u/serickson567

So I tried Bazzite with my nvidia card a while back, and although I prefer windows for a variety of reasons, Bazzite always felt “smoother” than windows, despite both being locked to my 60hz monitor. I researched for a long time and the most likely difference is due to gamescope using a variety of methods to present its frames. After a while, I found what I wanted and I have now matched, if not exceeded the smoothness Bazzite gives my PC on Windows.

For anyone who’s using a Blackwell RTX 50 series card, it seems the best frame limiter to use at the moment is the Nvidia App frame limiter over RTSS.

I’ve used RTSS (both async and front edge sync) and Nvidia’s frame limiter is just straight up another level.

To my understanding, Nvidia has implemented a hardware flip metering block into the new cards, which allows it to process the frames to the exact refresh rate of the display. I don’t know enough to go into details like MsBetweenPresents and MsBetweenDisplayChange, and the frame pacing can’t be seen when using RTSS’s overlay, but the difference in visual clarity is easy enough for me to see. I’ve also checked with LLM and they confirm that is much better pacing through the Nvidia frame limiter.

I’m not sure how many people know this as Nvidia hasn’t seemed to advertise it but try it out after disabling RTSS and you may feel the difference. Latency is also incredibly minimal.

Hope this helps anyone who had any issues with frame pacing.

Edit: so after a comment I double checked and older cards than 50 series still get an upgraded frame limiter due to recent updated drivers. Apparently it can be comparable to latent sync from special k, but i havent tested it and i am unsure how. If someone can that would be great, as a possible alternative to RTSS for frame pacing. On top of this, for older cards this is driver level implementation only, but still hooks deeply into the windows DXGI. 50 series however have a physical silicon block that processes these, so results would be better on there.

Just putting this out there hoping it may help some people.

Not sure if this works for everybody, but I play on my 4k 60fps projector, and so using frame gen was always an issue for me. I have an RTX 5080 but pushing my games to the max settings on 4k with upscaling would still get me below 40fps on demanding games. When using frame gen x2 this would be even worse, even if it looks smoother at 60fps, there’s lots of artefacts and the real frames would get cut down to 30fps to double with frame gen to 60fps, so it would also feel very sluggish.

I’ve found a way around this.

On the Nvidia app, if you change the V-Sync setting for the game to Adaptive Sync, then any frames above 60fps ends up getting dropped, including frame gen frames. This means essentially, I can run Crimson Desert on max settings on 4k, with ray regeneration on, running at 40-45fps. Then using frame gen it makes it feel as smooth as 60fps.

Now granted the game isn’t as responsive as a real 60fps (as the real frames are only 40fps), it is a fair trade for me on single player games to get the smooth 60fps look and responsiveness of 40-45fps.

I also have RTSS compatibility setting set to Nvidia Reflex (unsure if this has any effect on why I get responsive 60fps frame gen but just including for those that may want to get this set up).

I hope this is useful to anyone who wants to push their graphics to the maximum while still retaining 60fps smoothness without degrading most the responsiveness. (I understand most people have monitors/TV’s with higher refresh rates but just in case there’s the edge cases like me with only 60hz displays).

Hope everyone is having a good day :)

EDIT: So I just checked online, and using the Nvidia Reflex setting on the RTSS compatibility setting, seems to replace games’ default frame rate pacing with Nvidia’s reflex SDK, which lowers system input latency especially when using DLSS Frame Gen. This may be another reason why the using frame gen with adaptive sync feels responsive too. If someone else could test if that’s the case, would be useful, as I’m not sure how I would test it properly :)

Another thing I noticed was that on Crimson Desert, on max settings with RR on, on DLSS balanced 4K I get around 95-100% GPU usage at 40fps, but then using frame gen, it hits 60fps with only 80-85% GPU usage. I’m not sure how/why, but I’m assuming it’s because when using frame gen it doesn’t need to render past the 60fps. Either way, with the addition of feeling still quite responsive, decreased GPU usage and hitting 4k 60fps with DLSS balanced on Preset L, it runs very well for me on single player games.