Consoles and V Sync options...

iv-tecman

iv-tecman

iv-tecman

Soldato
Joined
12 May 2005
Posts
8,384
Currently playing Star Wars Force Unleashed – I wish developers would start to use some triple buffering or at the very least give owners the option to enable v sync.

Been playing a few PS3 games recently, its really starting to get a bit much… Seeing as I’m mostly from a PC background, something as simple as enabling V Sync is taken for granted.

Sure it can affect the games response as it waits to render each frame to the refresh rate, but the visual affect is way more rewarding then seeing a huge line flicker across the screen as a bit of scenery or a facial animation is cut into sections.. Really detracts from the overall immersion of the game being played..

Uncharted 1
Heavy Rain
WipeOut HD fury
Star Wars force unleashed

Well, guess as developers get to grips with the PS3 hardware, they’ll turn v sync off as default and as engines etc get better on the machine they’ll turn it back on again..

Uncharted 2
Batman Arkham
Red Dead Redemption

Are good examples of how a game looks without screen tearing – much better.. At least provide the option, and you know with all the PS3 options, the one that I’d use the most – being able to control the v sync…
 
Just out of curiosity, can you recall the conditions that you get screen tearing in WipEout HD Fury. I cannot recall ever seeing any but you can get the game to slow down noticeably in Metropia Forward Phantom when entering the 180 degree turn at the end of the course.

There were a lot of slowdowns and a few glitches with playing Elimination on some Fury tracks, namely Tech De Ra and Tallon's Junction with lots of ships blowing each other up in close proximity, but never screen tearing.

Just wanted to give it a try and recreate the conditions :)
 
My memory is rubbish with the names of the wipeout HD tracks, but I've noticed it happen with fury move over then wipeout HD. Its mostly when its replaying or when the pre-start fly overs before you start a race, and i've seen it pretty much each time I watch a fly over before each race..

Its not as bad as other games, so bare with me... Star Wars unleashed however, very bad as is uncharted 1. Yet uncharted 2 isn't anywhere near as bad, but I'm lead to understand that uncharted 2 used triple buffering.

I can handle slowdowns, had these since the PS1 days... I guess v sync is the new pop up..!! I remember wipeout on the PS1, and that had amazing pop up, whereas Wipeout HD suffers with 'small' I will say screen tearing... So its maybe me expecting too much...

Classic example of a die hard PC gamer - where you can configure everything to how you like it, and not how a developer thinks it should be... lol
 
I think triple buffering is getting more common on the PS3. I was reading something about it in a Digital Foundry face-off.
 
iv-tecman said:
Currently playing Star Wars Force Unleashed – I wish developers would start to use some triple buffering or at the very least give owners the option to enable v sync.
Click to expand...

Have to get used to it I'm afraid. I'm the same as you, mostly using a PC as my main games platform, but have been hammering some PS3 stuff since I bought one this year.

At the end of the day, vsync effects framerate, so really it's the developers keeping up the percieved fps at the expense of visual quality. Triple buffering would eat up an already limited amount of video memory, which would mean less space for textures etc.
 
FlukeRogi said:
Have to get used to it I'm afraid. I'm the same as you, mostly using a PC as my main games platform, but have been hammering some PS3 stuff since I bought one this year.

At the end of the day, vsync effects framerate, so really it's the developers keeping up the percieved fps at the expense of visual quality. Triple buffering would eat up an already limited amount of video memory, which would mean less space for textures etc.
Click to expand...

PS3 has 256MB of VRAM? Ok that's not a lot to play with, so guess developers will need to up their game and learn to get the best from the machine.. Nah, course they won't...

Not something I'd like to get used to, Heavy Rain and Uncharted 1 & 2 are pretty much PS3 only, so unless I want to reduce the number of games I can play and play PC games only... I guess you're right. This, is the core reason I'm not sold on consoles being the only gaming platform... Its a bit, well, its like this, and you'll damn well put up with it.

Oh well.. *rant mode off* lol I can ignore screen tearing in a VERY good game... Heavy Rain is worth it.
 
VRAM won't affect Vsync. It can be a performance killer in some situations. I use ot most of the time on the PC but on the PS3 I don't think of things like that, i just play the game as it's shown to me. The only time I've moaned about vsync on the PS3 is on Turtles in Time. There's no reason at all why it can't run at 60fps Vsync'd.
 
iv-tecman said:
Oh well.. *rant mode off* lol I can ignore screen tearing in a VERY good game... Heavy Rain is worth it.
Click to expand...

