Do you use Nvidia's Driver Limiter or RTSS to limit your framerate? Any pros and cons to either?

I don't run any monitoring software and/or OSD to go with it. Just the limiter and that's it.

 

No One Lives Forever 2 and KISS Pshyco Circus, then again both use the Lithtech engine.

 

TheDeeGee: The closest thing I have is FEAR (Jupiter EX engine derived from LithTech) but that is dx9 and runs flawless with RTSS limiter. Don't have NOLF2 so I downloaded the demo, created RTSS profile for Lithtech.exe, set limit to 60, started new game, played about 20min and it was smooth sailing the entire time - flat frametime chart and no stutters. Tried also with 90, 120 and 142 FPS limit and again no problems. Then I tried crosire dx9 wrapper and again no problems. So not sure what did you encounter, but I bet it wasn't RTSS fault.

 

Might be my hardware combination, surely ain't my OS cuz it's only a couple of months old fresh install.

It was fine in other games like Black & White, Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed and Dungeon Keeper 2.

Anyways doesn't matter, i don't need RTSS. The games above feel exactly the same without it.

 

You do know that you can set an fps limiter and an OSD per game, right? I never use the Global setting from RTSS because it doesn't make sense, that way you have profiles for different games, if it gives me problems with a particular game, then I try something else, there was no need for you to entirely nuke it, you just killed a extremely useful tool for some weird worries with some old games, like RTSS doesn't even force you to be used on every single app, there is a reason why the Global profile can be disabled and why it has an "add" option so you can use .exe per app, but eh, if you are "better" off with it, each to their own.

 

I always used profiles per game, some games preferred 61 like UT99.

But if an app becomes troublesome and i can do without, i'd rather get rid of it entirely.

 

Don't worry
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RTSS is usefull when You have FreeSync/g-Sync monitor -> Flat line is what i like.

 

Which OSD?

I don't use Afterburner, HWInfo or HWMonitor or any of that. And in RTSS OSD is disabled.

Anyways, i'll leave it at this. I seem to be the only one with this problem, and it's already fixed.

 

Flat line is not a guarantee for no stutter.

It still is very likely caused by something else and RTSS limiter just makes it visible.

 

If you were capping to exactly 60 with Vsync enabled on a traditional 60 panel it very well could be your limit was too low which caused the stutters.

For example, a laptop of mine was getting the same issue and what it ended being was that the monitors “true refresh” was actually slightly above 60 (60.1 basically).

Changing my limit to 60.2 with RTSS instead of 60 exactly totally resolved the issue and I still got an input lag reduction over not capping at all.

You definitely need to check your monitors “true refresh” with sites online if you haven’t already. Cap too low and the Vsync back buffer isn’t always filled in time and you’ll get stutters.

Alternatively, some games just don’t like being limited externally for whatever reason so you might be right that those games just don’t it.

 

Yeah I noticed this as well — perfect flat line with no drops registered yet you still get clearly imperfect frame pacing/frametimes in some games (or maybe its related to how the games handle camera animation -- though it depends of course — this is with Gsync + Vsync ON). Some games get weird camera jitter it seems like when limited externally in my experience (though some games get smoothed out a ton).

EDIT: Correction, I should've said you can have bad "camera/animation jitter" not bad frametimes/framepacing despite a flat graph. The read out from RTSS is accurate going off Unwinder's comments, but that does not guarantee that other issues aren't causing the jerky motion (etc). Apologies

 

Yup, this is what I feel too on a 60hz screen with VSYNC disabled in some games. Frametime line is perfectly smooth, FPS is rock solid 60 and yet the game has clear intermittent jitter/stutter on things like camera movement. Fixes depend the on game, in some games it's fixed by capping FPS to the "true" refresh rate like you said, in other games going a 1 FPS above or below refresh rate works but the universal fix is just to enable VSYNC.
This kind of "no-vsync" stutter happens to me regardless of the frame limiter use - RTSS, NVCPL or in-game. Maybe it has to do something with the Windows' fullscreen optimizations and whatever, I don't really have enough knowledge to troubleshoot such things so most of the time I just leave VSYNC on if it's not a competitive game and have RTSS capped to the true refresh rate because NVCPL doesn't accept decimals.

 

Apologies, I should not have referred to it as frametimes/pacing there like I did. I should've called it "camera jitter" or "animation jitter" or something in that vein rather than connecting it to the reported frametimes. Thank you for further explaining what you have here, that's helpful to know.

My intent was really just to communicate that a flat frametime graph does not equate to "smooth" motion/animation/camera movement (etc). I was not intending to suggest RTSS was misreporting or some such so that's my bad.

 

I did a bit of research on this a while ago and lots of completely subjective testing, and here's my general advice.

For a fixed refresh rate monitor, follow the steps in post #11 of this thread.

For a G-sync monitor:
G-sync ON
V-sync OFF (in game settings and in NVCP)
Limit frame rate to a few frames below monitor's max refresh (e.g. I use 117fps limit on 120Hz display)
Prefer in-game limiter if available and implemented properly
Otherwise use RTSS
(if you monitor has a built in FPS counter* check that this matches the fps reported by RTSS overlay)

This has never failed me on any of the games I play, however for maximum smoothness in some games I had to disable the 'full screen optimizations' and run the game in true exclusive fullscreen.

*If you have an LG CX like me you can access an fps counter by hitting the green button on the remote several times.

 

You should try Front edge Sync in the limiter mode.It is more consistent than both Async and Back edge option.

 

Do you know why that is? I've read over the notes present that describe the differences in RTSS, but frankly it's over my head. It "sounds like" (I could be wrong mind you) the default is best for input lag while other modes are better for, what exactly, smoothness? I fully admit I don't know on this point, but I would like to. I may test out the front edge sync then as you describe just to tinker around a bit. Thanks,

 

The reason why I personally do not opt to use G-Sync ON with V-Sync OFF is because you still get occasional tearing often times that way even when within the g-sync window.