Stutter vs. Tearing - Desktop Composition Mode (Aero) On or Off?

[indiadamjones]

Yes! The new 1.5 Engine is hands down amazing, and the performance increase is on the magnitude of 10-20 fps increase in most areas. Naturally this is going to flush out some new bottlenecks for everyone as they squeeze more out of their systems.

 

Now, what I have realized is that Aero mode, and specifically Desktop Composition Mode, within your advance performance settings in Windows 7, FORCES V-sync. If you turn it off, you will get cockpit tearing as you look side to side with GhettoIR, or other headtracking.

 

So, just to review. Ultra smooth flight is available if you turn off Desktop Composition Mode, but it introduces tearing in the cockpit. If you choose to keep it enabled, V-sync will introduce some stuttering as it tries to keep the cockpit from tearing. This will be more intense the more objects that get rendered.

 

I haven't seen anything about this on ED forums, yet, and of course a lot of people complaining about tears and stuttering, but it appears to me, we don't have too many options here. Maybe this will change if you get your system specs up a bit, and cap the framerate to the monitor refresh rate. Any who, just thought I would leave this here for the detectives and clue hunters.

[danilop]

To cut the long story short - stutter free and smooth performance in 1.5 is unfortunately only possible running elevated frame rates. If your system can constantly keep the FPS well above your monitor refresh rate, you are happy camper. Most systems don't.

 

For the majority of users that means one of the three things: crippled graphics settings, annoying tearing or much less smoothness in comparison with 1.2 at the same frame rate.

 

There is no free lunch, after all ...

[DayGlow]

Run with for capped at 60 with vsync off. Mist tines run 45-60fps with no stutter or tearing.

[danilop]

I've tried all other suggestions and tweaks, including capping, but no joy - capping indeed helps somewhat, but it was not "1.2" smooth without further tweaks.

 

Only thing that helped in my case is No Tree Shadows Mod and Vsync ON in game which keeps FPS fixed at 60FPS constantly @ High settings. Tree shadows are performance hog and getting rid of them is small price to pay in eye candy department. We need option to switch them off in settings menu. It's again smooth as it was in 1.2!

 

 

Rig: I5 4670K @ 4.4, 8GB RAM and GTX 770 2GB @ 1920x1200, 60Hz

Edited October 11, 2015 by danilop

[doveman]

Haven't tried it myself yet but with The Witcher 3 a way to eliminate stutter was to run borderless windowed, cap fps and enable vsync in-game and also cap fps with MSI Afterburner. This worked because BW forced triple buffering, whilst capping with AB kept a steady frametime as well as framerate, whereas the in-game cap only affected the framerate. So might be worth experimenting with those.