Use Radeon Chill to Cap FPS on AMD

[iLLmEcHaNiCo]

Not sure why AAA games still release with no frame limiter in settings or why any developer thinks its ok for people with high refresh rate monitors to run their games in full benchmark mode the whole time.

Made this thread since no one ever talks about this overlooked feature in the Adrenalin software. Even the big tech gurus on youtube completely ignore this simple setting when showing choppy frametime graphs and proposing a "fix".

For AMD users, whenever you find that the FPS limiter in Adrenalin doesn't work for certain games (like Starfield), there's another feature called Radeon Chill. Set both the low and high values to your target framerate and boom, magic. Not only have you set your target cap, but you also somehow magically told the card to render frames equally. Not sure how this all works, but all I can say is that it works at least most of the time.

Yes, this feature will flatline frametimes in many games that have frame pacing issues. A traditional FPS cap doesn't seem to help with poor frametime pacing most of the time in my experience.

You'll also notice a SUBSTANTIAL drop to power draw, which means a cooler gpu, quiet fans. and of course reduced and more consistent input latency. It works so good that I honestly believe this feature should be the default setting out of the box for AMD drivers.

So in a nut shell:
1. turn off vsync in game
2. enable radeon chill and set both lower and upper limits to your FPS target

Make sure to do this in "global settings" and not under the game profile. I've seen the gpu performance profile and fan curves get wacky if setting this under the games specific profile. You can always change it per game with just a few clicks to get to global settings and it does not affect your desktop frame limit in any way.

Keep in mind I play on a 165Hz 1440p freesync monitor with freesync enabled. Your experience may not match my own depending on your hardware.

I'm sure this goes without saying, but your target should always be a few FPS below the lowest FPS number during benchmarking the game.

Hope this helps some folks in all games, not just Starfield.

[Sedgendary]

I can tell you why things like this are left out, games are made for multiple platforms so effort is put in to something that has an effect on all platforms or the lead platform (normally a console) so features that only benefit a PC user won't get dev and QA time. This is also why we are starting to see a lot of titles with only FSR and not DLSS as the consoles use FSR and DLSS is only usable by a fraction of the smaller playerbase

[Langkard]

I am enjoying playing at an average of 145 FPS, according to Adrenaline, with no frame rate "choppiness" on a 4K monitor. But, I built this system to do just that. No need for Radeon Chill, but maybe it will help others.