if you had a 144hz monitor but got less than 144 fps would it matter?

[natshill123]

if you had a 144hz monitor but got less than 144 fps would it matter in a game? Also would it be a smoother experience having your fps caped at 144fps and it never dropping below this cap, or having no cap/v-sync on and getting 60-80fps?

 

[WildCard999]

When I had a 144 I tailored it to each game. For example BF4 was set to 144hz, Division was set to 100hz, Witcher 3 & other single player games were set to 75-85hz. The reason I lowered some games and not others as there was no noticeable difference in those single player/less competitive games. Also doing this on the single player games keeps the GPU/CPU a bit cooler as your not pushing them as hard. On all my games I kept vsync on to avoid tearing.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Any frame rates lower or higher than the refresh rate of the monitor CAN cause tearing. There is a very good reason for G-sync and Freesync monitors and other methods of capping frame rates. At only 80fps on a 144hz monitor you will almost certainly have issues.

 

[gasaraki]

Depends on if this was a Freesync/G-Sync monitor or one without any of those. A monitor without either those would still cause tearing unless you can run the game at 144fps just not nearly as bad as a 60Hz display. The 144Hz monitor will give you lower input lag that's for sure.

What Wildcard said is counter productive. v-sync locks frames to the refresh rate of the monitor or half of it or a quarter of it. So if you are not getting 144fps, vsync will drop it to half that. Don't use v-sync on a 144Hz monitor IF it doesn't have Freesync or G-Sync.

 

[WildCard999]

What Wildcard said is wrong btw.

Explain why.


If someone is using a 144hz that doesn't support Freesync/Gsync and the FPS is not stable around 144hz then there going to experience screen tearing/stuttering. Even with a AMD GPU/Freesync you still need to keep the FPS within the Freesync range which is 48-144hz. I explained that if you cannot maintain 144hz in a game then you should adjust the refresh rate appropriately to keep the FPS around the hz set for the game, doing so with vsync will help with screen tearing/stuttering. *Also vsync will only shorten the FPS if you can't maintain the refresh rate you set which is why I said to adjust the refresh rate to what your system can sustain.

 

[xxxlun4icexxx]

What Wildcard said is wrong btw.

Explain why.


If someone is using a 144hz that doesn't support Freesync/Gsync and the FPS is not stable around 144hz then there going to experience screen tearing/stuttering. Even with a AMD GPU/Freesync you still need to keep the FPS within the Freesync range which is 48-144hz. I explained that if you cannot maintain 144hz in a game then you should adjust the refresh rate appropriately to keep the FPS around the hz set for the game, doing so with vsync will help with screen tearing/stuttering.

If you adjust a 144hz monitor to 100hz manually and turn vsync on, will it still cut 144hz in half because it isn't getting 144hz (aka the maximum refresh rate of the monitor)? Or will it perform it's function at 100hz and only if it can't keep up with 100hz then cut that in half?

 

[WildCard999]

Vsync will only cut the FPS if the system can't maintain the refresh rate, so if you set it for 100hz and you can maintain 100 FPS then it will work fine with vsync. If you cannot then the FPS will be cut by vsync. That's why it's important to either adjust the graphic settings or change the refresh rate to match the FPS/hz.

 

[Solandri]

What Wildcard said is counter productive. v-sync locks frames to the refresh rate of the monitor or half of it or a quarter of it. So if you are not getting 144fps, vsync will drop it to half that. Don't use v-sync on a 144Hz monitor IF it doesn't have Freesync or G-Sync.

FPS isn't fixed. It varies depending on the scenery and what's going on the the game (how much the GPU has to render).

Double-buffered V-sync could cut your framerate in half worst-case. But with the copious amounts of VRAM available today, nobody should be doing that anymore. The extra VRAM for triple-bufferred v-sync is less than 8 MB for 1080p, 32 MB for 4k. Triple-buffered v-sync doesn't affect your framerate at all, it will only add a slight lag (max of 1.999... monitor refreshes worst case). All v-sync does is delay displaying a frame until it's completely drawn. Say your GPU can render only 140 FPS but is displaying on a 144 Hz monitor.

• 
  ■Without v-sync you will get 144 "different" frames per second, but parts of those frames are the same as the previous frame. The line where an old frame image switches to a new frame image is a tear. Because of the framerate varying, this tear line appears at more or less random positions. But if your FPS stabilizes at an integer ratio of the monitor refresh rate, the tear line can appear in the same spot each frame (which makes it easily visible). If the FPS is slightly different from an integer multiple of the refresh rate, the tear line will slowly travel up or down (which is also easily visible).
  ■With triple-buffered v-sync the GPU is producing 140 FPS so you only get 140 FPS, and 4 of those frames will be displayed twice to make 144 FPS, thus matching your monitor's refresh rate. There are no tears.

There's another possible issue called jitter (animation may not be as smooth as it could be). Whether v-sync has more or the same jitter as no v-sync depends on which part of the screen you happen to be looking at at that moment. But since the entire frame is affected by jitter in v-sync, while only part of the frame is affected with no v-sync, it can be considered worse with v-sync enabled. That's really the only issue you'll face if your FPS is less than the monitor's refresh rate. (It also happens when FPS > refresh rate, but because it's happening at the refresh rate instead of via duplicate frames, it's less noticeable.)

Freesync and G-sync make the monitor wait until the GPU finishes a frame before it refreshes. Basically they're monitors with a variable refresh rate.