To Vsync or not to Vsync

[memlapse]

I recently upgraded my gaming box with the latest and greatest, specifically two 7970s, crossfire with the latest Intel i7 that supports PCIe 3. I'll spare you the rest and suffice to say it's a monster box.

 

I have spent the last two weeks tweaking. I've tried just about every possible combination to get the best out of my box. I'm running a butt-load of mods (90 was last count) with a lot of hi-rez texture packs. I've finally settled on what I think is the best all around config for Skyrim, but for one setting...VSYNC!

 

What I have done is set my AA and AF to 2/4, and I use FXAA post processing to clean things up (FXAA Tool) by tweaking the FXAA settings, enabling pre-sharpening and post-sharpening, then I bump the color a smidge. I have tweaked the "High" shadow settings in the ini to provide a better balance of performance and reduce those God-awful blocky effects. All of this adds up to a gorgeous game with fabulous performance. Where I run into issues is with finding the trade-off between using vsync, disabling vsync and letting it run wide open or use an FPS limiter, which is a different way of capping FPS to rates lower than your monitor's.

 

What I experience with vsync on, triple buttering and super sample AA is 60fps, minimal screen tearing (tolerable, anyway), no surges and very rare artifacts. I do, however, experience more freezes and lockup ups (and even one BSD, which I think was overclocking related).

 

No vsync and no FPS limiter, I get the occasional surge, very fast gameplay with little to no input latency, moderate screen tearing and framerates that out of this world (upwards of 120). I get more CTDs.

 

No vsync with an FPS limiter set between 50-55FPS, I get pretty smooth and consistent gameplay, with moderate to low tearing and ripples, but frequent bottleneck crashes (can tell by how the video behaves when it's a bottleneck).

 

No vsync with FPS limiter set between 60-70, I get very smooth and fast gameplay, with very noticeable tearing and ripples, but no bottleneck crashes. I get CPU bombs.

 

I may just have to bite the bullet and buy a 120Hz monitor. This doesn't remove the vsync questions, it just improves the odds of finding the right answers.

[RitualBlack]

Skyrim without v. sync seems to act odd. On my laptop I if I remove the v.sync limiter it sits around 60-70fps ultra but I get improper quest timers and really bugged props. I don't turn off v.sync for those reasons, but I also don't get the lock ups.

 

My laptop used to lock up fairly frequently but that was completely to do with the really shoddy dell drivers it came with. Probably because the 7970's are brand new the driver support isn't quite there yet and it will just be a matter of waiting. With the exception of Skyrim's initial release I was unable to play the game until the 12.1 preview driver came out which was pretty much two months after I purchased the game. I would wait until there are new drivers released before going out to purchase a new monitor.

 

I believe with Skyrim the crossfire tearing always happens and at times it really bugs me but I can live with it. Mainly for me I get water ripple flickering.

[Rennn]

Wait, you run AF at 4x and AA at 2x? I run it AF at 16x and AA at 4x on my GTX 460. With 2 7970s you should be able to put AA at like 8x and AF for sure at 16 without even a framerate drop.

 

Those crashes might be from power problems. The 7970 is a very hungry card, and if 2 of them are OC'd, the power consumption must be excessive, to say the least. What's your PSU? It must be pretty good or it wouldn't even support the necessary connectors.

 

If you had Nvidia I'd recommend you set vsync and cap your framerate to 58, since a cap of 58 fps would probably eliminate input lag with a refresh of 60Hz. I don't know if AMD has an alternative, but if it does, try capping at 58 with vsync turned on.