VRR Flicker on AW3225QF

[Duskfall]

So to recap if I would like to go the "Gync off" road in certain games while having the least possible input lag the steps to follow are these, right?

1. Use Special K and apply a fractional FPS cap.
2. Turn Vsync on in Nvidia Control Panel
3. Enable triple buffering in game if available

Would this give me about a "G-Sync experience" without having Gsync on?

[Duskfall]

Also I forgot to mention that when Gsync is enabled I get little vertical moving lines across the whole screen when there is a dark scene as mentioned in this Reddit post. If VRR is disabled the picture is perfect.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OLED_Gaming/co ... y_showing/

Honestly to me it seems that all these downsides you have to accept with VRR enabled on OLEDs aren't worth it. I rather have nearly imperceptible tearing at 240Hz than having to deal with flickering and an unclean image due to vertical lines.

[RealNC]

1. Use Special K and apply a fractional FPS cap.
2. Turn Vsync on in Nvidia Control Panel
3. Enable triple buffering in game if available

Leave vsync to "application controlled." Simply set "present interval" in SK to 1 to enable vsync.

You can also force triple buffering in SK in DX11 games by setting back buffer count and max device latency to 3:

Clipboard_03-11-2025_01.png (51.08 KiB) Viewed 9316 times

Forcing triple buffering doesn't work in DX12 games.

Would this give me about a "G-Sync experience" without having Gsync on?

No. But if you can always reach the FPS cap, it can be "good enough."

[Duskfall]

I was playing around a little with Special K and it seems that it doesn't like MSI Afterburner. I can't even start Alan Wake 2 with Afterburner enabled. Is there a way to make both work? I use Afterburner for my GPU overclock.

[RealNC]

I was playing around a little with Special K and it seems that it doesn't like MSI Afterburner. I can't even start Alan Wake 2 with Afterburner enabled. Is there a way to make both work? I use Afterburner for my GPU overclock.

Quit Afterburner and make sure it's not running. Go into your Afterburner installation folder (you can right-click the Afterburner desktop icon and select "Open File Location"), and edit the MSIAfterburner.cfg file in a text editor. In there, change EnableServer from 1 to 0. Now when you start Afterburner, RTSS won't be automatically started along with it. RTSS is what conflicts with SK.

[Duskfall]

Thanks. Do I have to start the game directly from Special K to use the settings? I guess if I just start it directely from Steam the settings inserted in Special K wouldn't take effect?

I also read that i could shrink the VRR range to mitigage flickering?

[RealNC]

Thanks. Do I have to start the game directly from Special K to use the settings? I guess if I just start it directely from Steam the settings inserted in Special K wouldn't take effect?

These settings can only be set in-game in SK's overlay if SK was injected into the game. If you start the game without SK, then it's not injected.

To inject SK into a game, either start it through the SKIF frontend, or by using:

Code: Select all

skif %command%

in the launch options for the game in Steam.

I also read that i could shrink the VRR range to mitigage flickering?

It will reduce the min/max brightness of the flicker, but will not actually eliminate it. You can switch to 120Hz mode for example to test. This reduces the VRR range from 48-240 to 48-120.

I'm not sure you can raise the minimum from 48 to something higher and keep using 240Hz, because your display is using dual-head DSC and EDID overrides with CRU aren't possible, AFAIK.

[Duskfall]

Thanks. Actually using Special K's framerate limiter did help reduce the flicker quite a bit. I set it to 90 FPS because my FPS in the game range from 70 all the way up to over 100 FPS depending on the area in the game. It doesn't eleminiate the flicker completely but at this point I guess nothing does.

[RealNC]

Thanks. Actually using Special K's framerate limiter did help reduce the flicker quite a bit. I set it to 90 FPS because my FPS in the game range from 70 all the way up to over 100 FPS depending on the area in the game. It doesn't eleminiate the flicker completely but at this point I guess nothing does.

The thing is that if you don't lower your refresh rate, then during stutters the display will jump all the way up to 240Hz. If you use 120Hz, then it will only jump up to 120Hz, which lowers the brightness fluctuation range of the flicker.

Again, try and see what works best for you. In the end, current OLED monitors all suffer from this. I'm only aware of one monitor that has minimal flicker. The Alienware AW3423DW. It happens to be the only OLED monitor that was ever produced to be "G-SYNC Ultimate" certified with a hardware g-sync module. Which means it's possible to mitigate OLED VRR flicker to a large degree, but only Nvidia has done it so far through the g-sync module. It's weird that no other monitor other than that one was ever made that has a g-sync module. And no display manufacturer ever cared enough about VRR flicker to use whatever method Nvidia used in their displays.

[Duskfall]

I see, thanks. A question about the Nvida Control Panel: I have Vsync on and Ultra Low Latency Mode set to Ultra. Is there a need to cap the FPS in Nvidia Control Panel to -3 FPS from max refresh rate as these two settings should already cap it anyway? And when using Special K I would use Special K's limiter anyway?