Capping in game FPS?

[Zeebedy]

Hey guys,

just been wondering, if in-game I can cap my FPS to my Hz im running on my monitor (120Hz), as im assuming weather the FPS was at 120 or 320 there would be an un-noticable difference??

Reason being, I noticed when capped in BFV my GPU runs a bit cooler as its not pumping out 200+ FPS..just plodding along at 120 FPS?

Hope this makes sense??


Cheers.

 

[robfosters]

Imo, it’s not worth pumping out more frames than your monitor can display per second. If it keeps your card cooler, it’s a bonus as it could extend the cards lifespan.

I don’t cap because I’ve got a 160hz g sync monitor and the games I play can’t reach 160hz at my res, but if I had a 60Hz monitor, I’d probably cap it if I could.

 

[Zeebedy]

Imo, it’s not worth pumping out more frames than your monitor can display per second. If it keeps your card cooler, it’s a bonus as it could extend the cards lifespan.

I don’t cap because I’ve got a 160hz g sync monitor and the games I play can’t reach 160hz at my res, but if I had a 60Hz monitor, I’d probably cap it if I could.

Cheers Rob, I think I will cap at 120 FPS (when it can run then lol!), reason m running at 120Hz instead of the capacity 144Hz, is that my second monitor is weird, I cant run both at 144Hz without the step up usage (which bothered me) on MSI AB, so when both are running at 120Hz, they seem "in-sync" and work better.

And tbh, I cant really tell much of a difference with the 24Hz between them.

 

[Zefan]

There are certain games which actually run badly when hitting 100% on the hardware, look in to that in case each respective game may benefit from being banged down to 99%.

Overall though, no, I disagree with the idea that there's no reason not to cap. It's better to see information as soon as possible, which is what higher fps gives you via partial frames. Even if you don't notice a difference visually, it'll enhance your feel of connection to the game if using a kb/m.

Give it a try, if you notice no difference then you have your answer, but don't just assume your screen can't show more fps than its refresh rate because that isn't true (sync technology aside!).

 

[Zeebedy]

There are certain games which actually run badly when hitting 100% on the hardware, look in to that in case each respective game may benefit from being banged down to 99%.

Overall though, no, I disagree with the idea that there's no reason. It's better to see information as soon as possible, which is what higher fps gives you via partial frames. Even if you don't notice a difference visually, it'll enhance your feel of connection to the game if using a kb/m.

Give it a try, if you notice no difference then you have your answer, but don't just assume your screen can't show more fps than its refresh rate because that isn't true (sync technology aside!).

hmmm, food for thought there, will investigate this futher I think, see how I get on.

 

[Zefan]

There's quite a lot of discussion on the Internet about it (I even recall few threads have popped up in here in recent years) however I believe this video does good job of demonstrating the "more information, sooner" effect:

https://youtu.be/OX31kZbAXsA

:edit: oh that's long than I remember. They might touch on it at other times but they definitely show/talk about 300fps @ 60hz at 19m25s onwards.

:edit2: hmm they don't go in to it as much as I thought they did. I must be mixing two videos together.

 

[KeanuIsLife]

I always cap to 120fps too so my gpu isn't at 100% all the time. Seems like to there might still be a difference in responsiveness though, but i assume the difference above 120 would be quite small compared to something like 30-60fps.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Hey guys,

just been wondering, if in-game I can cap my FPS to my Hz im running on my monitor (120Hz), as im assuming weather the FPS was at 120 or 320 there would be an un-noticable difference??

Reason being, I noticed when capped in BFV my GPU runs a bit cooler as its not pumping out 200+ FPS..just plodding along at 120 FPS?

The easy part to answer is the part regarding performance and GPU utilization. If your card is capable of 200fps and you cap at 120fps then the card will not need to run at maximum GPU utilization and therefore will draw less power, run cooler and run more silent.

The harder part to answer, is if capping FPS to refresh rate is unoticeable or not. It seems intuitive to say no it wouldn't be noticeable, you have 200 frames generated per second but only 120 refreshes can be displayed per second. But that's not quite how it works. The reason is because monitors do not update the entire screen instantly. They draw each new refresh in horizontal lines moving down the screen from top to bottom. And if the frame buffer is swapped during this process to introduce a new frame then you get what is called a "tear line" which where the old frame ends on some row of pixels and the new one begins. And so 1 full refresh of the screen can be potentially many frames stitched together.

Now you can argue that this is still just 1 frame, sure. But the patchwork of frames is a temporal thing, the rows of pixels closer to the top of the screen are older, the ones near the bottom are newer, they're from a more recent frame. My subjective experience of this is smoother and more responsive gameplay, especially when playing fast paced first person shooters where there's a lot of fast turning. However I will add a caveat, that there's diminishing returns on frame rate. I have a 60hz monitor and so running at say 100fps feels smoother to me. But on my 120hz monitor running at say 200fps doesn't really feel much smoother.

The TL;DR advice would be that a 120fps cap on a 120hz monitor isn't going to diminish your subjective feel for the gameplay by an appreciable amount. But the same probably can't be said for lower refresh rate monitors. I would also say that if you're going to cap, don't just cap but enable vsync so the frames are synced up with the refresh rate and that eliminates tearing. Vsync introduces some latency but it's a very small amount at 120hz

 

[KeanuIsLife]

The easy part to answer is the part regarding performance and GPU utilization. If your card is capable of 200fps and you cap at 120fps then the card will not need to run at maximum GPU utilization and therefore will draw less power, run cooler and run more silent.

