How to get a smoother Video Performance on your Monitor

[RoboCop]

Now just to avoid any confusion, what do I mean by smoother Video Performance? Well what I mean is how to reduce the screen tearing and display lags – as well on having a good FPS on your monitor for gaming. Now most of you are aware of G-Sync and how they produce less lag than FreeSync and the traditional V-Sync. But what do they really do, you may ask? Well their main purpose is to reduce the screen tearing which can be unsettling and not appealing for playing live multiplayer gaming. If you want to learn more what Screen Tearing is, you can find that out below:

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_tearing

But the question is, what Video Settings should we set for and which is best: Fast Sync, G-Sync, FreeSync or V-Sync? Well first of all you want to avoid using V-Sync along with Double Buffering as that produces more display lag than the others. G-Sync and FreeSync is effective, but those settings are only compatible with newer monitors that support those Video Settings; as well the GFX cards are have the ability to use those options. And Fast Sync? Well it does say it supports any monitor (or does it?), but again you need a newer nVidia GFX card as it requires Pascal and Maxwell GPU chipsets. If you want to learn and compare those Sync Video Settings to eliminate Screen Tearing but have less Display Lag, you can find out from Battle(Non)Sense video below:



Now for this I’m going to discuss FPS and Refresh Rates – bare in mind FPS and Refresh Rates are NOT the same meaning. In case you don’t know that using HDMI 1.4 cables on your latest monitors and GFX cards WON’T give you a good Refresh Rate of 60Hz at 4K Resolution. Besides it is also important to know what Video Cable and Port you are using for your game, as that can also effect the Video Performance. Back before the early 2000s, CRT Monitors may not have those high Refresh Rates and definitely not have 4K Resolution but they have a superb Native Display Lag around 1 nanosecond! Although most CRT Monitors aren’t Widescreen and tend not to have a HDMI port. And saddly all Modern Monitors today doesn’t have that super Native Display Lag around 1nm – which can be a problem for LightGun Games, as well trying to play games like Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution as their Display Lags makes the gameplay unfair as they depend on gamers to hit the buttons or dance mats at the exact time the screen plays the corresponding key or button. And if you got one of those old school CRT Monitors something like this

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https://www.cnet.com/products/ibm-p260-crt-monitor-21-series/specs/

and you realised from their Technical Specs that they support upto 1920x1440 @ 75Hz, which is good even though it is NOT a widescreen monitor. But again as I said that not all CRT Monitors have HDMI ports, well this IBM P260 only comes with VGA and DVI-I ports. Now this is the tricky part: does your latest GFX card still have those VGA and DVI ports? Well you may want to ditch using VGA as they aren’t as superior to DVI, but the problem is with DVI is looking at their pins and port patterns. Because you need to recognise and be aware what type of DVI you need in order to plug and play. There are few various types of DVI: DVI-A, DVI-I, DVI-D – both can be Single Link or Dual Linked. If you like to find out more on DVI then you can find out below:

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Visual_Interface

Now going back to FPS and Refresh Rates, well it depends which server you want to join and its server tickrates. Well nowadays most servers like BattleField 1 and Call of Duty WW2 as well as Team Fortress 2 run at a Tickrate around 60Hz. This means that the server and client can send packet data as well relay display visual at 60 cycles for second. But hold on, can your monitor and GFX card cope with 60Hz for both the Tickrate and the Graphics Quality? Well for those latest games like BF1 and CoD WW2 and you got a GFX card below a power of a nVidia 750 Ti, then your are likely to get a FPS drop and can effect your gameplay performance. With a GFX card like that, you would best have the Video options at a low quality preset, as those games are power hungry for powerful GFX Cards. Because it is important to ensure your GFX can cope with the display buffering as well using its GPU powerful to give you the optimal visual, but the nVidia 750 Ti doesn’t support G-Sync nor Fast Sync, so therefore Screen Tearing is hard to be eliminated and using V-Sync will create more Display Lag. In BF1 as well as BF4 you will notice some icons like those Orange “!” icons. Those are useful icons called Gameplay Performance Warning icons or whatever you may want to call them. The reason why they are useful is to indicate what type of performance issue you are encountering. When it comes to playing BF1 on a less powerful GFX card then you will likely see those icons like this:



Fortunately for CS:GO as it doesn’t use as much GFX power as BF1 and CoD WW2, but they also have CSGO Servers at a maximum Tickrate of 128Hz. Now if you want to ensure your CSGO Client is working in Tickrate 128Hz mode you can Right-Click on the CSGO Icon in Steam Library, then click on [Proprieties] and finally click [Set Launch Options]. And type in the textbox “-tickrate 128” But you also need to check and test if your CSGO works in Tickrate 128 mode, plus you will need to adjust your client NetRate as well. In order to do this you need to load CSGO and enable Console, and type net_graph 1 so you can monitor your performance and notice any Packet Loss or Net Chokes. Also your client won’t perform properly in Tickrate 128 until you have adjusted your cl_cmdrate and cl_updaterate at 128. Simply type “cl_cmdrate 128” and “cl_updaterate 128” in order to test and try out how well your PC can perform in CSGO 128 Tickrate servers. However they are other ways and things you need to be aware off like fps_max as well as cl_interp which are FPS Limiters and Network Interpolation which could sort out your gameplay performance also. And if you want to learn more about that you can find out from this video here:



Well that wraps this up for this guide, hope this helps and thanks for reading!

[Fallins]

I think I'm going to have to read this a couple of more times to really wrap my head around everything in this guide. Seems like a great guide for sure. Cheers, RoboCop.