I Can Haz Frame Rate?
Introduction
At CES 2020, on Monday, January 6th, 2020 NVIDIA finally released a feature in its drivers that has been 25 years in the making. Or rather, gamers have been waiting for such a feature for 25 years of NVIDIA driver development since the original NV1 released in 1995. It only took 25 years of driver development for NVIDIA to finally give gamers a “Max Frame Rate” limiter in its drivers instead of having to rely on 3rd party programs like RivaTuner.
The CES Game Ready driver was released this week at CES. The driver version is 441.87. The feature we are talking about today allows users to set the maximum frame rate for 3D applications or games. The driver also adds variable rate super-sampling support. This feature helps visual quality in VR applications. There is also an update to image sharpening. Users can now enable GPU scaling feature without image sharpening.
In today’s very brief article we are going to show you how to enable and use the max frame rate limiter in the drivers. DX11/DX12 and Vulkan APIs are tested to see just how it works. Manual run-throughs will be performed in the games and graph the frame rate over time both with and without the max frame rate limiter enabled.
For our testing today we are using an ASUS ROG STRIX RTX 2080 Ti video card to test this feature out. We wanted a fast video card so we could get really high FPS and see if the limiter can hold itself to the correct settings. We also tested at 1080p, 1440p and 4K.