Why does a game capped at 60fps feel better on 144hz than on 60hz?

[swaggyp]

Hello, I'm wondering if anyone can explain this phenomenon to me. I read the post on here about whether frame rates higher than the refresh rate makes a difference, but I'm asking about the opposite: whether a refresh rate higher than frame rate makes a difference.

The game I'm referring to is SSBM on the dolphin emulator. To me and to numerous other players (though I concede this is still anecdotal) the game feels significantly less laggy on 144hz as opposed to 60hz, despite the game being capped at 60fps.

My technical understanding is poor but I always thought that since monitor refreshes aren't necessarily in sync with your GPU producing frames, there is a worst-case scenario where a frame is produced immediately after the monitor refreshes, so now the time until you see that new frame is the time until the monitor refreshes again, which at 60hz is ~16ms. But if you're on 144hz, that time is only ~7ms in the worse case.

I have read a lot of posts on the internet saying it "makes no difference" and I don't want to be a stubborn guy that can't accept facts or whatever. But I am very skeptical of this because the difference is extremely noticeable to me and numerous other (top) players in the SSBM community. But perhaps we are all insane, that's why I wanted to ask some people with technical knowledge.

Thanks for any help

[hleV]

At higher refresh rate the most recently generated frame gets displayed sooner.

[swaggyp]

Now I feel silly cuz that is such a succinct and sense-making response

I suspected that was the case, but also I was a bit skeptical that that was all it was, because if I did my math correctly, in the absolute worst case, on a 144hz monitor the newest frame would be displayed ~9ms faster than the worst case for a 60hz (worse case being a new frame gets generated immediately after the monitor refreshes so you have to wait the full refresh cooldown period). But that's absolute worst case so I figured realistically you'd be experiencing maybe like ~4-5ms less input lag on average, which doesn't seem like enough to account for how much better 144hz feels. But perhaps it is and it's really as simple as that.

Anyway thanks

[TTT]

The monitor is still scanning out at the full 144hz even if you cap it to 60fps, the same way a 240hz monitor is still scanning out at 240hz with 60fps.

So 60fps on a 240hz is even better.

[deama]

If you have dwm enabled (enabled by default, hard to turn off after windows 8), it may be due to the dwm now exhibiting less of a delay, because the dwm delays by about 1 refresh cycle, so 60hz would result in an extra 16ms delay (or so), 120hz would be 8ms, 240hz would be 4ms. This does not change with fps, it changes with monitor's hz.
So at 60hz monitor, you'd get a 16ms delay, at 144hz though this would get reduced to about 7ms, so you'd get a reduction in 9ms from just using a 144hz monitor vs a 60hz.

This may not apply if you run games in exclusive fullscreen mode (though windows may screw with that), but I don't think you normally can run emulators in exclusive fullscreen mode? So this might be the reason why.

[rokita]

Would FreeSync make the monitor run at 60hz to match the 60fps of the game? I dont want to turn it off everything I play melee