Wednesday

FPS Limiter : Smoother gameplay in ArmA2 (and other titles)

Filed under PC

If you fly FSX you’ve no doubt heard of the “miracle tweak” called FPS Limiter. Without getting into specifics, what this handy little app does is limit your frames per second to a set number, preventing spikes and moments of extremely high frame rate which can cause stuttering and other problems. I don’t think this app is as well known outside FSX circles, but it works with any game you like and can really help smooth out your gameplay. It’s especially helpful with ArmA2.

Now admittedly, the vast majority of people are far from having overly high frame rates to begin with. This limiter certainly isn’t going to help you if you’re only getting 15fps, and I’d suggest you look over the related articles linked below this post for some tweaks on how to fix that. If  you’re like me however and can maintain a minimum of 40 fps or more this tweak should help you smooth out your gameplay, and put your system resources to better use than cranking out overly high frame rates.

It first occurred to me to try this little app when flying around in an F-35 in the editor. On the system and settings outlined at the bottom of this post, I get well over 100fps by myself in the editor with Vsync turned off. What I noticed was that although the frame rate was obviously high, the game stuttered a lot s I flew around. Enabling Vsync locked my FPS to 60 (the refresh rate of my LCD monitor) and the stuttering went away. One can presume that since the system was less occupied cranking out 100+ fps it was more able to maintain a smooth steady experience at 60fps. Now if you think about it, there is really no reason to have a frame rate above 30. Some might be happy enough with 25 or so, but anything over 30 or so is really almost pointless. Why have your system working hard to crank out 60 fps if it’s not needed? Wouldn’t it be better to limit your frame rate to 30, then leave that extra overhead you gain by not rendering all that useless frames for maintaining a smoother game? I’ve found the answer to these is yes, and how you do it is with FPS Limiter. Here’s how. Continue…