Question what happens when frames drop below your refresh rate?

[Carl Mwaamba]

i know that when v-sync is enabled, you get stuttering if your fps drops below the monitor's refresh rate do to trying to fill in missing frames with current ones however what happens when there is no form of frame synchronisation technology enabled. so for example you are playing a game at 80 fps on a 60 hz monitor and for a second or two your frames drop all the way down to 30. you don't have v-sync on, you don't have g-sync or freesync, and you don't have a frame limiter on your game. its pure 80 fps which drops to 50 with no interference. i assume that the most noticeable part will be the drop on smoothness but i'm not so sure about any types of artefacts or stuttering and what not.

 

[Isokolon]

when your frames drop below 60 on a 60Hz screen you get the current frame shown twice. the further and longer you drop, the more visible this gets and appears as lag/stutter

 

[cherry blossoms]

Vsync waits for the card to to indicate it has a new frame ready to draw and syncs with that, other wise the previous frame gets held and displayed..

With no sync, whatever is in the framebuffer will get drawn regardless of the state. As the framebuffer can be written to (ram) much faster than the screen can draw, this is why you see tearing as the buffer is being written to with the completed frame faster than the screen is drawing. Until the framebuffer is updated you'll see whatever is there.

 

[Aeacus]

It depends on how low the FPS drops and what you're looking at since in slow or static scenes, you rarely will see any difference beyond 30 FPS. In slow-paced games (e.g Hearthstone), 60 FPS is fine. If you play all kinds of games, including FPS, 144 FPS will benefit you a lot. And if you are a hardcore FPS gamer, the more FPS you have, the better, 240 FPS and beyond will be just perfect.

E.g i have 144Hz monitor and when i play my games (mostly slow-paced), i can't tell the FPS drop from 144 FPS down to 80 FPS. However, if i'd have 60 Hz monitor (which i also have) and my FPS would drop from 60 FPS down to 20 FPS, i'd clearly see the choppiness of the game.

 

[TJ Hooker]

you don't have v-sync on, you don't have g-sync or freesync, and you don't have a frame limiter on your game. its pure 80 fps which drops to 50 with no interference. i assume that the most noticeable part will be the drop on smoothness but i'm not so sure about any types of artefacts or stuttering and what not.

You are correct, nothing special happens in that scenario other than being a little less smooth due to lower framerate.