before i had an ATI Radeon 5700 which lagged quite alot on ultra settings, dropping from 60 fps on low settings down to 20s (sometimes 10s) on ultra I knew my PC was in need of an upgrade on the GPU, so i decided to buy an AMD R9 270X. it can play ultra settings fine at 50-60 FPS without lag. however FPS still remains at 60 max. i have never seen FPS go over 60 yet. I have tried low settings and ultra settings, and both times FPS maxes out at 60. and the only significant drop in FPS comes from tabbing the game or opening an ingame window (i/e party, map, class menu, etc) is there any particular reason why FPS wont go up? locked to 60 maybe? is there a way to change it or increase it?
As Sogestsu said, that is because v-sync will limit your FPS to your monitor refresh rate. It does this to synchronize frames so that each frame is rendered each time the monitor updates the image displayed on screen. A normal monitor refreshed, or updates what it displays, 60 times per second. The GPU will render a frame and hold it in a buffer waiting to send it to the monitor until the monitor signals it is ready to refresh. This eliminates something called "tearing" because only a full frame is displayed on screen, where as if vsync is off them the GPU just keep sending frames as fast as it can to the monitor. The monitor will refresh at the same 60 times per second and if a frame is halfway displayed from the next frame and half from the previous frame then you see a tear. So the 60 fps limit is perfectly fine and good and you dont want to go higher at all since the monitor is limiting you to only seeing a maximum of 60 frames per second anyway. One bad part though about vsync is that it's biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. Since it will only send a fully completed frame to the monitor, if you drop below 60 fps then even if you are at 59 frames per second you are only seeing 30 fps. This is because even if the frame is 99% done rendering, if the monitor wants to refresh the frame isnt done yet so the GPU will hold onto the next frame and the monitor will display the same old frame twice in a row. Then it will wait to send that frame it just finished up the 1% on all the way until the next monitor refresh. So if you can maintain a constant 60 and never go under then that is perfect, but if you fluctuate between 58-60 fps then you keep jumping between 30 and 60 fps in your game which leads to a strange feeling that makes people feel as if the game is somewhat laggy. Really it is just the constant jump between the two fps rates quickly that causes this feeling. It would be better if you stay at 30 fps the whole time if you cannot maintain 60, but best of all of course is to just maintain 60fps at all times. Nvidia has a feature called Adaptive Half-rate, which is like vsync but it locks your FPS to half the monitor refresh at all times. This allows you to maintain smoother gameplay if you cant quite maintain a constant 60 fps. Another great use is if you have a 120Hz or 144Hz refresh rate monitor, because then it locks your FPS to 60 and the monitor refreshes twice per frame exactly. It leads to very smooth gameplay without having to have huge GPU power to maintain a constant 120 fps in games.
Studio XPS 8100 Windows 7 ultimate Intel core i7 870 2.9 GHz 8 GB ram R9 270X @EniGmA1987 should i play on lower graphics settings then? still looks somewhat good on medium. or maybe i should lower the rendering distance? but it does fluctuate between 50-60 specially in heavy battles. and IIRC, there is a way to limit the max FPS via the game useroptions menu (i currently have it at 300, but its obviously not working) so i take it my monitor needs an update then? the one i have now is pretty old (used to be a TV before i got this PC) maybe from like 2008 or 2007. (its pre-digital tv era)
Well you can turn vsync off if you really want higher FPS. But you will not see anything higher than 60 frames per second because that is all your monitor refreshes at. If you want to see higher then you must get a monitor that refreshes at a higher speed. ASUS makes a pretty nice 144Hz monitor (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824236313). But it is up to you if you want to spend the money on another upgrade like that. My advice is always do the upgrade, but that is just cause of how I am. If you dont have the money for one then dont try and push yourself to be able to get it. The other thing you will need in the future (a year, two years maybe) is a faster processor. That one will work well enough for now, but it wont be able to make full use of any more future GPU upgrades because it's core speed wont be high enough. You cannot upgrade the CPU either in that Dell, it will take a whole new computer to do that upgrade. If you are still hanging around the forums by the time it comes the CPU just cant cut it anymore then you should post on these forums about hardware for a new PC, there are a lot of people here who will gladly put together some recommendations. within whatever budget constraint you say. Even if you set a max FPS of 300 in game, as long as vsync is on then you will never see above 60fps. There is probably an option in game to turn it off, and if the option is already off then it is your graphics drivers that are setting vsync on. Which means you will need to go into Catalyst Control Center and turn the option off. Graphics settings are up to you. I personally never go below high settings, but prefer ultra if available. And if not available I usually force higher settings in my graphics driver control panel anyway. For me, if i cant play with a minimum FPS of 48 using the high settings then it is time to upgrade my hardware. 48 fps is where I lock myself to because I run my monitor at 96 Hz refresh rate, so 48 is exactly half.
Gold, if you're speaking of Planetside 2, the game caps the FPS to 60 by default. To disable this cap, go to the graphics settings and uncheck the "FPS smoothing" option. You can also modify your settings .ini file in your Planetside 2 folder to set your own preferred FPS cap (by default this "hard" cap is 300-ish). I cap mine at 120FPS because my monitor is 120Hz. If my FPS goes higher than 120, I'll get vertical tearing, unless I enable vsync. Like Enigma said, if your monitor is 60Hz, then you're better off keeping the FPS to 60. Get a 120+Hz monitor if you have the cash, but know that the difference between 60 and 120 FPS is not phenomenal and will not blow you away or anything. I can definitely notice the difference, especially when flying, but I got the monitor only because my other one was getting old. Having said that, I love gaming at 120 FPS .
Processor is severely bottle necking your graphics. If possible to over clock I'd try to push your processor to at least 3.5, however it sounds like the studio xps is a pre built Dell? I'm on mobile so can't check. Also would depend on your cooling. Like I stated earlier, there are a lot of factors that can hinder or improve performance, upgrading 1 out of many parts will not necessarily make it better. Sounds like you need a new system unless you can overclock a bit. Take that with what others have said and you have solid advice to make a decision with.
yeah prebuilt dell. got it at best buy during late 2010, my main reason for getting it was to play DCUO during beta, (and then i ended up not playing the game because it was P2P, and i never went to pick up the pre-order (so really only spent $5 on it) as for the monitor issue, i have another monitor thats used as a TV atm. its a 32 inch as opposed to this one thats 19 inch. and it was recently bought last month on black friday, so it may not be bad. but ill have to check it out later then. I did try hooking the new one up, however that was when i still had the old GPU and FPS were pretty low in the higher resolutions. as for the processor, a friend of mine from another game suggested the upgrade i recently made of the R9 270X and a corsair TX650. for rather cheap since it took $270 (200 for the GPU and 70 for the PSU). he told me eventually ill have to upgrade the motherboard and processor. if this comp lasts me 2 years, then ill probably make my own later on in the future. hopefully windows 8 becomes a thing of the past by then, cause i personally dont like it.
The TV will not be any higher than 60Hz when connected to your monitor. There are only 10-20 models of TV's out of all of them in the world that are actual 120Hz refresh rates and accept that input to them. Nearly all 120Hz and 240Hz TVs just interpolate frames in between and call it whatever they want but really they are still 60Hz. A TV is actually far worse than a computer monitor because most of them have a significant amount of input lag due to the scaler and additional processing that goes on in the TV. You need to basically turn all options off to get acceptable input lag when using a TV.