welcome to a special Linus Tech tips episode about adaptive vsync so this is
all about the technology that makes GeForce cards that feature adaptive
vsync pretty much the best thing ever
for LCD users so back when we were all using CRTs and we were lucky to get 30
to 40 FPS in our games and CRTs high end
we're capable of 75 85 H Hertz we didn't worry too much about the frame rate
going over the refresh rate of the monitor so to be clear the frame rate is
how many frames per second or FPS or images per second the video card could
potentially output to a display device in this case you can see our frame rate
is around 150 FPS in Battlefield 3
staring at a wall this is with a 660 Ti
refresh rate is how many images the screen can draw in a second so this is a
pretty fast monitor this is a 120 HZ monitor for 60 HZ monitor users this is
going to be even more of an issue because you're much more likely to have
these out of sync so 120 and 150 what
that means is this video card is feeding this 150 images and this monitor is
displaying only 120 of them so what that
means is while the video card is in the middle of changing from this position
actually here let's do it this way from something being in this position to this
position the monitor might pick up half of this one and half of this one and you
get this disjointedness between where the image is split called tearing so
tearing only occurs when the frame rate goes above the refresh rate this is an
extreme example of tearing this is not an artifact This Is Us looking at
something and seeing the that that
tearing so you can actually also see it in the line here I don't know if you
guys are going to be able to see that very well but you can see it gets quite
distorted and quite crappy so you can see like it breaks up
like this so the way to combat tearing is to turn on vsync or vertical sync
what that does is it locks your frame rate at the refresh rate of your monitor
the problem with vsync is that when you get into an actionpack scenario vsync
has to keep the refresh rate or rather the frame rate at an
even crap I always forget is it Factor
whatever the thing it has to multiply out to the refresh rate of the monitor
so if you run into like a firefight and you would have normally dipped to 110
FPS it'll actually knock you all the way down to 60 and then all the way down to
30 and all the way down to 15 until it reaches one where you can
keep that sustained frame rate so what we're going to do is we're going to show
you how adaptive vsync gives you the
best Best of Both Worlds whenever you're going to be running too high vsync will
automatically turn on and whenever you're going to be running too low or
below that refresh rate vsync will turn off which will allow you to run at 110
or 100 FPS rather than knocking you all the way down to 60 and giving you that
difference so we're going to turn on adaptive vsync and we're going to come back and look at this wall and show you
what a difference it makes to the tearing this that uh that goes
on you can change the in the manage 3D settings of your NVIDIA control panel so
we're going vertical sync instead of using the 3D application setting we're
going to go with adaptive yay adaptive
bsync all right let's fire up our game again and see if this actually works I
don't know if it will no looks like we're going to have to uh we're going to
have to restart our game here slick thought it might work but I thought he was wrong and it looks like I was
right all right so here we go we have adaptive vsync on which means you can
see that we're pinned at 120 FPS
which means that after we chop this thing ha no tearing artifacts see that
that is what it is supposed to look like without all of those lines same thing if
we look back and forth on these pillars we're not going to see that horrible
separation now let's go find ourselves a firefight and let's see what happens to
the frame rate so as soon as we drop below 120 FPS instead of knocking us all
the way down to 60 we should be able to
achieve like you know 119 or 117 or 115
so there you go that is adaptive vsync it means we don't have to deal with bull
crap tearing which looks terrible and is very very distracting because you can
have the most beast machine in the world and it's almost the more Beast of a
machine you buy the more susceptible you are to this horrible visual anomaly and
so we don't have to deal with that and we don't have to deal with dipping all
the way down to 60 FPS which I personally can tell the difference
between UH 60 and 120 whatever you people who think that you can't tell the
difference you guys are just totally wrong and I'm sorry but uh get a better
machine and get get a better Monitor and you will understand um so I don't have
to suffer with 60 or 30 FPS but I don't have to deal with tearing so it's like
like the best thing ever thank you NVIDIA for bringing us adaptive vsync
which you can see continuing to uh to work here as we watch these frame rates
move all over the place and do what they do
going to play me some Battlefield 3 now I actually kind of like this mouse I hadn't tried it before CM Storm
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