Why Games Feel SO Laggy (and how to fix it :)

do you guys know Yuzu the Nintendo switch emulator that allows you to basically run switch games on your PC that just recently got banned it just got killed my Nintendo see here if you try to click on yuzu's website it's kind of sad it just loads it doesn't exist anymore it's just gone why did it get killed by Nintendo it is actually because so many people were actually playing tears of the kingdoms to The Legend of Zelda game on PC but why did people want to run tears of the Kingdom on PC probably one of the main reasons is to make it look and run better if you see here I mean the Nintendo switch is just so underpowered nowadays this is a video from digital Foundry running at 30 FPS and to a lot of people nowadays and I I don't blame people 30 FPS isn't that good of an experience this is what got me really thinking is like the switch is running at 30 FPS locked this is a live FPS counter you see this FPS graph here it is a solid line at 30 why does it run at 30 when Maybe yet sometimes on the switch it could run higher than 30 why doesn't Nintendo allow the fps to go further than that if it is possible cuz usually more FPS equals better right well even got me more curious because so many console games out there are always locked at 60 FPS or 30 FPS and rarely we've seen them locked at 45 but it's usually like pick one 30 or 60 but why do they choose to lock the FPS do they know something that we don't cuz typically when we think of FPS the higher the better you know you get as much fps you're going to get it's going to make your game look smoother it's going to make it more responsive that's why we buy faster CPUs faster Ram faster GPU on PC it's the whole advantage of PC is being able to up up your FPS further than what consoles can do but are consoles actually on to something that we're not doing because surprisingly limiting your FPS in games through a bunch of testing I did can actually be really good okay we're in a Last of Us Part One here and you can see I'm I am on a very fast GPU right now I'm on the 4070 TI super so yeah this can handle a lot of FPS I'm on a separate PC so this is entirely like this is running as fast as it can go ultra settings fully at 1440p and then you can see here at Native resolution 110 FPS on average which is really high it's super smooth really nothing to complain about you probably wouldn't even want to change in this game but this is really just to show you what is possible possible if you see here in the corner of the screen if I point that way there's a little thing called L and that stands for latency you can see we're getting about 13 to 14 milliseconds of latency now we'll go into a little bit more of how this is tied into um how fast the frame rate is a little bit later in the video but latency is super important because it's how tight is your game going to feel how responsive is your input in the real world into the the screen that you're looking at let's go ahead and cap our frame rate this going seem really int unintuitive because we were getting 110 FPS and that's really good but let's cap our frame rate to 90 and see what happens by capping our frame rate getting less frame rate in the game that we're getting better latency and you know we Capt it to 90 FPS I mean the game still feels really smooth we're at 9 milliseconds now or a little bit under that a lot of the time I'm not going to like sit here and say like oh you need every millisecond of latency in The Last of Us Part One we were already at a very good base frame rate and a really good base latency but it gives you an idea of how much things can actually change so let's also check out if we just cap it by more this might surprise you a lot let's cap it all the way to 60 FPS what you're going to see is our latency is at 9 milliseconds 9 it is still less than when we were running at 110 FPS and you guys can't see this the game does visually look less smooth to me but you're watching a 60fps video so it's going to look the same to you capping your frame rate can make the game feel really responsive now it is pretty important when you run at these frame rate caps to get the best latency that you need to be at the peak frame or get capped at 60 like you don't want to be going under 60 or whatever you cap your frames to you want to be hanging around right at that cap all the time to get the best latency I'll just show you an example of so let's say we're getting 110 FPS before and and you would think the latency would be good but because we're not always running at 110 FPS we're actually a little under it there but if we maybe look at the sky then we'll get 110 FPS and our latency will be good you see we're at 6.4 here because we're frame rate capped at 110 it knows how many frames are going to the CPU and the GPU but then if we look forward here and we're getting less than 100 T you can see our latency spikes up a lot so you want to cap your frame rate right about where you can actually maintain steady FPS and where the game visual looks smooth like 60 FPS I mean is generally agreed that the game does look quite smooth and this actually might be one of the reasons there's actually been a push recently in PC gaming to get to be getting more than 60 FPS people want this 114 FPS average of of latency but really when you cap the frame rate the game is going to feel more responsive at lower so why does the frame rate cap actually help the system latency that's because the CPU and the GPU are becoming in sync when your game is GPU limited see we're we're in last ofus part one here which is very GPU