We often neglect to get too involved in the discussion of what options people should always enable when they play games. Rather, we tend to focus on what we test with. Honestly, our recommended settings for playing the games we test would be very similar to the settings we use to benchmark with one very important exception: we would enable triple buffering (which implies vsync) whenever possible. While it's not an available option in all games, it really needs to be, and we are here to make the case for why gamers should use triple buffering and why developers need to support it.
Most often gamers, when it comes to anything regarding vsync, swear by forcing vsync off in the driver or disabling it in the game. In fact, this is what we do when benchmarking because it allows us to see more clearly what is going on under the hood. Those who do enable vsync typically do so to avoid the visual "tearing" that can occur in some cases despite the negative side effects.
We would like to try something a little different with this article. We'll include two polls, one here and one at the end of the article. This first poll is designed to report what our readers already do with respect to vsync and double versus triple buffering.
{poll 134:300}
After reading the rest of this article, our readers are invited to answer a related poll which is designed to determine if arming gamers with the information this article provides will have any impact on what settings are used from here on out.
First up will be a conceptual review of what double buffering and vsync are, then we'll talk about what triple buffering brings to the table. For those who really want the nitty gritty (or who need more convincing) we will provide follow that up with a deeper dive into each approach complete with some nifty diagrams.
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The0ne - Friday, June 26, 2009 - link
I truly believe this article and the arguments are really for the hardcore gamers. I game myself but rarely do I care for the few minor issues that occur every now and then. If you're not a hardcore gamer it's really not an issue whether you have any of these options on.OblivionLord - Friday, June 26, 2009 - link
What i would like to see in the tests is multiple passes and some custom test runs ingame using while frabs to capture the framecount.. not just complete synthetic benching using either the ingame timedemo or a custom timedemo. This way things are a bit more realistic to how the benches reflect gameplay performance.Also throw in the Min and Max framerates for those that want to know. Not just limit us to the AVG.
This triple buffering issue is just small fries compared to the overall method of how this site conducts its tests to other sites.
ereetos - Friday, June 26, 2009 - link
In some games, extremely high FPS will distort the physics in games (e.g. quake, call of duty)with your video card rendering 125 fps, you can move faster than people running 60fps, shoot faster, and jump further. When you bump that up to 250 fps, you have an increased advantage which is why multiplayer gets capped to 250fps by punkbuster software.
If you enable triple buffer, but no vsync, will this still be the case? or will the game engine interpret it as a lower frame rate?
DerekWilson - Friday, June 26, 2009 - link
it is impossible to disable vsync and enable triple buffering.the point of triple buffering is to allow one buffer to remained locked all the way through a vertical refresh cycle so that there is no corruption while still allowing the game to have two buffers to bounce back and forth between.
i was unaware of the punkbuster "feature" ... i imagine that since the game would report only 60 FPS with triple buffering, even if you were getting the lag advantage of something like 300 FPS, that it would not be limited in that case.
but i don't know how punkbuster works, so i could very well be wrong.
Dynotaku - Friday, June 26, 2009 - link
So here's a question. I have a 120hz LCD. I run it with vsync disabled, and in for instance CoD4, I get around 90FPS most of the time. No tearing that I can really detect.So with a 120hz monitor, is triple buffering still better or is it a case where it doesn't make that much difference as long as you're getting 60+ FPS?
JarredWalton - Friday, June 26, 2009 - link
If you enabled VSYNC, you'd get 60FPS, while with triple buffering you should get 90FPS still (but with perhaps slightly more latency).Dynotaku - Friday, June 26, 2009 - link
I guess my question is, is it better to disable vsync or enable triple buffering? It probably doesn't matter much at 90 FPS. I'm running without vsync and I don't see any tearing and the framerate is amazing an really fluid.DerekWilson - Friday, June 26, 2009 - link
if you have a real 120hz refresh, triple buffering would be even better as there would be no tearing and the maximum additional lag added by triple buffering would be cut in half.Running at 90 FPS on a 120 Hz monitor, triple buffering would still be the best option.
jp777cmoe - Saturday, July 18, 2009 - link
with or without vsync on? i have a 120hz monitor.. not sure if i should go no vsync + triple buffering or vsync with triple bufferingvegemeister - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
He would get "90 FPS", but since his monitor is not running at 90Hz, what he would actually see is a ridiculous amount of judder.