Losing Sanity: ALL Games Stutter Below Refresh Rate

Actually the problem IS most likely vsync. I had the exact same problem, and it would only go away if I turned off vsync or lowered the effects until I maintained CONSTANT 60fps. Supposedly NVIDIA has some sort of "adaptive vsync" or something along those lines that takes care of the hitching, but it never did anything for me.

Try disabling vsync and see what happens. On my GTX 280 that fixed it. Eventually I got fed up with hitching and got a new video card. No more hitching on my HD7850
 
check and see if adaptive vsync is on, i know i had a problem with it if a game force used a frame rate cap. also check and see if your drivers are actually putting your monitor at 60hz, the nvidia drivers won't let my main monitor run at anything but 59hz which makes it impossible for me to run vsync otherwise i get the awesome hitching effects in a lot of games. but i'd honestly tie the problem down to drivers more than anything.
 
With such exhaustive attempts to fix this I find it hard to believe you're still getting this problem, I mean you've practically tested enough components to make a whole new PC.

The biggest problem is that what you're describing is frequently misunderstood by people reading, almost everyone means different things by stuttering/hitching/juddering etc, sometimes people say their game is stuttering and they show me what they mean and it's just that vsync is off and the screen is tearing, they have a perfectly smooth frame rate but they describe tearing as stuttering.

Are you able to capture the effect either with fraps or by filming your monitor? Honestly unless others can see the kind of affect you're talking about it's going to be hard to give meaningful help, for all we know what you're seeing is perfectly normal and you're just sensitive to Vsync causing uneven frame delays (below 60fps with vsync on, refreshes duplicate frames which maybe construed as hitching by someone highly sensitive)
 
Have you tried setting "Maximum pre-rendered frames" equal to 1?

I noticed some unevenness of frames during movement in CS:GO the other day. Forced that setting and things are far more consistent now.
 
I switched to Nvidia to get away from ATI driver issues that caused hitching in some games. But this GTX670 has made me even more paranoid and sensitive to it.

I think for step 0, you should abandon framerate as a unit of measure. If you want to dig into this, measure frame times using FRAPS or something similar. See http://techreport.com/review/21516/inside-the-second-a-new-look-at-game-benchmarking

If you can find a game or hardware configuration that feels smooth to you at 55 fps, this might help you see why. It won't help you fix it though.

If you're hypersensitive to it and want to throw money at the problem, I suggest you build a separate PC with alternate brands of hardware. That way you can compare some other variables. Every now and then I entertain this idea. Usually I'm able to ignore the stutter enough to live with it.
 
When I play Diablo 3 it looks like I'm sitting on a paint mixer the entire tine. I'll have 180 fps and it looks like I have 15 fps. It's the only game that I have this problem with.
 
Diablo has weird performance issues, especially after the last patch. Seems related to how busy blizzards actual servers are. I play with a few friends and we'll all randomly drop to like 10 fps at around the same time, but not in the same area. Usually passes after a few seconds.

That being said I've yet to get Diablo to go over 60 fps. Yes I have vsync enabled but I'm using a 120 hz monitor. Even if I disable vsync in game it never goes over 60 fps (and I've raised the max foreground fps to 200).
 
You mentioned that your frame rate goes down to 55 fps but does not feel like 55 fps, and that you've enabled vsync and triple buffering.

On the first miss, your 'frame rate' (effective, at that moment) goes down to 45 fps, not 55 fps. You have a few options:

A) Get used to it
B) Use adaptive sync/swap-tear and take tear lines as an occasional compromise
C) Increase your minimum frame rate, via whatever means are practical
D) Limit your frame rate to something lower than 60 fps. This reduces jitter from frames being swapped unevenly, but the compromise is obviously the reduced frame rate

Setting frames to pre-render to 1 can be useful, but really only when your frame rate is high enough to not ever miss the swap interval in the first place. Otherwise, you probably want to give your GPU the room to breathe by pre-rendering.
 
