v - sync

[Frank]

Hello,
has anyone had a substantial increase in performance by disabling v-sync?
My older voodoo2/TNT setup 'seemed' to benefit more from this(but also exhibited greater graphic anamolies as a result).
I have conclusive results of the speed increse associated with my G400 when v-sync is disabled but somehow I was expecting a little more.
This feature used to affect my scores markedly with the older cards but not so with my G400.
Will anybody confirm or deny this?
Regards,
Frank.

[Maggi]

you will only see a noticeable boost when you use double buffering and not triple buffering ...

Check it out with 3D Mark.

------------------
Cheerio,
Maggi
________________________
Asus P2B-DS @ 103MHz FSB
2x P3-450 @ 464MHz
512MB CAS2 SDRAM
Millenium G400 32MB DH

[Frank]

Thanks, I will try that out and take that into consideration when setting up games.
Frank.

[Maggi]

When you have VSync enabled (better visual quality, no tearing) you should use triple buffering to maintain speed.

When you're heading for highscores in benchmarking whatsoever, set to VSync off and double buffering.

You could also measure the difference between VSync On vs. Off when using Single buffering ...

------------------
Cheerio,
Maggi
________________________
Asus P2B-DS @ 103MHz FSB
2x P3-450 @ 464MHz
512MB CAS2 SDRAM
Millenium G400 32MB DH

[absalom]

Single buffering? heh, I think you mean double buffering. No card I know of works with a single buffer. The way today's graphics cards work is you basically have 2 buffers. One buffer is the local image that is drawn to the monitor. The second buffer is the "workspace", for lack of a better word, where polygons and textures get drawn. After the scene is drawn to the second buffer it is copied to the first buffer then drawn to the monitor. If you were to use a single buffer you'd see polygons flickering as they are being drawn each frame. Triple buffering is just an extra buffer used to help keep the visuals in syncronization with the monitor. Triple buffering doesn't make things faster, it just eats up more ram... especially at higher resoultions. There's a formula for figuring out how much ram it takes for the framebuffers at a resoultion. I can't remember it off my head though...
http://www.3dgaming.com/fps/techshop/glossary/index.htm

This is an old but good article on 3d terms... there's a nice formula there to figure out how much memory is taken away at X resolution with Y-bit z-buffer. You can sort of figure out what amount of ram it takes for double and triple buffering there... but no actual formula is provided.

[This message has been edited by absalom (edited 09-21-1999).]

[This message has been edited by absalom (edited 09-21-1999).]