vsync slowing some games down

[drhycodan]

There are probably more, but a good example of this is metal gear twin snakes. In the tanker level, with vsync on, the game runs smooth and then slows down to a crawl to a few seconds and then goes back to full speed again. The weird thing is, the emulator still thinks the game is running full speed during that vsync "lagging" and so the music stays normal. With vynsc off, the game runs smooth without any slowdowns but at the cost of screen tearing.

[JMC47]

That's normal if something is throttling the game in a weird way. It's usually a problem when the game would slowdown to 59 fps or something, but with vsync on it slows down to 30fps. I don't remember how I fixed this for me... but, just mess with your GPU drivers and such and it'll probably clear up.

Edit: I'm not saying the game is actually slowing down for you, it shouldn't be on your computer. But, some kind of weird throttling is happening, and it happened to me on a game I could run well over 60 fps as well.

[DaRkL3AD3R]

Enable Triple Buffering in your graphics card's control panel. This definitively works for Nvidia, and might work for AMD but their drivers are shit so it's a flip of the coin unfortunately.

[drhycodan]

So do you only enable vsync in the control panal and leave it off in dolphin or vice versa? Or enable it in both?

[Radiant Malevolence]

So do you only enable vsync in the control panal and leave it off in dolphin or vice versa? Or enable it in both?

I would also like to know which settings to use for this. I notice a lot of screen tearing in the Metroid Prime games. But when I enable Vsync the game drops to 30FPS every time I drop any FPS. Even if I only drop to 59FPS, it still goes down to 30FPS, if that even makes any sense.

Is this how Vsync always works? I wouldn't know because I never use it on PC games due to the input lag it usually causes.

[JMC47]

Yes, it's how vsync works.

[drhycodan]

Odd, the vsync option in Dolphin causes a lot of slowdowns for me. But if I disable vsync in dolphin and enable it only in my nvidia control panel, I get no slowdown at all. I'm guessing vsync was poorly integrated in Dolphin or it doesn't work in conjunction with triple buffering while nvidia's vsync works in conjunction with triple buffer.

[Radiant Malevolence]

Yes, it's how vsync works.

Ah, well that's unfortunate. I guess I'll just have to deal with the screen tearing until I can overclock my CPU for a constant 60FPS. Thanks for being fast and getting straight to the point.

[JMC47]

No problem; there wasn't really much else for me to say about it.