Background: My monitor has a local dim option that produces flicker when combined with VRR. So for games where I care about HDR I have been turning off VRR.
My question is, to avoid judder and have evenly paced frames, what is the recommendation?
I have a max refresh of 160 so if I can’t hit that consistently should a cap at something that divides evenly into 160? For instance, 80 or 40. Should I avoid other common frame caps, like 60 or 120?
Essentially yes, although frame capping is not always perfect, and your refresh rate is also not exactly aligned to the reported number, so you might still see some lingering frames every once in a while. Changing your monitor’s refresh rate to 80hz and turning on regular vsync should give you the smoothest experience, then after that is capping your fps to 80 with a 160hz refresh rate which should give you smooth frames pretty much all of the time, then last up is capping your fps to 60 with a 160hz refresh rate should result in stutters at fairly predictable and regular intervals.
https://www.testufo.com/stutter#demo=microstuttering&foreground=ffffff&background=000000&pps=720
On this site if you switch between “smooth” and “microstutters”, you should be able to notice a difference with slight frame pacing errors even at fairly high refresh rates, so you are definitely not crazy if you believe you can notice a difference between vsynced 100fps vs 160fps.