intensive so I it's also CPU intensive but I have a very fast CPU in here when especially when your GPU Limited in your system the CPU is like pumping out frames right it's working faster than the GPU is working every single frame that the GPU renders is already previously rendered on the CPU I'm showing some stuff from Gamers Nexus here cuz they collaborated with Nvidia here to do sort of like a latency demonstration when the CPU is pumping out frames faster than the GPU it ends up getting sent to this thing called a render Q as it waits for the GPU to finish up its frames but every frame that's waiting in the render queue is technically where the game should be and that means that all those frames are adding latency to your game cuz once you actually visually see the frame rendered out by your GPU there's already other things that have happened in the game now when we Caper frame rate in game now the CPU and GPU they know how many frames to expect and it actually makes that render queue kind of obsolete and that's where we're going to jump into another technology that isn't in this game but it's in another game okay we're in cyberpunk here um what I wanted to check out in this game is specifically because it has a technology called Nvidia reflex now you guys probably heard about Nvidia reflex before because it is nvidia's technology that reduces latency okay sometimes it can be great sometimes it doesn't work as well then you can also see average PC latency as well you can only use average PC latency with the Nvidia app software when you actually have dlss 3 available in the game so that's why I didn't show it in the other one but by average at the frame rates we're getting about 92 93 to 95 average FPS and we're getting about 18 milliseconds on the render latency and about 41 milliseconds on the average PC latency go ahead and just turn on Nvidia reflex and what you're going to notice is instead of limiting our frame rate our frame rate stays relatively the same sometimes times it'll go down a little bit but most of the time it'll actually be pretty pretty stable but you can see that our render latency dropped from around 17 milliseconds to 12 and then the average PC latency dropped from what was that almost 40 to like 27 or overall numbers dropped quite a bit let's goad and check out the other setting that Nvidia reflex has does have to offer and that is on plus boost kind of the same we're get about the same latency we got a little bit lower not by much so it actually seems almost more inconsistent now let's go ahead and just check it out by capping our frame rate something important to not is our frame rate didn't change that significantly using Nvidia reflex but it's was going to cap our frames at let's just do this at 80 FPS something that we could probably maintain um our overall PC latency is actually a little bit higher than it was with reflex but our render latency is lower what's interesting now is our frame rate is locked we're getting a pretty tight pretty smooth experience we can also look at what happens if we cap our frame rate all the way at obviously we were getting 90 FPS we can obviously hold a stable 60 FPS our average PC latency is around the same as it was before but the thing about it is our overall consistency in the game play is probably going to be more like consistent consistent is more consistent it's because we're always getting 60 FPS we know what latency to expect when we're playing the game and we're probably not going to drop while we're playing it either but you're probably wondering is like well how does Nvidia reflex work you're able ble to get that good latency while maintaining a higher FPS and it is a very very good technology because reflex allows you to do that and well basically what it is is a dynamic frame rate limiter calculates how long it takes the GPU to render out a frame and then basically lines up the CPU to only prepare a frame for the GPU every single time the GPU is ready so it basically marries both the GPU and the CPU together that's so that they're in sync when they're processing frames sometimes maybe the the it does the GPU is less consistent and then the CPU doesn't expect the right amount of frames that's where your frame rate could take a dip using reflex but overall you're still going to maintain really high frame rates while getting better latency because now that render Q doesn't really exist but something I just wanted to test out you know for shits and giggles in in cyberpunk here R tracing overdrive and let's just set it to dlss balanced at 1440p this is maxed out rate tracing and just see what kind of FPS we can hit getting around the mid 60s on FPS here very fast card so it is able to do this is very demanding so what you can see here is our latency without any kind of reduction technique is pretty bad 50 milliseconds of latency on the average PC and I'm not going to lie it doesn't feel that tight especially because the 60fps frame rate isn't that consistent sometimes it's better sometimes it's worse when that when it gets better uh when you have higher frame rate then your latency is going to decrease and actually feel tighter because there's less time in between the frames obviously we do have reflex in this game so we could just turn off our frame rate cap and turn on reflex and we'll get better latency so if you have access to reflex technology it can be a great tool we're going to get into AMD cards a little bit later in this video but yeah reflex is a great technology but capping your frame rate I will say is definitely an alternative so like say we're capping at a 50 FPS