True, but on your older system you were probably using an older video card or at least older video card drivers. I would say drop back a few revisions on drivers or turn off vsync like others have suggested.
 
What mouse/keyboard are you using? Sometimes strange issues arise with USB items, I've seen people solve stuttering issues by changing the mouse from polling at 1000hz to 125hz fixed the problem.
 
The problem with Vsync is that it creates HUGE un-evenness at any time your framerate spikes lower than 60fps. Why?

Vsync only works with pure divisors of the frequency you are using. In this case, 60hz. This means that with 60hz and vsync on you can only have:
-60fps
-30fps
-20fps
-15fps
-10fps

Meaning: any time your framerate dips below 60... you get 30. Playing at 30 fps is not that bad, actually... the problem is the up and down time, in which you go from a speed to another in no time which causes the game to stutter like mad. Sure, using triple buffering reduces this problem by having different stored frames in the buffer but, still, the issue remains.

And this is actually very hard to solve because... there is no way to do it. If you were playing on a 120hz vsync off you would have a lot less tearing (tearing is based on the de-synchronising of the frames from the monitor buffer... and the faster the monitor buffer updates, the less you will have tearing).. but still have some; well, at least you woulnd't have this crappy stutter.

So, mate, I'm sorry but you have to choose between:

a) Play at 60fps vsync on and deal with it.
b) Option a) + lower video settings so that you rock 60fps at ANY time.
c) Play with 120hz vsync off and deal with tearing.

Ah! You notice the same problem with 120hz vsync off because the same things happens: if you get less than 120fps you jump to 60fps, although the next jump is not as bad as you go to 40fps.

Mmmm, maybe 120hz @ vsync on feels actually better for you than 60 hz @ vsync on... you may try.


----

PS: you should be able to capture everything easily with fraps. But hey, what you have to record ain't video: you have to record the frametimes, and then work with such data on excel to compare them and the like. Its not hard, I can tell you how to do it (its rather easy).
 
can you explain this a bit further.
I would, but I was actually wrong. A 60 Hz display can only refresh every ~16.6ms, so any time you notice any kind of discrepancy in the frame rate, your effective frame rate for that moment is 30 fps: if there are no frames in the flip queue ready to be displayed by the time the display is ready to retrace, you must wait ~16.6ms until the next retrace, which kicks you down to 30 fps.

The key thing to keep in mind here is that you shouldn't rely on frame counters to determine what's happening, as they average frame times of the past few frames to compute a number. Like prava said, you want to look at individual frame times, which you can do with FRAPS. This won't really solve your problem, but it will demonstrate why frame counters and frame rates can be unreliable ways to measure these things.

Ah! You notice the same problem with 120hz vsync off because the same things happens: if you get less than 120fps you jump to 60fps, although the next jump is not as bad as you go to 40fps.
It's the same thing at 120 Hz — the frame rate is halved — but there's also half the jitter as the delta time between refreshes is halved. The effect of missing the a swap should be less noticeable at 120 Hz refresh than it would at 60 Hz refresh.
 
It's the same thing at 120 Hz — the frame rate is halved — but there's also half the jitter as the delta time between refreshes is halved. The effect of missing the a swap should be less noticeable at 120 Hz refresh than it would at 60 Hz refresh.

Sure. The thing is: from 120 to 60fps its a HUGE JUMP, that anybody would notice as a huge stutter. At the end of the day what one feels ain't actually the frame-rate... but the unevenness of it. 30fps is fine as long as you have a frame every 33.3ms (which is something that does never happen, as the load on the computer is not even while playing), but because framerate is uneven you won't most out of it hehe.

My point is that if you have the same FPS not only is 120hz better without vsync, its actually better with vsync because the dips in framerate aren't that bad. Well, you also have less tearing at 120hz... and less jitter when seeing movies at 24fps :D

If you are at +60fps but dip into 50 sometimes, with 120hz you will be sitting at 60fps and go back to 40fps... when you would be going back to 30fps at 60hz.
 
Back
Top