Flickering with g-sync

[RealNC]

I don't know this software can you explain me what it does ?

It's a utility (costs about $7 on Steam) for frame rate amplification. Kind of like AFMF on AMD where if you play a game that's internally capped to 60FPS, you can convert it to 120FPS (or 180 with x3 mode and 240 with x4 mode.)

It's not as good as DLSS or FSR frame generation, but it still looks good IMO. The problem is that it requires the game to run in windowed mode (borderless windowed or normal windowed.)

However, apparently Elden Ring has mods that can do much better frame generation through DLSS or FSR. Try those instead. LosslessScaling is the last resort.

[Drabat]

I try it and yeah the game feel completely different :O

[Geralt_GDL]

It only happens with g-sync (or freesync) because this changes the refresh rate of the display. Without g-sync, refresh rate is fixed, and so dark color brightness remains fixed as well.

If you want to understand it better, simply run a game with g-sync enabled that can reach like 300FPS somewhere and apply two FPS limits. A 300FPS limit in the nvidia control panel, and a 90FPS limit in RTSS. Have a hotkey in RTSS that can toggle the FPS limit on and off. Now run the game and use the hotkey to toggle the RTSS limiter on and off. As you jump from 90Hz to 300Hz and back, you will see the brightness of dark colors change. The lower the refresh rate, the brighter it gets. This is what causes the flicker. When a game has bad frame times and you get frame time spikes, this directly translates to brightness spikes, which is flicker. And it's not fixable. Any "fix" people claim is working just means the monitor is prevented from actually lowering its refresh rate, which in turn means it makes g-sync not work correctly.

I really thank you so much for finally helping me understand why flickering occurs on my OLED monitor with G-Sync enabled!

I have an Alienware AW3225QF 4K 240hz monitor and an RTX 5080.
Let me tell you my concrete example: I play Avowed, and with Frame Generation x4 I have no problems and I always stay between 160 and 200 fps. So setting a frame limit around 150 fps might be great to be able to keep G-sync on and avoid flickering.

The thing is that I tried to do that, via Nvidia control panel, but then I saw that in game the flickering still remained, especially in darker scenarios.
But based on your example (300hz vs 90hz) since there are no frame time spikes, thanks to the frames capped at 150, I should not have flickering, is that right? Then why does it persist?

At this point something doesn't make sense to me.... can you help me understand?

Thank you really again, I realize I'm intervening in this thread after a long time it's been written, but I just found out about it now!

Please let me know.

[BeardMan94]

I’ve tried to use the ”adaptive” mode with Lossless Scaling to keep a constant FPS in order to avoid VRR flicker.

However… much like you say (with NVidias 4x framegen), even though the framerate is high and pretty constant- the flicker still appears.

I can only guess that it’s an inherent problem with framegen. Your generated frames originate from maybe 40-60 fps, and it might be that a frametime spike in your ”source” framerate is enough to cause flicker.

Note that this is all just speculation on my part.

[RealNC]

I can only guess that it’s an inherent problem with framegen.

Actually, no. It's a problem with the frame pacing of the driver. It's just not accurate enough to avoid the flicker. Both Nvidia and AMD could do much better if they wanted, but unfortunately their frame pacing is only good for VRR displays that don't flicker.