I have Freesync, it doesn't it eliminates tearing without vsync, but it does nothing about consistency of framerate. What I'm saying is that I'd rather have a narrow P99, even if it's just above 60, rather than experience 50-144fps variations.
>but it does nothing about consistency of framerate.
It does quite a bit. e.g.:
If your refresh rate is 60Hz, that's some 16.6ms per frame.
If the frame takes 16.7ms and thus isn't ready by the deadline, you get either tearing (very visible, annoying, experience breaking) or your frame takes 33.3ms, which is a lot of Jitter.
Jitter between 16.6ms and 33.3ms or tearing, are both much worse than 16.7ms you could get with freesync, which is just some 100µs of jitter.
Even at 120Hz, the barely miss deadline case would be half the jitter, but still 8ms vs 50µs. And the tearing alternative is still every bit as horrible.
Yes, it helps there, but I'm talking about frame rate constantly jumping around. I'm not talking about 16.6 vs 16.7 or even 16.9, I'm talking about 16.6 vs 40/60/90 and so on. VRR isn't going to fix it at all:
I want the same consistency for terminal input delay. Suckless terminal, for example, has higher latency, but P99 is much closer to avg than Alacritty and urxvt. While on the subject of terminals: st will stay mostly the same when there is additional load present, while all GPU-based terminals will start slipping if I'm doing something that involves GPU (discord voice call, screen sharing/recording, spotify).
