One of the biggest problems with PC gaming is the lag between the monitor refresh rate and the frame rate per second the games go. And no, this time we are not going to talk about artifacts like Tearing, but about something common, which affects the gaming experience and which has unfortunately been accepted as normal.
Each of the images you see on your monitor has been previously generated by the computer’s graphics card at a specific speed to be sent to the panel where it is displayed. However, many times if we start playing and place an FPS counter, we will see that the number displayed is not the refresh rate of the monitor. What happens when both sides are out of balance? Well, full frames are lost along the way.
Your graphics card does not coordinate well with your monitor
When we talk about FPS, we are talking about the frame rate per second, but it does not have to be the speed at which images are displayed on your TV, because it belongs to the refresh rate. Unfortunately, the two are often confused or even used interchangeably. However, they aren’t the same, and there are often times when certain FPS rates look weird or look odd when playing, like things moving around seem odd or there are things that don’t add up.
In reality, ideally, the FPS of games should be kept at the same speed or at a multiple of the refresh rate of the monitor. That is, if the panel hits a refresh rate of 120Hz, the frame rate in games would be 120, 60, 40, or 30 FPS, all exact multiples of the refresh rate so the signal is at l ‘unison. . The solution that is given? Variable refresh rate solutions like NVIDIA’s G-SYNC or AMD’s FreeSync, where the monitor’s refresh rate is controlled by the game.
However, the problem is that this is an additional cost to the monitor manufacturer and the end user and the correct solution to this would be to ensure that games don’t run at an FPS speed that doesn’t is not a multiple of the frame rate. screen refresh we use.
What are we referring to?
Say you have a video that plays at 24 frames per second, a very common speed a few years ago. If you reproduce it on a screen with a refresh rate of 60 Hz and, therefore, there is a ratio of 1:2.5 between the two parts. The fact is that since it must balance the start and the beginning of each frame and one cannot be generated in the middle of the other, such an imbalance causes the two parts to be uncoordinated.
Think of it as a kind of calendar that isn’t mathematically precise. So the imbalance builds up over time from frame to frame until it becomes too obvious that it gives us the feeling that the game is lagging behind or that something is wrong between the response time of the game, what we see on the screen, and our actions.
The solution has been used on consoles for some time
And this is none other than dynamic resolution, in which a refresh rate is marked and in order to avoid this not being constant, the resolution varies according to the load level of the game. Unless you are a very picky person, many users don’t notice it and it has become an effective way to avoid certain image artifacts without having to force the user to purchase expensive monitors in order to avoid certain image issues that occur produce. .
In other words, it’s about reaching parity between the refresh rate and the speed at which the game frames are generated from the title itself so that fewer people suffer from said problem.
