V-sync and games

I'm a noob, so forgive me guys. But what is V-sync? I know it's important and something to do with graphics, but everytime I turn it on, my game's performance really slows down and even causes my game to crash or lock-up making it unplayable.

I'm managing to play some games without it, but I guess it really isn't neccessary to turn it on. Anyway, whatever the heck it is, it really does screw up framerates, game performance, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-sync

No point in having it unless you're having big fps jumps and downs which cause tearing. Like if your fps in CSS jumps from 30 to 200 then to 40 and etc.

V-Sync just refreshes the game to the same fraction of your monitors refresh rate. In other words, it helps get rid of "Screen Tearing" (You know, the little lines that move up the screen sometimes?) If it's causing problems, then just disable it. It's not very important, but on certain monitors it just makes things seem to run a whole lot smoother. However, it does put the framerate cap to 60fps when you enable it.

Yeah, like I said, just leave it turned off if it is causing problems for you.

Hmm...now I know what it is. But how come it hampers my game's performance significantly? I think having V-sync on made one of my games lock-up or freeze. ASK_Story

Because it waits for the frame to render before it is shown to you.

Hmm...now I know what it is. But how come it hampers my game's performance significantly? I think having V-sync on made one of my games lock-up or freeze. ASK_Story

If your PC is able to crank out the frames high enough (say at 80+ FPS) you will get tearing. If you enable VSync, tearing is removed, but there is a*potential* drop in performance. If you have a really good PC, you won't have any drop in performance.

The drop in performance comes when your card is unable to keep up with the 60 FPS demand - if your computer misses (pumps out less than 60 FPS) then your frame rate drops to 30 FPS, regardless of whether you missed 60 FPS by 1 FPS (50 FPS) or 29 FPS (31 FPS).

[QUOTE="ASK_Story"]Hmm...now I know what it is. But how come it hampers my game's performance significantly? I think having V-sync on made one of my games lock-up or freeze. Jack_Summersby

If your PC is able to crank out the frames high enough (say at 80+ FPS) you will get tearing. If you enable VSync, tearing is removed, but there is a*potential* drop in performance. If you have a really good PC, you won't have any drop in performance.

The drop in performance comes when your card is unable to keep up with the 60 FPS demand - if your computer misses (pumps out less than 60 FPS) then your frame rate drops to 30 FPS, regardless of whether you missed 60 FPS by 1 FPS (50 FPS) or 29 FPS (31 FPS).

Limits the fps to the refresh rate of your monitor . tears happen when a sudden increase of frames is created in your gpu and your monitor cant keep up with the rate. so vsync limits the fps to the refresh rate of the monitor , not allowing it to tear.
... Pretty sure . i use it for some games but games like half life 2 it screws with my HUD sometimes. i can live with some tears in games like prey (game sucks) but others i get no tears with 200+ fps stable usually

[QUOTE="Jack_Summersby"]

[QUOTE="ASK_Story"]Hmm...now I know what it is. But how come it hampers my game's performance significantly? I think having V-sync on made one of my games lock-up or freeze. WhiteSnake5000

If your PC is able to crank out the frames high enough (say at 80+ FPS) you will get tearing. If you enable VSync, tearing is removed, but there is a*potential* drop in performance. If you have a really good PC, you won't have any drop in performance.

The drop in performance comes when your card is unable to keep up with the 60 FPS demand - if your computer misses (pumps out less than 60 FPS) then your frame rate drops to 30 FPS, regardless of whether you missed 60 FPS by 1 FPS (50 FPS) or 29 FPS (31 FPS).

Yeah, I've noticed that too. I think what happens is that the game is switching between being locked at 30 andl ocked at 60 FPS so quickly that the FRAPs (or whatever is displaying the framerates) is AVERAGING whatever number of samples - say 10 ms at 60 FPS and 20 ms at 30 FPS - thus it displays 40 FPS (avg.) even though the monitor NEVER actually displayed 40 FPS.

But it's a fact - when VSYnc is enabled, you are not really seeing, for example, 50 FPS.