Some games seem to run poorly at anything other than 30 or 60 fps

[FlavioPlaza]

First of all, sorry for the English, it's not my native language.
I've been playing on PC for years and for a long time I tried to find settings that would allow me to have fluid gameplay on the controller, similar to what we can see on consoles. With that, I spent a lot of time performing different types of tests and even posted a video on my youtube channel explaining a little bit about refresh rate and vsync.

That said, I could observe some features in some games, starting with the point that takes the title of this post.

I noticed that some games end up having strange "behavior" if they are running outside the exact 30 or 60 fps. The frames end up having a strange fluidity, as if within the game's engine it couldn't run anything outside of what was originally intended to run on a console (30 or 60fps).

This is something very difficult to demonstrate in a video, but trying to explain it, it's like the game frames "jump" and the fluidity is lost.

To perform these tests, I set my monitor to different refresh rates, as well as using Nvidia inspector's custom vsync, which allows me to "split" the game's sync rate with the monitor's refresh rate, to avoid problematic syncing.

In testing, I started with the default refresh rate of 144hz, where I used vsync 1/3 (48 fps). The following games were tested:

death stranding*
God of War
horizon zero dawn
spider man
metro exodus*
far cry 4*
far cry 6
days gone
Battlefield 2042

The games that I marked with a "*" are the ones that showed some abnormality, in particular metro exodus and far cry 4.

Both games seem to have a serious problem if I play at any frame rate between 30 and 60 (I also tested at 40 fps with my monitor's refresh rate at 120hz). The movement of objects in the scene, especially the ground seems to lack fluidity, where I had the feeling that 30fps was even more fluid than 40fps.

Death Stranding features something similar, but only during cutscenes.

I have the feeling that this game's cutscenes were designed to run at 30fps (ps4) or 60fps (ps5) and any value outside of that causes a very large fluidity instability.

Finally, I also noticed that some games don't seem to behave well with some VRR technology (gsync or freesync). Of those tested, the most problematic were days gone and bf 2042. Days Gone presents constant stutterings with VRR on and bf 2042 seems to not be able to maintain the fluidity of frames that I was able to observe when I activated vsync perfectly with the update rate of monitor (1:1 or 1:2).

Anyway, I know that a lot of this happens due to specific optimization problems, but has anyone else noticed something like this?

My setup:

RTX 3060ti
Ryzen 7 3700x
16gb ram
1tb SSD SATA

[jorimt]

I noticed that some games end up having strange "behavior" if they are running outside the exact 30 or 60 fps. The frames end up having a strange fluidity, as if within the game's engine it couldn't run anything outside of what was originally intended to run on a console (30 or 60fps).

This is something very difficult to demonstrate in a video, but trying to explain it, it's like the game frames "jump" and the fluidity is lost.

Some games seem to have an internal logic/tick-rate that only "feels" right at multiples of 30 FPS.

I.E. Certain games that offer "unlimited" framerate options may end up repeating or interpolating frames after a certain threshold, and/or make it appear that way because their physics, animations and/or camera systems are stuck at a fixed tick rate (30, 60, etc), while the rest of the game actually runs at the uncapped framerate.

I happened to have recently started Death Stranding for the first time before I even read this topic, and I had to lock the game to 120 FPS at 240Hz w/G-SYNC for it to feel "right;" a 224 to 237 FPS lock didn't feel like a "true" 200+ FPS when panning the camera, even with stable frametimes.

Likely engine-specific for some games, and something the end-user can't ultimately do anything about, short of limiting the game to a multiple of 30, or reporting it to the developers.

Finally, I also noticed that some games don't seem to behave well with some VRR technology (gsync or freesync). Of those tested, the most problematic were days gone and bf 2042. Days Gone presents constant stutterings with VRR on and bf 2042 seems to not be able to maintain the fluidity of frames that I was able to observe when I activated vsync perfectly with the update rate of monitor (1:1 or 1:2).

VRR will show system-side stutter as-is, so that's expected, and separate of the other issue.

VRR is basically a 1:1 mirror of system frametime performance, for better or worse, so if a game has particularly bad frametime performance, VRR will simply reflect it, just without tearing.

[Sptz]

I happened to have recently started Death Stranding for the first time before I even read this topic, and I had to lock the game to 120 FPS at 240Hz w/G-SYNC for it to feel "right;" a 224 to 237 FPS lock didn't feel like a "true" 200+ FPS when panning the camera, even with stable frametimes.

Likely engine-specific for some games, and something the end-user can't ultimately do anything about, short of limiting the game to a multiple of 30, or reporting it to the developers.

I know this is an insane necro. But just wanted to re-confirm this as it could help someone playing this in current time. I got the Director's Cut and first time playing it. I was going insane as I capped the framerate to 116 or 117 like I do on every game that I can push that much (playing on an LG C9), and it felt like a stuttery mess when panning the camera, it didn't feel like 116 FPS AT ALL. So now I'm forced to play at 120 fps (ingame cap) which means you're constantly hitting the VSYNC ceiling, input lag galore. But at least it feels super smooth.

Thing is, playing with DLSS4 (overridden by NVApp) overriding to DLAA, looks amazing but there's very rarely situations here and there where FPS might dip to say 118-119 and you can instantly tell. This engine literally feels like it only functions at 60 or 120. Nothing else.