I tend to play stuff at 40fps because my experience of it is that I feel like I’m getting 90% of the way to 60 (playing a lot of 30 until mid-20s will do that to you!), and then shift up to 60 if I have headroom or the game in particular feels rough at 40. My main machine has a 120Hz monitor and it’s lovely for some games, but it’s something I ‘feel’ on the mouse more than I ‘see’. I just can’t imagine using it on my deck for the vanishingly few games that can hit 90 on the Deck and then caring.
But, I’ve seen claims like ‘setting it to 40Hz will make it run 40 in an 80Hz container’ (some Nerd Nest video or the guy on it who does a lot of battery testing), or the PCGamer review which states the OLED can take “a game locked at 30 fps and triple each frame so it runs like butter at 90Hz”.
Is this just referring to, say, response time / latency?
The issue is usually that both the in-game vsync, as well as the deck’s system level vsync is active. Therefore, it have multiple frames delay, which is very noticeable at 30 fps. Allowing tearing fixes this.
So what’s the best way to have the best experience/input lag? Never messed with Allow Tearing, just left the default 60 fps cap, and generally disable Vsync in-game and either use game’s 60 fps cap or put unlimited.
Would the best be Allow Tearing On, disable in-game vsync and use game FPS cap?
I haven’t done such extensive tests, so somebody else probably can answer this better.
From my knowledge:
For minimum latency, you would want to disable all vsync (so ingame off and allow tearing), as well as the FPS cap. You could even overclock the screen (I believe the LCD goes up to slightly over 70 hz).
But this won’t necessarily be the best experience, because it will result in tearing, uneven frame pacing and increased battery drain.
For a more balanced experience, I found it to be good to have one vsync enabled (either ingame or via allow tearing off) and an appropriate FPS cap. I believe in theory, you don’t need the FPS cap if it is intended to be the same as the refresh rate and vsync is on (because vsync will sync frames to the screen anyway). But it hasn’t caused noticeable issues for me if I didn’t have double vsync.