If you set the min frame rate to zero and it should disable the auto-throttling.

I disagree, a higher framerate is always better, let the engine breath.
Vsync causes input lag so that's a no no and capping your framerate at your monitors refresh rate can accentuate tearing.

I personally don't notice any greater degree of smoothness and fluidity over about 120fps so I'm happy for a games framerate to be limited around there.

Call of duty is a perfect example of this, you play cod 4 multiplayer with your maxfps set to around 120 and it's smooth as silk, you play one of the recent IW abortions, mw2 or 3 with the framerate capped to 90fps to smooth out their horrible p2p system and you'll notice the difference straight away (yes, even on a 60hz monitor), looking around is jerky and unclear, you will be playing slower and worse because of it.

I've always uncapped my framerate, even when I had a 60hz monitor (I'm just making this distinction in case people assume that having a framerate over your refresh rate at 60hz is none benificial) but I can't recommend 120hz monitors enough, they are amazing.
It's the next best thing to a CRT as far as monitors go at the minute. Sickly smooth and you'd be hard pressed to notice any tearing with vsync off.
If you're into competitive first person shooters, they're essential.

This is all just my personal opinion of course :D I know everyone has their own ideas of what's right and wrong, loads of people swear by vsync even though it's the spawn of the devil ;)

Your display is 120, that is your refresh rate. You will notice a smoothness difference up to 120.

The benefits of running higher than your refresh rate are present in some specialized MP situations. IMO it is not worth the extra stress on your system or the chance of cooking your card a la Starcraft 2 when it pumps out too many frames. Running more FPS than refresh will have more tearing on average than using a limiter set to your refresh. Limiter also wont have any lag concerns like Vsync does.

Your display is 120, that is your refresh rate. You will notice a smoothness difference up to 120. The benefits of running higher than your refresh rate are present in some specialized MP situations.

No, that's just my point, I was the same at 60hz and on crt's with sillyhigh refresh rates. Setting the refresh rate above 120hz, I don't notice the benefit, same with framerate, about 150fps seems to be my sweet spot, anything above that is a waste to me.

Even on a 60hz monitor, games felt far more responsive and fluid when their framerate was over 60fps. Your refresh rate might not be keeping up with the framerate and your brain and hands but it isn't synced so your eyes and brain are getting enough feedback for it all to be a lot smoother, fluid and responsive experience, if that makes sense. I'm talking specifically about multiplayer first person shooters here at 60hz and I've had a few drinks so I might be talking complete bollocks :lol:

All I know is that on my 60hz monitor, I could do a nice fast pan with the camera and pick out enemies, with the framerate capped it was less fluid, it turned into a blurry, jerky slideshow, everything was less sharp and more stilted and just not right. I had to slow the pace, actually, here's a good video to illustrate, I capped a random match back when I used to play mw2, that game was capped at 90fps, You can see, I had to adopt this sort of twitchy pigeon head flicking style so as not to pan and cause the jerky blurring. Apologies for the video quality and audio popping.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftQmP9m8epw

IMO it is not worth the extra stress on your system or the chance of cooking your card a la Starcraft 2 when it pumps out too many frames. Running more FPS than refresh will have more tearing on average than using a limiter set to your refresh. Limiter also wont have any lag concerns like Vsync does.

Yeah, until very recently I used dxtory to universally cap my framerate to 115fps, just under my refresh rate for that very reason but it caused jittering in a few engines so I just stopped using that feature.
To be honest, I don't notice any more tearing when the framerate goes over 120fps at 120hz, the refresh rate is fast enough for it not to be an issue for me, I mean, if I really concentrate, stare at something while panning really fast back and forth, I could pick it out.
Obviously I did notice it at 60hz but it's the lesser of two evils, as you say.

I agree, it's a waste pumping out over 150fps when I get no benefit from it but for the modern games that aren't capped that my rig can manage over 120fps on, it doesn't go much higher, I have good airflow and my systems nice and cool so I'm not going to worry about it.