Same here. When you know there's nothing you can do to improve it, you sort of accept it and just get on with playing the game, whereas if it was happening on my PC, I wouldn't put up with it.
 
Consoles are years behind PCs. I only use my PS3 to play exclusives and for media streaming. I use my PSP to play the old PS1 classics and some PSP games and that's it. If you expect real gaming and want customization and features like V-Sync then stick with your PC.
 
I don’t think games consoles are years behind PC, they just aren’t as configurable. Its really weird, if I play a PC game without V Sync the game tears with every turn in a game, its very noticeable..

Was playing Star Wars force unleashed (not a very long game BTW, clocked it last night) and the screen tearing is very random. Sometimes I went through a whole level and never witnessed it once, then the next level it’s a tear festival in certain parts…

I have to admit, once the action gets frantic, you kinda forget and I bet it did tear – I just didn’t notice.

I’m of the opinion that Sony could firmware patch this, it wouldn’t be hard to provide a user option to enable V Sync, then its down to the customer… The PS3 is a fantastic media player and has quite a few options, one more like this would be useful.. After all some developers are just lazy or forget to give the option…

They patched Bioshock to give a V Sync option…
 
Have you guys ever looked at a similar spec pc to the 360? It's scarey, its a low end gaming rig. The thing that dev's are going to do with the engine is make sure it looks pretty from far away. At your PC, you are sat a mere foot or 2 from the screen. A console you are sat several feet, pretty far away. So this gives them a lot to work with, not much AA/AF, textures pop late ect ect. Try running BC2 on a nvidia 8600 GT and get the same look you get out of your xbox... it's tough lol.

ags
 
Not sure about the 360, but I think as has already been mentioned before somewhere on this forum, comparing a PS3 to a PC in terms of hardware is a bit stupid.

The PS3's GPU would equate to a low end GPU in a PC, but the PS3 uses its CPU cores a lot with in regards to its graphics.

Admittedly, a lot of games could look better on PS3...but thats lazy development in my opinion. The rough, pixelated edges of bushes for example in BC2 are not the PS3's fault, since there is no such issue in Uncharted 2 where grass/bushes etc have smooth edges no matter how close you get the camera angle to them.

So I don't think a literal comparison between the hardware really holds much merit. As I say this is in regards to PS3, I'm not sure what goes on inside the 360 so to speak :p
 
The PS3 when developed for and programmed correctly is perfectly capable of producing some top looking titles, you’ve only got to look at Metal Gear Solid 4 or God of War III to see proof of that..

A top end PC costs three – four times that of a PS3. Anyhow, my issue is not the hardware, or the games offered with the PS3. I think PS3 games look, for most part fantastic on a 42” plasma. I merely complained about the lazy slack programming in regards to adding v sync to avoid screen tearing.

God of War III and uncharted 2 managed perfectly fine… This is down to lazy developers, or that ongoing ‘PS3 is too difficult to get to gripes with’ argument.
 
V-sync can sometimes cause a huge drop in frame-rate. It's not as simple to say it reduces peformance by x%. It depends what the maximum, average and minimum frame-rate is. Is some situations, you get a better overall visual effect by leaving vsync off. If you have a game that is, for the most part, running between 30-40 FPS then vsync won't affect this too much. that's probably why there are a lot of console games locked to 30fps. If you had a game that was running at 25-35fps then vsync could make it look quite jerky/slow unless most of the frames were 30fps+. It depends how often if dips below 30. If it ran at 25-29 a lot of the time then vsync is going to kill it. If you had a game that was running between 50-60+ then vysnc could slow it right down and you probably wouldn't use it unless 80% of the frames were 60fps+. 50fps with tearing will probably look better than 30fps locked. Not always but usually. With the PC, people often use vsync because their monitor is 60hz and the frame-rate of the game they are playing is 80fps++. In that situation you have nothing to lose by using vsync. There's not that many PC games these days that people have to settle for less than 60fps.

IMO the worst time to use vsync is on a game that average 60fps. If if spends half its time 55-59 and half its time 60-65 then you wont get that much tearing but if you enable vsync it will just run as 60,30,60,30,60 which looks pretty bad I think and makes for a lower overall visial effect.

