Can you get more FPS than your monitor's refresh rate?

[Night]

So I got this program to boost FPS in games that are very demanding. I usually don't need to do it but for me every frame makes a difference in response time and mouse feel, which is most important to me. For example when I play an older game I can get over 300 fps and everything feels smooth and responsive, but when I try to play a newer, more resource taxing title like Helldivers 2 for example, even if I getting above 120 fps, it just doesn't really feel as smooth or responsive obviously. I was wondering if I could use this software to get way more frames, exceeding my monitor refresh rate which is 144 and if so, what would be the best settings for that. I also have a RTX 3070, if that matters.

[Gizzmoe]

You can't get more fps than your monitor hz. It wouldn't make sense in LS, because it generates "fake" frames, so more frames than hz wouldn't decrease input lag.

[Night]

Originally posted by Gizzmoe:

You can't get more fps than your monitor hz. It wouldn't make sense in LS, because it generates "fake" frames, so more frames than hz wouldn't decrease input lag.

Forgive me for the stupid question but what if I were to get a monitor with higher refresh rate than my current one. 240 for example is enough for the responsiveness to feel okay. Would it make my game feel any smoother or nah?

[Spook]

Originally posted by Night:

For example when I play an older game I can get over 300 fps and everything feels smooth and responsive, but when I try to play a newer, more resource taxing title like Helldivers 2 for example, even if I getting above 120 fps, it just doesn't really feel as smooth or responsive obviously.

LS will not give you the responsiveness of 240hz when your interpolate up to 240hz. It will give you the responsiveness of 80fps on x3 and 120fps on x2, but with at least one added frame of latency.

The 300fps is the reason why the older game feels smoother, possibly less buffered frames as well.

To get Helldivers to feel as smooth as your older 300fps game, you would need to run Helldivers at an un-interpolated/no-framegen 300fps.

[Kozero]

The above comments are all correct, but one important point to add: frame pacing is critical with frame generation. If you drop 2 fps, frame doubling will drop 4, and tripling will drop 6. This has a massive impact on "smoothness" obviously. This is why you need to cap your FPS in game to your minimum stable FPS.

Ideally you want to cap no lower than 60 fps, and no more than half your monitor refresh rate. With a higher FPS cap you will get less latency, but you also increase the likelihood of stuttering.

If you have a 144hz monitor for example, you would want to cap between 60 fps and 72 fps. However, you would need to consider how the GPU load of frame generation will effect your minimum stable FPS. This involves a bit of trial and error.

That said, Helldivers is a very poorly optimised game unfortunately. I would recommend capping the frame rate at 60 fps in game, turn on frame doubling, then lowering your graphic settings until you get stable fps during terminid swarms.

I would also recommend turning off scaling in Lossless Scaling to reduce GPU load as much as possible. Performance mode helps as well, but you will get more artifacting in game. It's up to you if that trade off is worth it.

[-=[Sr_Brown]=-]

Originally posted by Gizzmoe:

You can't get more fps than your monitor hz. It wouldn't make sense in LS, because it generates "fake" frames, so more frames than hz wouldn't decrease input lag.

It's not really like that at all, if your fps are higher than the Hz of your monitor you will start to have tearing, that is, the image will be cut off and your monitor will start to show cut frames. If you have a much higher fps than the refresh rate you will have more tearing, but you will also have less input lag and the feeling of fluidity will be greater. What lossless does is make interpolations, it generates full but interpolated frames (Calculating the position between one frame and another and thus giving you the feeling that everything is more fluid)

If your monitor has low Hz I recommend that you deactivate vsync or limit the fps, even if your monitor is 144hz, I recommend that if a game runs at 200fps, that you let it run, because you will have better results (And the tearing at such high frequencies and fps is barely noticeable.

[Gizzmoe]

Originally posted by -=Sr_Brown=-:

even if your monitor is 144hz, I recommend that if a game runs at 200fps, that you let it run, because you will have better results

Or much worse results, depending on the game and the system it runs on. With LS and framegen with an uncapped framerate and rendering above your monitor hz inevitable leads to worse framepacing and big framerate fluctuations, plus it saturates either the GPU or the worker threads of the game, which both isn't good because it leads to stuttering.