I tend to play stuff at 40fps because my experience of it is that I feel like I’m getting 90% of the way to 60 (playing a lot of 30 until mid-20s will do that to you!), and then shift up to 60 if I have headroom or the game in particular feels rough at 40. My main machine has a 120Hz monitor and it’s lovely for some games, but it’s something I ‘feel’ on the mouse more than I ‘see’. I just can’t imagine using it on my deck for the vanishingly few games that can hit 90 on the Deck and then caring.
But, I’ve seen claims like ‘setting it to 40Hz will make it run 40 in an 80Hz container’ (some Nerd Nest video or the guy on it who does a lot of battery testing), or the PCGamer review which states the OLED can take “a game locked at 30 fps and triple each frame so it runs like butter at 90Hz”.
Is this just referring to, say, response time / latency?
45fps
There is no benefit but since Valve went for this screen that has this capability why artificially limit you for the refresh rate you choose? Mind you that you can ran on 60Hz if you want to, so there is no downside.
Thats plain wrong, why do you think vrr is a thing. If you have 30 fps while running a 30hz screen and then dip to 29 fps, you will miss a frame and wait for next refresh, so instead of 33.4ms between each frame, you get one frame that will be delayed by 66.8ms.
If youre running 90hz and have 30 fps dip to 29, that one frame will only be delayed by 44.5ms instead. Since a refresh happens every 11.1ms instead of 33.4.
If you have 100% locked 30fps in games it doesnt matter, but almost no game will always run 100% locked with 0 fluctuation.
No you are wrong. The VRR is different because it does it on the fly so you do not need to lock the Hz. Steam Deck does not have VRR, so it has to lock, but can lock to any Hz you want. Is not limited to 90Hz.
Lets say you have a game that fluctuates from 30fps to 50fps. On the Deck your best option to to lock at 30Hz (or an integer multiple). This looses the extra fps but this is not that bad, you get it on battery life. On ROG Ally that has VRR you can live it uncapped and get all the extra fps which is nice (and also have less than an hour battery life)
To add to your statement, which is correct, SD’s LCD screen flickers at anything other than 60hz, so some people might experience dizzines, eye strain, headaches, and so on, when playing at say 40hz, with the OLED they might play 40 fps at 80hz and avoid said issues.
My understanding is that with the new display there is no such thing as running at a high frame rate with a lower frame limit (ie 60hz 40fps), I’ve seen digital foundry’s review and they mention (and show) how the two sliders have been unified into a single one
There’s a setting to revert back to 2 sliders
Ah I see, good to know! 👍
What I’m wondering is… When Im now at 60Hz and cap the framerate at 30 in the quick access menu. I get really noticable input lag. (at least the games I tried). When I run these games at 40Hz with 40fps, it’s not really noticable for me. So, now on the OLED, let’s say you want 40fps, the screen is at 80Hz. What’s the input lag be like? Nearly as bad as the LCD deck with 30fps cap on 60hz? I really hope that’s not the case, but I think it is. That would be really bad. (I know in developmer options you can separate the slider, but how low can the OLED refreshrate go, and will the seperate slider always be an option?) We will see I guess.
btw https://youtu.be/LkrV6VlGPIE?si=haFYk3WZfqS9cci0
very promising
The issue is usually that both the in-game vsync, as well as the deck’s system level vsync is active. Therefore, it have multiple frames delay, which is very noticeable at 30 fps. Allowing tearing fixes this.
So what’s the best way to have the best experience/input lag? Never messed with Allow Tearing, just left the default 60 fps cap, and generally disable Vsync in-game and either use game’s 60 fps cap or put unlimited.
Would the best be Allow Tearing On, disable in-game vsync and use game FPS cap?
I haven’t done such extensive tests, so somebody else probably can answer this better.
From my knowledge:
For minimum latency, you would want to disable all vsync (so ingame off and allow tearing), as well as the FPS cap. You could even overclock the screen (I believe the LCD goes up to slightly over 70 hz).
But this won’t necessarily be the best experience, because it will result in tearing, uneven frame pacing and increased battery drain.
For a more balanced experience, I found it to be good to have one vsync enabled (either ingame or via allow tearing off) and an appropriate FPS cap. I believe in theory, you don’t need the FPS cap if it is intended to be the same as the refresh rate and vsync is on (because vsync will sync frames to the screen anyway). But it hasn’t caused noticeable issues for me if I didn’t have double vsync.
A higher refresh screen will always feel smoother and more responsive regardless of frame rate because the screen is refreshing more often. Playing TW3 at 60fps on the Ally’s 120hz screen feels really, really good. The downside of this SD refresh is that the device won’t perform any better, it’s still going to push 30-45fps in a lot of games. But that experience is going to feel tremendously better on the new screen because (1) it’s OLED with amazing colors and contrast, (2) OLED has near instant response time leading to a faster and snappier experience, and (3) 30Hz more refresh rate will be noticeably smoother compared to 60Hz.
I have probably been saying this for like a decade, but people still believe that you need to hit your monitor’s max. refresh rate to feel any difference compared to a standard 60hz screen. No, a screen with a higher refresh rate is not pointless if you don’t hit the max. refresh rate.
This is good to know. I had no idea. Thank you.
I cant remember which youruber was reviewing the oled SD that said it felt better on the menus even.
He went on to say how human mind takes all these little inprovements and translates it to a smoother feeling performance even if the framerate hasn’t changed.
One benefit to OLED is you can run 35fps@70Hz. Minimum refresh rate for LCD is 40 afaik so you can’t do that.
None.