SSAO & VSYNC what does it actually do?

[White Owl]

Your PC is very similar to mine, and I see you've settled on almost exactly the same graphics settings. Cool.

Yes, turning vertical sync on should solve the tearing. Tearing happens when your system is trying to produce more than 60 frames/second on a 60hz monitor. A couple times I experienced a bug where my framerate was capped at 30... but simply restarting everything fixed that.

I'm curious about your selection of 4x anti-aliasing. Does this option actually reduce any of the jaggy lines for you? My anti-aliasing has never worked at all, but I've read some other people report it works for them... They were all using very different systems, though.

For whatever it's worth, I think SSAO does make the eye candy a little bit prettier. I can leave it on and still get playable framerates most of the time. If I know I'll be over London with lots of aircraft I'll turn that one off, shadows off, and maybe turn a couple other settings down.

[Oldschool61]

Originally Posted by White Owl

Your PC is very similar to mine, and I see you've settled on almost exactly the same graphics settings. Cool.

Yes, turning vertical sync on should solve the tearing. Tearing happens when your system is trying to produce more than 60 frames/second on a 60hz monitor. A couple times I experienced a bug where my framerate was capped at 30... but simply restarting everything fixed that.

I'm curious about your selection of 4x anti-aliasing. Does this option actually reduce any of the jaggy lines for you? My anti-aliasing has never worked at all, but I've read some other people report it works for them... They were all using very different systems, though.

For whatever it's worth, I think SSAO does make the eye candy a little bit prettier. I can leave it on and still get playable framerates most of the time. If I know I'll be over London with lots of aircraft I'll turn that one off, shadows off, and maybe turn a couple other settings down.

THe anti-aliasing is also a frame rate killer

[White Owl]

Originally Posted by Oldschool61

THe anti-aliasing is also a frame rate killer

I have a few frames/second to spare, and as noted above I'm willing to turn other settings down if somebody can tell me how to get AA working. Please.

[louisv]

In order for Vsync to keep everything synchronized, when it doesn't get 60 fps from the computer, it falls off to 30 fps because otherwise there would be tearing. Think about it, you can't have say 45 fps on a 60 fps monitor, there would be partial frames along the way...60/30=2 and 60/45=4/3=1.33

If the computer cannot get 30 fps, say it gets 29, then vsync will make it fall to 15 fps because 60/15=4, a whole number for whole frames.

So use it knowingly.

Louisv

[InsaneDruid]

This is only true for vsync with double buffering. Triple Buffering solves that, and is a driver default for nvidia since many years.

There is a rather old but still good article about vsync, double and triple buffering on the german site 3dcenter

[von Pilsner]

Originally Posted by louisv

In order for Vsync to keep everything synchronized, when it doesn't get 60 fps from the computer, it falls off to 30 fps because otherwise there would be tearing. Think about it, you can't have say 45 fps on a 60 fps monitor, there would be partial frames along the way...60/30=2 and 60/45=4/3=1.33

If the computer cannot get 30 fps, say it gets 29, then vsync will make it fall to 15 fps because 60/15=4, a whole number for whole frames.

So use it knowingly.

Louisv

I have read that before, but have never experienced it...

I have been using vsync + tripplebuffer in a few games for years and I've never seen my fps counter lock in at anything lower than 30 (i.e. I see 20, 22, 27 [etc...] fps in a few games that have vsync + tripplebuffer)

Here is an extreme example (vsync on)


As you can see my computer can't quite make 30fps, but it isn't dropping down to 15...