So you get 96 FPS. But your monitor can only show you 60 FPS. So at least 36 of those 96 frames never display. Wasted power.
Now, we get into a technical discussion that I will try to make understandable. Since so many of the frames that your video card is rendering is never displayed, there is actually movement in-game that never makes it to your screen. So at best, only 2 out of 3 or 4 frames are being displayed, and that is causing what I will call very high speed jitters. You may not see it, but a huge number of players will see it.
60 frames per second allows for each frame to take 16.66 ms to draw out. So for a perfectly smooth flow of motion, you want one frame every 16.66 ms to be displayed on the screen. And 2 frames to be shown every 33.33 ms, and so on. Unfortunately though, almost none of us live in a perfect world.
On the other hand, 96 frames per second only allows for 10.42 ms per frame. Frame 1 is completed and sent to the monitor at the 10.42 second point. Then, at the 20.84 ms point, well before your monitor is ready for the next frame, your video card has another frame ready. So the video card does one of two things.
1) If vertical sync is on, the second frame is trashed, and the video card starts rendering the third frame. This third frame will be completed at roughly the 31.25 ms point. Remember that the monitor wants the next frame at the 33.33 ms point. So this is also before the monitor is ready for another frame, so this frame is also trashed. So finally, at the 41.48 ms time point, frame 4 is done, and at this point, the monitor has been sitting idle for 8.35 ms. So you saw frame 1, and now are going to see frame 4. and so on.
2) If vertical sync is off, the second frame is sent to the monitor, which is still in the process of displaying the first frame, and so from that point forward, the monitor stops displaying the first frame and starts showing the second frame, which causes whats known as tearing on the screen. Now if in-game, nothing is moving, you will not see tearing. But if things are moving, part of frame one is being shown with part of frame 2 being show on part of the screen as well. And it will be very obvious to most people where the tearing is. And then part of frame 3 is shown along with parts of frame 1 and frame 2... And then frame 4 hits... and its just a vicious cycle. Tons of tearing all on the screen at once.
There are a few exceptions to this. There are 120 Hz and 144 Hz monitors out there. Generally, they are more expensive than the 60Hz monitors that most of us have. But, those faster monitors also need at least double the frames rendered and sent to them than than the 60 Hz monitors need. So when you see how much trouble most people have maintaining 60 FPS just imagine trying to maintain 120 FPS or even 144 FPS. The numbers of pixels being pushed is incredible.
This all happens because the monitor and the video card are assuming 60 Hz and nothing but 60 Hz. When you drop below 60 Hz, if you've dropped to an even portion of 60Hz (say 30Hz), things can appear to still be smooth, and sometimes, some games still look ok to some people at frame rates between 30 and 60.
Both Nvidia and AMD have released technology that is finally allowing monitors to tell video cards that they are ready for a new frame. But Nvidia and AMD have each done this in different ways. Nvidia's G-Sync and AMD's FreeSync both have some monitors shipping now that have these technologies in them. But they are new to the market still. And they are not compatible with each other. So this is an improvement, but its still not ideal.
So until this all plays out, most of us will still be trying to get to 60 FPS or as close to it as we can. But do not fixate on that number. I would bet that most of us will not get 60 FPS in GTA V. And even if we can in some parts of the game, we will find that we don't get it consistently. That is just the nature of games. There is a lot more going on in some frames than in others. And all those pixels add up very quickly.
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