Vsync and FPS limiting is not working correctly with higher refresh rate displays.

[Streetwind]

Issue Summary:
- The "on" and "off" states for Vsync appear to be flipped. Off means on, and on means off... most of the time. Sometimes on is also on, but different.
- The "Max FPS" slider doesn't work at all in some cases, and only minimally in all others. No configuration can be found in which it works as expected.
- The game does not properly detect the display's native refresh rate for its vertical sync in many cases.

 

Actual test performed and results:

Display native refresh rate: 75Hz

Test 1: Nvidia Control Panel vsync setting as "globally off"

With Vintage Story in windowed mode:
- Setting "Vsync: Off" locks me to 60 FPS. The "Max FPS" slider is ignored, unless I set it to below 60 FPS, in which case the game immediately drops to 30 FPS. In other words, it behaves as if Vsync was on, not off, but for the wrong refresh rate.
- Setting "Vsync: On" locks me to 75 FPS, which is the correct refresh rate for my display. However, Vsync is globally turned off in the Nvidia control panel and should not apply even if control over the framerate is handed over to the Windows Desktop. The "Max FPS" slider is completely ignored, no matter the setting.
- Setting "Vsync: On + Sleep" behaves identical to "Vsync: Off", locking me to 60 FPS (the wrong refresh rate) and dropping to 30 as soon as the "Max FPS" slider is set below 60.

With Vintage Story in fullscreen mode:
- Setting "Vsync: Off" locks me to 60 FPS. The "Max FPS" slider is ignored, unless I set it to below 60 FPS, in which case the game immediately drops to 30 FPS. In other words, it behaves as if Vsync was on, not off, but for the wrong refresh rate. (This is the same as in windowed mode.)
- Setting "Vsync: On" lets my framerate run completely uncapped - well over 200 when looking up at a cloudless sky. The "Max FPS" slider is completely ignored, no matter the setting. (This is different from windowed mode.)
- Setting "Vsync: On + Sleep" behaves identical to "Vsync: Off", locking me to 60 FPS (the wrong refresh rate) and dropping to 30 as soon as the "Max FPS" slider is set below 60. (This is the same as in windowed mode.)

 

Test 2: Nvidia Control Panel vsync setting as "application controlled"

Test results in windowed mode mirror those of Test 1, except that minimum FPS is slightly worse.

Test results in fullscreen mode mirrored those of Test 1 in the "Off" and "On+Sleep" settings. When choosing "On", however, a different result appeared. Instead of shooting up into the mid-200's, the game now largely behaved as in windowed mode with this setting - that is, locked to 75 FPS, with the "Max FPS" slider completely ignored. However, performance was significantly worse, with the average FPS counter of the F3 screen dropping below 60 at times, despite staring up into a cloudless sky.

 

Now, this may of course just be a quirk of my system.

For this reason, I invite other users with displays that have refresh rates of greater than 60 FPS to check if they can replicate my findings, or if everything works fine on their end.

[radfast]

Relevant question: are you playing VS on Windows or Linux?   I think this issue is only a Windows issue, or at least, worse on Windows.

 

[Streetwind]

Yes, this is on a Windows 10 machine. I can provide system details if you like.

[radfast]

No I don't need full system specs.  It's enough to know you are running under Windows.

There are several different effects and issues inter-linked here.

One of them is when Vsync is set to the middle setting ("On"), then the MaxFPS set in Vintage Story settings is ignored.  That's because if VSync is on then the graphics card should control the Vsync.  So I think that one is "intended behaviour".  But Vintage Story handles Vsync a bit differently with the "On + sleep" setting.

There are other issues though, still investigating these ... 

Edited February 11, 2021 by radfast

[Sunbather]

I just bought the game and I thought I was going crazy. After all those promises and serious hype around the game especially regarding performance, I was getting 65 to 72 fps tops with a Ryzen 3600, RTX 2060 Super, NVMe SSD and 2x8GB DDR4 @3200mhz. I almost gave up on gaming for this week.

If it had been limited to 60 fps or 75 fps (the default fps limitation in the settings), I would have smelled the cake. But getting 65 fps? Clearly not Vsync or fps limiting but simply bad performance. When my performance then tanked down to 42 fps, I almost screamed and already swore that I will refund the game immediately. With a 144hz display the bad performance was really, really noticable.

Now, after reinstalling the game several times (because I was too stupid to install a mod, too) I just left the default settings for testing, meaning Vsync turned ON, and lo and behold, I am getting 144 fps on very high settings and ~110fps with cranked up shadows and the volumetric shading mod.

This shouldn't be. And anyways: if Vsync on and off only were reversed, then it still would limit the game to 60fps and not to very strange 65fps or higher.

 

Edit: Even stranger that both times my GPU was maxed out: when I was stuck at 65 to 72fps and also now with really high frame rates.

Also: Make a PSA or fix it because I am surely not the only one who almost refunded the game after playing actually not more than 20 minutes.

Edited March 10, 2021 by Bruno Bälder

[radfast]

Since the OP created this issue, we have released version 1.14.8 which has a better description on the tooltips of what the MaxFPS / VSync settings are intended to do and how they interact.

On a Windows 10 machine, with VSync off and MaxFPS not unlimited the game can sometimes lock to 64fps.  It depends what other software you have on your machine and what Windows itself is doing, it's connected with the Windows system interrupt timer which is 15.625ms by default (i.e. 1/64 second).   I am curious to know if you had MaxFPS unlimited, or set to a level like 144fps, when you experienced this issue.

[Vapervop]

On 3/13/2021 at 1:16 AM, radfast said:

Since the OP created this issue, we have released version 1.14.8 which has a better description on the tooltips of what the MaxFPS / VSync settings are intended to do and how they interact.

On a Windows 10 machine, with VSync off and MaxFPS not unlimited the game can sometimes lock to 64fps.  It depends what other software you have on your machine and what Windows itself is doing, it's connected with the Windows system interrupt timer which is 15.625ms by default (i.e. 1/64 second).   I am curious to know if you had MaxFPS unlimited, or set to a level like 144fps, when you experienced this issue.

Yeah, that's what's happening to me. I have the MaxFps option set to 75, but is locked to 64. If I set it to "unlimited" then fps go 144+ . What I have to do to unlock my fps? It seems that the MaxFps option isn't working properly.