WoW - Lag Fix

[Aria]

Just an update.. I noticed running this fix while also having bittorrent downloading things is a problem. Unless my connection has just been fucking up, out of nowhere every once in awhile I lag to all hell for about 5 minutes until I pause my torrents. Anyone else experienced?

[darksensei]

Dips in FPS make your average FPS important even above the level the eye can discern.

[Marauder]

Originally Posted by TKarrde

No, they can't. Not in the way those who are perpetuating yet another myth ("FRAME RATE IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN 60 FPS AND 120 FPS IS PROFOUND") want us to believe. But there is no discernible difference when playing WoW.

And most of you people who go OH I CAN TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN 200 FPS AND 60 FPS are on monitors with 60Hz refresh rate, making your argument retarded and yet another case of placebo influencing opinion.

Motion blur can be detected up to 300 Hz - in fact Vsync is added precisely for purposes of motion blur, and the you can discern higher than 60 Hz, and discern framerate that goes beyond and below the refresh rate. A simple analogy is the spinning wheel standing still that you learned about in grade school.

[Plorkyeran]

Originally Posted by Marauder

Motion blur can be detected up to 300 Hz - in fact Vsync is added precisely for purposes of motion blur, and the you can discern higher than 60 Hz, and discern framerate that goes beyond and below the refresh rate. A simple analogy is the spinning wheel standing still that you learned about in grade school.

Wow. That may be the single least accurate statement about VSync I've ever seen, and I've seen some pretty funny theories from people with no idea what it actually does. Most of the stuff after the OP is outdated now, but this is a decent overview of what VSync actually does.

[Marauder]

Well what I said was right, but I used the term "motion blur" incorrect at one point, I can clarify.

I'm talking about two things in my post - one is Vsync, and the other are the limitations of the human eye. It was mostly a reply to the quoted statement which was incorrect.

I can reword it more precisely, and keep in mind I was talking about a CRT - "refresh rate" with LCDs is different. Because video games do not produce the same type of motion blur as in a 24 fps TV image, they typically require a higher framerate to become cleaner (or maybe smoother is a better word). This means high framerates on crisp, nonblurred discernable images - which are detectable well in excess of 60 fps, or 60 hz. Anyone should be able to see the effects of this simply by changing framerate caps and refresh rate caps on a monitor (and game) that allows it. 60 Hz is readily detectable by turning your head to the side and viewing the flickering with the periphery of your eye. A 100-125 /s refresh will look much more "solid."

In fact there is a lot of study in the field of oculomotor adaptation and eye strain when it comes to refresh rate - CRT's are known to cause eye strain at lower resolutions. In fact you will read a large paragraph measurably faster at 500 Hz vs 60 Hz (although the break point in between those values is probably not known).

When the framerate and refresh rate don't match, you get an effect like the spinning wheel that I mentioned - only in computers it works as images chalked together (called tearing - which I called motion blur in the bolded area above - which is incorrect - but the idea is that you add vsync because you're going to have a mismatch at times). Vsync basically fixes this. If images did blur together, this would not be as necessary - even as stacked images, although vsync would still help - especially with rapid motion or large scene changes.

I remember building a very basic graphics animation engine for a television output while in my senior year of college. Our choices to combat all sorts of "jerkiness" of the images was to either write an algorithm to blur images, or to write one that effectively worked as a framerate vsync (which gets complicated when the program runs extremely "hot" and has to scale down). Vsync was an easier, but divergent method to work at our issue. I'm not sure that helps anyway.

Edit: It should be noted that you can get motion judder on LCDs by setting a refresh rate different from its native value. Many LCD's have an internal frame buffer that forces a refresh rate of the native refresh rate (usually 60Hz), regardless of the video card output or settings. So even though you told WoW to display at 85 Hz, the screen will only display 60 Hz. If your video card feeds out a matched framerate and refresh rate you can have problems.

Setting your displays like this can cause tearing obviously, and motion judder (it will dump refresh rate - native rate frames each second). This was one of the problems we had on our program, and it makes things look "jerky".

[Dynalisia]

Originally Posted by Jabberwhacky

So I've been a fan of VSync for a while now, but recently I download a UI compilation that seems to have the setting fucked up. It's always worked fine (no tearing) for the past 3 years or so, but now, whether or not I have it checked or unchecked, I get tearing. Is there any sort of master-command in some config or .wtf file that would override the ingame Option menu? It's really rather annoying.

Video drivers sometimes have a global override I think.