that sound as a PC Gamer capping at 50 FPS but it's not 60 uh yeah maybe you would technically want to cap it at 60 and maybe you can always go to DSS performance so you maintain 60 FPS something also I wanted to show you too if you are capping your frame rate to reduce latency um you know you're going to be sacrificing a little bit of smoothness to make the latency better in your game because the more frames you have running in the game the smoother it's going to appear and all that stuff I do think dlss performance looks pretty soft here at 1440p it doesn't look terrible but it does look pretty soft if you're in like a a single player game and it doesn't really matter about like you know seeing every single frame perfectly then you could turn on something like motion blur and that does make up a a lot like to me the game looks so much smoother with motion blur on it and yeah obviously we're locking our frame rate at 60 and we have full path tracing on in the game with dlss performance right now getting good latency without reflex on or anything right now it's just really really good experience again when people talk about like you know 60 FPS isn't good enough are they talking about the game doesn't look smooth enough or they are they talking about that the uh latency isn't good enough in the game and that's where capping your frame rate getting a solid 60fps could be really good 60 FPS is not dead I mean eventually we're going to always want higher and higher frame rates but it's clearly not dead but let's go and hop into a competitive game just to check it out there where latency matters a lot because it actually gives you competitive Advantage if you can see somebody peeking around a corner you know before uh the the opponent can see you so actually having a faster refresh rate monitor having faster peripherals that you know respond faster to your movements like faster render times in your game does affect your competitive Advantage you can see people and kill them before they can kill you we're cranking a ton of FPS here we're at 1440p on Native at at medium settings so it's pretty low settings for this GPU and everything and this resolution latencies are pretty good I mean overall PC latency is only 10 milliseconds our frame time on the graph there is only 2 milliseconds so maybe we can improve that that latency by turning on some different settings now this game does um feature reflex and stuff like that but can we do this without being so inefficient because to me it almost feels like a waste of how much uh frames that we're pumping out we can't even see them so is there a way to optimize this to make it more responsive while not having our GPU work so hard or our CPU works so hard first off let's just go and check out Nvidia reflex just enable it and the settings here because we are GPU or actually CPU Limited in this game running at like you know 480 FPS or whatever or 90 FPS Nvidia reflex relies on us being GPU limited the CPU needs to know how long the gpus takes to render a frame so we're not seeing this insanely big Improvement in PC latency we were at about 10 milliseconds before and now we're at about nine or a little under nine at times so I don't think most people can notice that some people can some people claim they can I don't think most people would so let's also check um the Nvidia reflex plus plus boost is our frame rate does go down a lot we dropped from like 490 fps to 450 but our latency also decreased a lot now our render latency in the game is about the same but our average PC latency dropped from 10 before we turn on reflex to five um Reflex on plus boost now a lot of people actually would be able to feel 5 milliseconds latency I'm I'm playing this on 120 Herz refresh rate right now let's go ahead and drop this down to 240 HZ as the frame rate cap and see what happens what you do see which is absolutely bizarre we cut our frame rate in less than half or we went from 490 to 240 that's a little bit less than half we are actually getting a better latency now the render latency is about the same 8 millisec 9 milliseconds of latency so we dropped like a millisecond there now you're not going to be able to see that but what's really interesting is you look at the top our GPU is only working at less than 50% of what it needs to do our CPU is barely working too so this can make your system a lot more efficient especially like if you're just chilling out playing a game why do you need to draw a whole bunch of power like my system overall is drawing like 200 Watts right now it's like it's pretty pretty low amount of power but you can also do another thing in this game this won't be available in every game but some games have this little setting here let me hide my camera that is actually called reduce buffering and if you turn on reduce buffering I'm not exactly sure what it does but it does affect your latency which is pretty cool what you can see is we now without using reflex technology at all so you could do this on any brand GPU we'll check that out in a little bit we now dropped our render latency down from what is it like 3 milliseconds or so down to two and our average PC latency is in the mid 5 to 6 milliseconds of latency and that is actually something that you'd feel and we're running at 240 HZ like our system is barely working compared to what it was doing before is your latency isn't going to are a whole lot I mean you're locked at 240 FPS which means that you're not going to like have swings in latency as you're playing the game like one time it's more responsive one time it isn't as responsive like what if