Am I misunderstanding FreeSync? Still getting tearing

[Shoopman]

I recently upgraded my monitor and went from Gsync to Freesync. AFAIK these two technologies are basically identical. They are supposed to sync your monitor's refresh rate to the output of the GPU, displaying exactly one frame every time one is rendered. This eliminates tearing because the display is not trying to show two halves of different frames at once.

 

Here is where my confusion starts: I am playing Resident Evil 8 with Freesync on and Vsync off, with a framerate cap of 116 and refresh rate of 120. However, I am still getting tearing. Not all the time, but it pops up fairly often. How I understand it is that Vsync is not needed with G/Freesync as long as your FPS is not exceeding the refresh rate of the display, hence the fps cap. If I'm wrong please let me know because this is driving me crazy. I triple checked that everything is set correctly. If I turn Vsync on, the tearing goes away.

 

The only thing I can think of (if I'm not just wrong about how this all works) is that 116 is somehow not low enough of a cap? Is it possible that the game is spiking above 116 momentarily, too fast for to be compensated for? I was to be clear that this doesn't happen in other games, not even other Resident Evil games which use the same engine, so it's very weird to me.

[BuzzingBee]

Have you tried restarting PC? Switching between full screen exclusive and borderless windows? Reinstall graphics driver? 

 

You did the right thing with capping FPS just below refresh rate, I went one step further and cap at exact refresh rate and turn on enhanced-sync / fast-sync. But yes, sometimes freesync just don't like to work on certain games for no reason and going through some simple troubleshootings usually solves the issue.

[LIGISTX]

1 hour ago, Shoopman said:

I recently upgraded my monitor and went from Gsync to Freesync. AFAIK these two technologies are basically identical. They are supposed to sync your monitor's refresh rate to the output of the GPU, displaying exactly one frame every time one is rendered. This eliminates tearing because the display is not trying to show two halves of different frames at once.

 

Here is where my confusion starts: I am playing Resident Evil 8 with Freesync on and Vsync off, with a framerate cap of 116 and refresh rate of 120. However, I am still getting tearing. Not all the time, but it pops up fairly often. How I understand it is that Vsync is not needed with G/Freesync as long as your FPS is not exceeding the refresh rate of the display, hence the fps cap. If I'm wrong please let me know because this is driving me crazy. I triple checked that everything is set correctly. If I turn Vsync on, the tearing goes away.

 

The only thing I can think of (if I'm not just wrong about how this all works) is that 116 is somehow not low enough of a cap? Is it possible that the game is spiking above 116 momentarily, too fast for to be compensated for? I was to be clear that this doesn't happen in other games, not even other Resident Evil games which use the same engine, so it's very weird to me.

I wouldn't cap the FPS in the game engine, but I would turn on fast sycn in nvidia control panel. This lets the game run at full speed (since having the engine hold it back can cause issues, potentially what your seeing), but only allows the GPU to actually output frames within the adaptive refresh FPS window. 

[Stahlmann]

Turn on V-Sync globally in your GPU driver, but OFF in the ingame settings. Then the rest of the tearing will go away and you won't have the input lag from ingame implementations.