I think you might be discussing multiple things here with refresh and FPS.

In the older days (not that old actually) designers would tie events to a games FPS like logic and input. This was very bad as everyone can get different framerates on their systems. One of the older Id games would cause players to run faster if their GPU would push over 120 FPS or somesuch high value. CS used to have all kinds of different behavior based off of the FPS. A lot of the older and popular MP games had problems like this which is why a lot of people did and still do try to crank the FPS online.

I don't MP so this next part may screw some terms. Maybe someone more exp. can do better.

The servers on MP games have tickrates for updating the game information. Players generally want the info rate they are sending to the servers to be as close to the tickrate (slightly higher I think is considered best). The belief is that too low a rate and they feel laggy while too high and they are wasting commands. They are looking for synchronization. In a lot of MP games FPS is tied to the rate of commands they send to the servers (or used to be). So players would generally want to pump the FPS so they would use all the available tickrates which can be as high as 100.

I think MP is starting to use lower maximum tickrates like 66 and maybe they have already decoupled the client FPS and client command rates for their data.

You might be noticing more responsive gameplay at the higher FPS because the game might have coupled something to the FPS it really shouldn't have or it might be a MP server thing. If you were using Vsync to cap your frames before you might have noticed the increased latency it has which would cause the better responsiveness with it disabled and the FPS uncapped.

If you have a prerendered frames option in your GPU drivers you might try lowering that value and using Vsync for SP for a bit. It has removed the laggy feelings for others and then you could get the best of both worlds.

For SP, I cannot really think of any reason to push FPS higher than refresh if you have a non-vsync frame limiter. Cheers.

EDIT - I have also heard that stuttering issues with limiters can sometimes be resolved by setting the max to one of two frames higher than the refresh. So 60 gets 62 and so on. Maybe that helps somebody someday.

I know what you're referring to, the old 120fps thing on the quake engine, it's not that.

I just stuck to talking about multiplayer fps because I thought that's where responsiveness and fluidity and sharpness, clarity and smooth camera panning is most important and you'd relate to that and it would prove my point better.
I mean, you can usually take all the time in the world lining up a shot in single player, I know people who use vsync when playing single player but not for multiplayer, for example.

For SP, I cannot really think of any reason to push FPS higher than refresh if you have a non-vsync frame limiter. Cheers.

At 120hz or higher, I'd agree with you, if you're playing with a control pad, I'd agree with you, but if you're playing a fast game like a first person shooter, with a mouse, a very fast and accurate input device that requires constant, consistent feedback, I'd say that going over your refresh rate is a good idea. There's no need to limit your framerate to your refresh rate and yes I know how ludicrous that sounds :D

EDIT - I have also heard that stuttering issues with limiters can sometimes be resolved by setting the max to one of two frames higher than the refresh. So 60 gets 62 and so on. Maybe that helps somebody someday.

I'll definitely give that a go tomorrow, cheers. Serious sam 2 was one of the games that had stuttering with the frame limiter enabled so I'll give that a try at 122 and see how it goes. Will report back.

EDIT - I have also heard that stuttering issues with limiters can sometimes be resolved by setting the max to one of two frames higher than the refresh. So 60 gets 62 and so on. Maybe that helps somebody someday.

Update: At least for me, and with dxtory, this didn't work so I'll just continue to leave it off. Thanks for the suggestion though.

Eh, maybe it was just something that was supposed to be used in tandem with vsync.


If bored you could try running vsync and this.

The general recommendation is to set 'Maximum Pre-rendered frames' (Nvidia) or 'Flip Queue' (ATI) from its default of 3 down to a value of 2 or 1. If this doesn't work in reducing lag, then try a value of 0, but remember that lowering this setting can actually reduce your FPS. If these changes don't work in reducing lag, then again, keep in mind that most mouse and control lag in virtually any game is due to low framerates and/or VSync.

http://www.tweakguides.com/Fallout3_13.html

Yeah, I would always turn off the framelimiter on the few games I used vsync for as that would cause stuttering.