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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

"Among other things, the new standard will support the game mode variable refresh rate (GM VRR). Nowadays, AMD already supports FreeSync-over-HDMI using a custom mode and with the HDMI 2.1 everything gets a little easier."

Oh, that'll be nice. Now that almost every interface is using 3D rendering tech under the hood, regardless of how it looks, I've noticed tearing has spread from something only gamers see very much of to something I'm seeing everywhere. Hopefully this helps drive the tech to push this everywhere and tearing will, in perhaps 10 years or so, be a thing of the past.

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Silly thing is that tearing is a non-issue as long as one has vsync enabled. But games often disable vsync to get that "lovely" raw FPS number...

Actually, to reduce input lag. You don't want vsync in multiplayer first person shooters, that's for sure.

I don't disable VSync for FPS. I disable VSync because it reduces input lag.

The input lag can be a serious issue with certain monitors and video cards. It's very noticeable to me when playing and FPS.

Agreed. Overwatch in particular has felt a lot more snappy since disabling it. I'd been out of FPSes for a while, but that game made me acutely aware of it.

You should try vsync with triple buffering and make sure to set:

flip queue size / max pre-rendered frames to 1 (depending on AMD/Nvidia)

Most games I play these days are DirectX 10+, which seems to preclude the use of the pre-rendered frames setting.

v-sync is a workaround, VRR is the solution.

As others have pointed out, there are numerous problems with v-sync — in addition to input lag, f you want to drive (for example) a 100 Hz monitor, the GPU will need to consistently deliver ≥100 FPS, or you'll repeat frames and introduce jitter.

This means you don't need to consistently hit 100 FPS to experience ≫60 FPS refresh rates (without jitter).

The problem with vsync is if the game would be 59 fps on a 60hz monitor, it's going to be presented at 30 fps because it's going to barely miss the vsync every frame. This creates large fps instability when the game runs around the monitor frequency.

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