[SOLVED] If you lower your monitor's refresh rate does it mean that your FPS is capped to that refresh rate?

Iver Hicarte

Distinguished
May 7, 2016
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Greetings,

As I have said in the title, does a lower refresh rate also cap your FPS to that refresh rate? I'm having a problem with my GPU recently, I get flickers when I set the refresh rate of my monitor to 144hz, but when I lower it to 120hz, I don't get it frequently. Got curious if my FPS will also be lowered in games that can easily hit 144 FPS and above.
 
Solution
if you have enabled FPS synchronisation with your monitor refresh rate to avoid screen tearing, then yes, FPS will be limited to monitor refresh rate

FoxInFlames

Prominent
Jan 3, 2022
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I'll take a small example here
Suppose I have a GPU which can produce 110fps on some game, and my monitor has 120hz of refresh rate, so I'll get the output of all the frames by GPU is providing me.

Now suppose I set my monitor to 90 Hz but any display syncing features such as g-sync, freesync of vsync is turned off, my GPU will still make 110frames but I'll be able to see only 90 of them (due to the monitor's limited refresh rate), this might induce screen tearing and stuff.

Now if I have turned on any of the syncing features listed above (or set a refresh rate from the program/game settings itself), my GPU won't produce more than 90 frames (because i restricted it from going beyond my monitor refresh rate) and it'll ease the load on the CPU + GPU

I hope you understand what im trying to say.