Question / Help V-Sync on or off?

[Snaert]

Hello everyone!

So I've been streaming for quite a while but I've only streamed league of legends. But now im streaming Diablo 3 and my stream looks fine and all but a little bit choppy even tho I have high fps when i stream so my question is, Would it be better to turn on V-Sync and lock the fps at 60 when I have the stream fps locked at 60fps in 720p or does it not matter? Should I even consider dropping down to 30fps on the stream and leave the fps ingame unlocked.

Does vsync even do anything for my viewers. And before anyone asks yes I know what vsync does ingame but I still have to ask this.

Roger and out!

//Andy

 

[Lain]

It can "make room" for OBS to do its compositing on the GPU when a game is eating up all the GPU, but that's rarely ever needed. If you really want to check, just make two video files, one on, and one off, to see for yourself. Should take like 10 minutes.

 

[pacholol]

If you use 720p 60 fps in your obs settings people that are watching will enjoy and see what you see on the screen ( the motion and smooth moving and it's very nice to watch). But if you use 30 fps they will lose some smootness and they will not enjoy that much.
If you dont drop any fps while using vsync and streaming at 60fps you can go for it since viewers will see exactly what you see. But anyway it all depends on how you see it. If for you the game looks better without vsync then go without vsync since you are the first to who it has to look good the game. If you have fps drop your viewers will notice that also. So if your vsync drops to 30fps while playing your viewers will see that (like in league of legends when you alt tab, viewers see the fps drop).
Anyway - Use vsync if it looks better for you, dont use it if the game runs better without vsync. (all vsync does it's lower the gpu usage and send the amount of hz that your screen has, if it's 60 it will send 60 and if its 120 will send 120 not spending more fps when you dont need).

 

[Snaert]

It can "make room" for OBS to do its compositing on the GPU, but rarely that's ever needed. If you really want to check, just make two video files, one on, and one off, to see for yourself. Should take like 10 minutes.

If you use 720p 60 fps in your obs settings people that are watching will enjoy and see what you see on the screen ( the motion and smooth moving and it's very nice to watch). But if you use 30 fps they will lose some smootness and they will not enjoy that much.
If you dont drop any fps while using vsync and streaming at 60fps you can go for it since viewers will see exactly what you see. But anyway it all depends on how you see it. If for you the game looks better without vsync then go without vsync since you are the first to who it has to look good the game. If you have fps drop your viewers will notice that also. So if your vsync drops to 30fps while playing your viewers will see that (like in league of legends when you alt tab, viewers see the fps drop).
Anyway - Use vsync if it looks better for you, dont use it if the game runs better without vsync. (all vsync does it's lower the gpu usage and send the amount of hz that your screen has, if it's 60 it will send 60 and if its 120 will send 120 not spending more fps when you dont need).

Thanks Jim (again)!

And thank you Pacholol for the elaborate answer!

I will not use vsync them sense I dont rly see the point in it. And I've got over 100fps at all times when streaming Diablo 3.

//Andy

 

[FerretBomb]

Er, Pacholol is giving poor information, or outright misinformation.

VSync does lock the framerate to your monitor's refresh (or a divisible portion of it) so as to eliminate tearing as its primary function. Lowering the GPU load is a secondary byproduct, and is absolutely NOT what vsync is designed to do. It's meant to ensure visual quality (which you WANT while streaming). It waits to display each ready frame in entirety before displaying it, which can cause some very minor smoothness twitches, and some have reported input lag (but at 60hz, that's truly just psychosomatic BS on any modern game engine to be frank... back in the Quake 3 days it was a slight issue).

Normal rendering uses two buffers; the displayed buffer (being shown on-screen), and the draw buffer (the one the video card is rendering). Vsync-off, it just switches as soon as the monitor can take it, causing the tearing as an incomplete frame is written to the screen.

Triple-buffering is the answer to this. It uses THREE buffers (name gives it away, huh?), with one displayed buffer, and TWO draw-buffers. The video card will alternate writing to each of these draw buffers, back and forth, as fast as it can. When the monitor is ready for the next frame (the vertical sync 'tick' hits), whichever of the two buffers is complete is then written to the screen. You still get a little smoothness variance, but dramatically less, with no input lag at all.
The down side, it's like running with vsync off; your GPU will run at full-tilt. You just get no tearing, and look awesome.

If you're getting chop and poor performance, please post a complete logfile (as in the stickied thread at the top of this forum) as it's quite possible that it's not related to vsync usage at all, and otherwise fixable.


tl;dr: Use VSync ON with triple-buffering enabled whenever possible, for best image quality. Resort to vsync off only if your GPU is borderline capable of running at your refresh rate.