I have a question, What is vsync and should I have it On or Off?

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Hi there, I was just wondering what is the purpose of Vsync and should I have it turned on or off? Any help is greatly appreciated. TIA

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This was brought up in December:

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Look at this article. It may help:

Cheers

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Link is invalid…

This one does…: What Is VSync, and When Should You Use It? | Digital Trends

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It has something to do with synchronizing the rendering of frames by your graphics card and your monitor refresh rate. It will supposedly prevent “tearing” or horizontal lines being drawn on the screen. Not really important to understand what it is (unless you are a tech geek and love that stuff). You should try it on and off and then use the one which you think looks better (smoother). I have mine on but I don’t notice any difference. I have a G Sync monitor which may override v sync anyway. And, if you are using an NVIDIA graphics card, there are some v-sync NVIDIA settings.

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If you:

  • have a VRR monitor (variable refresh rate, i.e. it says freesync or g-sync)
  • and your card supports your monitor’s technology
  • and you’ve enabled VRR in nvidia control panel or radeon settings
    then turn vsync off. The monitor will match the game’s frame pacing and it will be as smooth as possible.

If you do not have both a VRR monitor and a supported card, the monitor is drawing frames at a fixed rate. Experiment to see if you prefer it on or off.

details

Monitors draw images from top to bottom. “vsync” is “the vertical sync interval” and an old, old term, it’s a timing instant as the monitor begins drawing a new image, pretend it’s right before the top left pixel.

“vsync on” means the game waits for the monitor to be ready before sending a frame.
I don’t know if MSFS drops frames between 31-59 fps to maintain a stable 30 FPS with vsync on, but some games do.

“Tearing” happens on when the game sends a new frame in the middle of the monitor drawing the last frame. This is relevant when the game’s FPS exceeds the monitor’s refresh rate. Because, the top half is older than the bottom half and it looks weird, especially when the camera is moving around

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