you can't maintain 240 FPS well in a game like um OverWatch 2 here we actually have a thing called Dynamic resolution scale it dynamically is going to change what resolution your game is running out in order to Target a frame rate and this is our frame rate that we're targeting 240 FPS if your game were to drop below that Target frame rate then it's going to decrease the render resolution of the game and then upscale it in order to maintain the look at the game while not impacting your FPS a whole lot is now at like 5.66 milliseconds of latency extremely consistent and even if some crazy stuff was happening in the game your latency wouldn't change a whole lot because the resolution scale will compensate for it so you're getting this insanely consistent and responsive experience you can basically get the entire advantage of Nvidia reflex like making your gameplay even more consistent now this does take a little bit of tinkering again like I said Nvidia reflex being a oneclick solution is really really good and really really powerful but having a very consistent and responsive experience especially in a competitive game is extremely strong it gives you literally a competitive Advantage you can kill people before they can even see you um there's still a skill Gap there like just because you have a fast Monitor and you optimize all your latency settings yes it's going to give you an edge but you still got to be good at the game I'm sorry I'm not that good at the game so I'm I'm talking from experience I'm not a god so let's go and check out how you can use frame rate caps on AMD gpus as well and I bet you're wondering it's like okay what is the difference between AMD and Nvidia in terms of latency well Nvidia has been on top of the game latency because of reflex technology which we looked at but also AMD has made attempts to catch up as of recently and in terms of graphics and stuff you can actually turn on this little feature called anti lag which does help to reduce input lag but it also doesn't really have an FPS hit or anything like that so you might as well just turn it on AMD did make another competitor and that is called anti-ag plus and I on the wrong PC one second anti-ag plus but they did it in a way where you don't actually integrate it into the games because Nvidia technology is essential to be integrated into the game so that it the game engine knows how fast the GPU is rendering how fast CPU is rendering how to manage that render queue how to eliminate it and that kind of stuff instead what we're going to do is mod the game and guess what happens when you mod the game you get banned and the games that are most important for latency like other games yes visually demanding ones could be important for latency anti- like plus because you modded the game and counter- strike 2 people are getting banned for using anti- plus they did kind of resolve this everybody who got banned because of it did get unbanned but amds hasn't really recovered from the sense and to this day um anti-ig plus isn't isn't on their gpus anymore they removed them so people would stop getting banned accidentally and stuff and this feature did come out in 2023 they're saying that it's going come back I have no clue how they're going to do it U because they're still going to be modding the games apparently there is an advantage to AMD taking the approach of modding the games cuz Nvidia has to work with developers in order to integrate reflex technology into games that's why reflex isn't in every game basically the AMD developers can just figure out how to put it in the game and then mod it into it instead of having to work with the devs and everything it's like AMD can do it all on their side of it devs might not like that which I wouldn't even blame them for not liking this basically modding the game some games aren't meant to be modded and stuff like that let's check out amd's ways to reduce latency because anti- like plus isn't really a thing right so so how do we reduce latency we're in cyber Punk here and I have to use this overlay in the top left because it's the only way I can measure latency on AMD cards what I'm going to do is also enable this and now I'm going to enlarge it and you can see it does show the GPU percentage and stuff like that you want to mostly be focusing on this number here that says the the milliseconds that is PC latency U we're getting 50 milliseconds of latency at 1440p Ultra and we don't have any frame rate limiter or anything like that so let's just turn on anti-ag right here and you can actually turn it on without having to reopen the game you can see we just dropped from 50 to like 30 that is actually a huge difference okay and that is without any input from the game engine I don't know how they're doing that that is very effective though um say for example you're in a case where you try anti-ag and it just doesn't work that well so anti-s off right now we're at like 50 milliseconds of latency and the game is like ah feels okay 85 FPS let's see if we frame limit the game to 70 and see what kind of difference it's going to make for us to now around 35 milliseconds of latency on average what is nice about it too is it is consistent so we're actually consistently getting 70 FPS so this is just like a global way you can reduce latency it's not specific to the GPU brand um we're actually at ultra settings at 1440p on the 7800 XT no resolution scaling or anything you can see that we're getting about you know 310 FPS or so about 16 milliseconds of PC latency now I'm not sure if you'll always be able to use frame view I will leave a link to frame