Refresh rate vs fps

[StevenClough346]

While I understand that if you want utilise a higher fps, you need a monitor with equivalent refresh rate.

But let's say I'm playing a game with a max fps of 60 but I have a monitor that can do 144hz refresh.

Would that have adverse or beneficial effect on the game smooth visual flow?

 

[TonyCarter]

That’s why you need a monitor with variable refresh rate, so the monitor can match the FPS that the PC is outputting.

Otherwise you might see flickering as the monitor is expecting another frame that doesn’t come in time.

However, if you can lock your game AND monitor to the same FPS (60 in this case) then there shouldn’t by an issue, but there’s more to smooth gameplay than just FPS & monitor frequency (e.g. input latency, texture loading/pop-in, etc.).

 

[Scott]

Prior to variable refresh tearing could be a mess. The biggest issue would be if the system wasn't powerful enough to fully utilise the monitor. A way to combat this was to lock the frequency of the monitor to what the system could output and then live with the odd stutter.

Nowaday, VRR monitors will continuously refresh at the rate of the frames received from the GPU. I'm not entirely sure how this works, I'm guessing there's some sort of signal to tell the monitor what's coming its way, but it works a treat.

Old school you can think of refresh rate as a constant. Whatever the monitor could do or was set at..... that's what you would get continuously. You would get issues when the GPU would be out of sync with that rate. The good thing is it would sort itself out quite quickly so you would typically only see a frame or 2 of tearing before it got the sync back. This wouldn't be the case when there was a real struggle from the GPU though, so Vsync was very important to get right for fast paced games.

VRR has been a god send IMO.