The harder part to answer, is if capping FPS to refresh rate is unoticeable or not. It seems intuitive to say no it wouldn't be noticeable, you have 200 frames generated per second but only 120 refreshes can be displayed per second. But that's not quite how it works. The reason is because monitors do not update the entire screen instantly. They draw each new refresh in horizontal lines moving down the screen from top to bottom. And if the frame buffer is swapped during this process to introduce a new frame then you get what is called a "tear line" which where the old frame ends on some row of pixels and the new one begins. And so 1 full refresh of the screen can be potentially many frames stitched together.

Now you can argue that this is still just 1 frame, sure. But the patchwork of frames is a temporal thing, the rows of pixels closer to the top of the screen are older, the ones near the bottom are newer, they're from a more recent frame. My subjective experience of this is smoother and more responsive gameplay, especially when playing fast paced first person shooters where there's a lot of fast turning. However I will add a caveat, that there's diminishing returns on frame rate. I have a 60hz monitor and so running at say 100fps feels smoother to me. But on my 120hz monitor running at say 200fps doesn't really feel much smoother.

The TL;DR advice would be that a 120fps cap on a 120hz monitor isn't going to diminish your subjective feel for the gameplay by an appreciable amount. But the same probably can't be said for lower refresh rate monitors. I would also say that if you're going to cap, don't just cap but enable vsync so the frames are synced up with the refresh rate and that eliminates tearing. Vsync introduces some latency but it's a very small amount at 120hz

Very interesting stuff, hadn't considered a lot of these points so good stuff here!

 

[J.D]

If you have a g/sync monitor, cap at 117 instead of 120 as then you will have continuous gsync with very little input lag. I have always noticed it immediately and it really slows down my responses with Vsync. I even hated to use it in single player games so until Gsync I would never use Vsync.

https://youtu.be/OAFuiBTFo5E?t=307

I'd recommend to watch the whole video as he will explain it better and in much more detail.

 

[HangTime]

Generally best option seems to be cap slightly below refresh rate with Gsync/Freesync enabled, then you should get smoothness without wasting a lot of GPU power.

That said, for competitive FPS games you might get better results running very high framerates no sync and a framerate cap much higher than refresh rate (if you can sustain it).

 

[Stu]

I'm sure I saw on a HUB video recently saying that higher frame rates results in lower latency, which is obviously good... I guess it is the partial frames mentioned by @Zefan

https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/campaigns/frames-win-games/overwatch/

This should give some useful info.

 

[RipGroove]

I've tried a few ways to cap FPS in the past (in game limiters, V-Sync, RTSS, NVCP etc) yet it never just feels right, something always seems off and I always revert back to uncapped almost right away.

Currently playing a lot of BFV and depending on the map I'm getting 150-200fps on a 100Hz G-Sync monitor (200 being the hard limit that the game can handle) and no amount of tinkering will get it running as smooth as just letting the GPU spit out FPS like mad. Sure the GPU usage goes right down and it runs cooler when capped but that's about it.

 

[Disco_P]

Unless there are bugs (nier automata, spyro, gta v, skyrim all have varying problems) I always leave it uncapped as I much prefer the smoothness over the power saving. I do notice a huge difference in responsiveness between 300fps and 150fps. I also find myself playing much better with massive framerates as everything feels much faster, quickly checking a corner feels like far less effort, peeking a hallway etc.

 

[RipGroove]

Unless there are bugs (nier automata, spyro, gta v, skyrim all have varying problems) I always leave it uncapped as I much prefer the smoothness over the power saving. I do notice a huge difference in responsiveness between 300fps and 150fps. I also find myself playing much better with massive framerates as everything feels much faster, quickly checking a corner feels like far less effort, peeking a hallway etc.

Same, I can't really describe why higher FPS feels better, but it just does IMO

 

[kylew_is_back]

Always cap your fps below the average fps, this way will give you constant fps the majority of the time hence the game will feel smoother, also GPU will make less noise and will be cooler (as a result will boost slightly higher in these rare moments that the fps drops below your fps cap.

 

[RipGroove]

Always cap your fps below the average fps, this way will give you constant fps the majority of the time hence the game will feel smoother, also GPU will make less noise and will be cooler (as a result will boost slightly higher in these rare moments that the fps drops below your fps cap.

I've tried all sorts of figures below my refresh rate and nothing feels as smooth as totally uncapped IMO.

 

[otester]

Download EVGA Precision X1 and power limit it.

Some games also have fps cap options.

 

[robin66]

I cap at 120 fps to save on power and heat in my system. I don't really notice any difference between 120 fps and 165 fps.

Using Radeon Chill, the frames drop down to 80 fps when there is no movement on the screen. Which helps even more.

Everyone is different of course, but this setup suits me very well, I find.

 

[KeanuIsLife]

Always cap your fps below the average fps, this way will give you constant fps the majority of the time hence the game will feel smoother, also GPU will make less noise and will be cooler (as a result will boost slightly higher in these rare moments that the fps drops below your fps cap.

This is a good idea and might be something I start doing!