view the tool I'm using to actually see latency here I think it only works in games that has dlss 3 available in it that you'll actually be able to see that on an AMD card even though you're not using dlss you need to have it available in the game because it's how Nvidia works with the latency pipeline I think I know we're using Nvidia software to monitor an AMD card but it is it is what it is it is what it is it's a tool that tool that works so let's see what happens if we mess with a few things so first of all we could actually set the FPS cap um because we can hit 240 FPS pretty consistently so let's just try capping at 240 what happens our latency improves dramatically we drop from literally like 16 17 millisecs of latency all the way down to like 8 and a half milliseconds ly oh oh it just dips into seven wow uncapping the frame rate what's interesting too is you do see our GPU doesn't have to work as hard we're at like 80% load as we're at 100% load before but we're actually getting better latency but what happens if we drop the settings down in the game is it better to just cap your frame rates and not even drop the settings in your game 400 FPS in the game and you can actually see our latency was lower by capping our frame rate at 240 instead of this let's go ahead and cap it now we can cap at 360 you know what I mean we can cap it higher because the settings are lower and then our latency is going to be even better because we're at a higher frame rate and now we're getting like 6 milliseconds of latency so just by capping our frame rate we pretty much cut the latency in half which is absolutely incredible and I just realized my face cam has been off but I've been looking at the camera and I'm haven't even been I haven't even been actually show on the screen and then all the same things apply like with the Nvidia GPU is like we can always always use Dynamic resolution scaling we can always do that kind of stuff to maintain that um target FPS and in this game like FSR 2 uh FSR 2.2 so yeah we have available anything that we'd want to use it for like seriously frame rate is always something that we Target and we always want as high a frame rate as we can possibly get what we found out today is like yeah frame rate capping it actually does make sense it does provide a more consistent experience it does provide lower latency even compared to higher frame rate rates because this the CPU the GPU they know what's going down you know they can they can talk they can communicate they know what's up allows your your system to be at as low latency as possible and at the same time frame caps can make your your system more efficient in terms of like power efficiency or noise heat you know that type of stuff you know especially like maybe you're in the summer and it's really hot in your room or whatever you can turn on a frame rate cap to reduce the heat in your room how do you do it what we saw is you actually do want to have a frame rate counter on the screen or something just to see what kind of frame rate you can get and maybe tweak your settings in the game to get a decent amount of FPS that you would be okay with capping at so say you're getting 65 FPS maybe you want to turn down settings in the game so you could be achieving 70 FPS consistently so that you won't dip below 60 or you actually cap it that will give you the best latency in the game and also make your system just more efficient it does take a little bit of manual tuning that's why uh latency tools like a reflex and anti-ag plus when it does come around are very very good tools just click one button and you pretty much get the best latency you can most of the time while maintaining that higher frame rate now what is the major downside of capping your frame rate I think it's kind of obvious is you're sacrificing smoothness for latency if the game is running smooth enough you know even if you turn on people might hate me for this but you turn on a little motion blur it could actually look really good but it just depend depend on personal preference how high is the refresh rate of your monitor but a lot of times I would say if you're able to lock 60 FPS in the game it's still going to feel pretty damn good there's a huge crowd of people out there fighting for gpus to be pushing past 90 or something like that or the 90 is the new 60 I don't think that's really entirely true as long as you have a rock solid 60 and it's capped it looks really good A little bit of motion blur too really Smooths it out then in competitive games even frame rate caps are still a good thing like it makes your system more efficient like you can still get insanely insanely good latency performance while being a lot more efficient and you don't even see the frames like say I'm playing on 120 htz here like why would I need 400 FPS when I'm not getting a latency benefit from it and I can just cap it at a much lower frame rate it really some things to consider but capping your frame rate can surprisingly be very good definitely answer that question at least for me hopefully for you too why frame rates are always capped in games I was like why do they do that why only just to let the frame rate run as wild as possible but hope you learned something today and I'm going to see you guys in the next one [Music] peace

Channel: Vex

Views: 92,930

Keywords: latency, fps, framerate, frame rate, high fps, high, reflex, nvidia reflex, nvidia, antilag, antilag+, amd, vex, high fps doesn't matter, doesn't matter, low-latency

Id: wQzi112P9Zc

Length: 26min 46sec (1606 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 16 2024