We will always have explosions that reduce the FPS to 12 and corriders that bump the FPS to over 100, I'm talking about the typical parts of a game.
 
Last edited:
So, let me get a better understanding… I’m fairly sure my Plasma is a 60hz screen, so when the game tears, its because the game has hit over 60fps?

Or am I totally mis-understanding this? If they locked the fps to 60fps using v sync if the game drops below 60fps, due to v sync it will drop to 30 and not say 55fps? I’m not understanding this..

So a game locked to 30fps on PS3 using v sync could, in theory do 60fps but due to drops they decided to keep it smooth and lock to 30 with v sync enabled, but some developers don’t like this so don’t lock the frames, and when it hits past what your TV can handle, you get tearing?

This mean then that Star Wars force unleashed is hitting past 60fps in some scenes and hence the tearing?

Sorry to ask, but if I’m complaining about something I need to better understand this. Its been reported that Star Wars forced unleashed (its just an example game) tears more in the PS3 then the 360… so, in theory the PS3 is pumping out more fps then the 360, hence more tearing??

So, those with 120hz 3DTV should be seeing no tearing at all unless the game on a PS3 hits past 100fps… highly unlikely..

So to recap, to keep the frame rate up past 30 on average, v sync isn’t enabled, and means if the game does on average 45 – 55 fps, then it won’t drop to 30, but if it goes past 60 then it tears? If you’ve got a 60hz display..?
 
Without Vsync: The GPU renders and sends out frames as fast as it can. The monitor/TV captures 60fps (presuming 60hz). You get tearing because when the monitor captures a frame, the GPU might be between frames (+/-) so you get half of frame 1 and half of frame 2. That's why you get tearing. You get no loss of FPS because the GPU is going as fast as it can.

With Vsync: The GPU renders a frame but then waits untill the the monitor is ready to capture its next frame. The whole frame is then sent from the GPU to the monitor. You get no tearing. The downside of this is that, if the GPU doesn't render the frame in time (E.G 55fps) it then WAITS untill the monitor is ready for the NEXT full frame. It then sends the whole frame. If it continually misses each frame (again, E.G 55fps) then you are almost halving the FPS to 30 becasue it is missing every other frame of 60hz/FPS. You get the same effect at 30fps. If the GPU in rendering 30 fps then it's simply 1 GPU frame to 2 monitor frames. No tearing but a lower FPS. At this point if the GPU drops below 30 then you lose even more FPS because it can't manage the 1:2 ratio (with vsync). Going back to the PC example of a game rendering at 80fps+. In this situation there is no point in NOT enabling vsync because without it you will get tearing and whichever way you look at it, you are are only seeing 60 refreshes a second of the image.
 
Last edited:
iv-tecman said:
Sorry to ask, but if I’m complaining about something I need to better understand this. Its been reported that Star Wars forced unleashed (its just an example game) tears more in the PS3 then the 360… so, in theory the PS3 is pumping out more fps then the 360, hence more tearing??

So, those with 120hz 3DTV should be seeing no tearing at all unless the game on a PS3 hits past 100fps… highly unlikely..
Click to expand...

Yes to all except these 2.

1: It may mean that they could enable triple buffering and vsync on the 360 due to extra VRAM etc, so it's not that clear cut.

2: No, as the consoles only output at 60Hz iirc.
 
Maybe the devs should take a leaf out of Traveller's Tales book and enable the option to switch Vsync on or off like you can with Lego Starwars\Batman etc. Keeps everyone happy:)
 
malachi said:
Maybe the devs should take a leaf out of Traveller's Tales book and enable the option to switch Vsync on or off like you can with Lego Starwars\Batman etc. Keeps everyone happy:)
Click to expand...

Not if it results in much reduced FPS due to the above mentioned reasons.
 
Ok thanks all for the explainations and pros and cons.

Triple buffering is something I've known about, wish it could be more frequently used. Uncharted 2 doesn't suffer for it, looks really good to my eye.

I have seen the option for v sync with the lego games, I enabled it and it certainly didn't affect performance...

Online playing, well you want the best response time you can get, for single playing.. Its all about style and how it looks and gameplay over how quick it moves.. Some slowdown in single player I can handle.. Half the screen shifting across and seeing the next frame before the last one has gone - well I really don't like seeing it..

Its PC gaming thats done this.. Those super high powered gaming rigs means you take something like v sync for granted.. lol
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom