Of my 20 years masteracing, I’ve come to the conclusion that each hardware combination have their own individual quirks that affect games differently. Because of this, the pc feels like a car that you need to know and tweak individually.
Over the years I’ve completed numerous of these tweaking side quests from ini mods to registry hacks.
One of the most recent one was ff16. On default it ran well enough. I had it at 4k dlss performance and half refresh (82.5 FPS locked). Frame pacing were great!
At that setting I get shimmers on some textures during movement and frame drops in cities. I could left well enough alone but am a pc MASTERRACE, not a pc peasant who accept mediocrity, I wanted OPTIMAL!
So once again, my quest begins.
I tried 1440p dlss quality. This fixed the shimmering textures albeit a bit more blurry, a trade off I can live with.
After a few hours play I see frames were dropping in cities. So I tried lowering dlss to performance, this brings back the shimmering and make the game a lot more blurry. No go.
This prompt me to tried dlss frame gen. This completely fucks the frame pacing and made everything worst since it turns off vsync by default. What can I do? Hmmm..
I tried locking FPS with rtss to 120, this fixed the frame pacing but produce terrible screen tear. I fixed it by turning on gsync.
This cause a new problem: VRR flicker of my monitor. Turns out oled and VA monitors has this problem when using VRR. After googling, the fix was turning on vrr control on the monitor.
Turns out vrr control cause micro stutters.
So now I know, for my specific hardware combination, if I use gsync my monitor will have vrr flicker. If I DON’T use gsync I will have screen tear with framegen when FPS locked.
After researching some more, the gsync rout is a dead end. There is no way to fix the flicker with gsync on without the micro stutter of vrr control.
So option number two it is: fixed refresh and try to eliminate the screen tear of nvidia frame gen.
A few minutes googling and reading some old posts, turns out you CAN use vsync with frame gen. Nvidia just made it a bitch to do it.
Turns out all I had to do was go into nvcp, then program settings, add ff16 in and forced vsync on there.
Everything seems to work, framegen is on, vsync is on, no screen tearing.......the fps and frame time is off when running around. Random FPS drops and stutters.
So I tried more settings. And one of them finally fixed it. Lock FPS to 120 in nvcp. This fixed the erratic FPS drops and stutters.
There were still micro stutters, seems like nvcp FPS lock sucks. So I lock FPS to 120 with rtss. The nvcp FPS lock were still needed as without it the frame drops came back. Must be one of the quirks of nvidia framegen.
So with all that the game is finally optimized. 1440p dlss quality, 120fps framegen, no micro stutters, no frame drops, no vrr flicker.
Another side quest completed. On to the main quest of playing the game.
