Well, I just tried the new update. It’s hard to say if and/or how much better the stuttering is, but I still notice it pretty easily.
I did two different panning speeds. It looks better when you go slower but it’s still noticeable. At faster panning speeds you can see how the trees kind of “lurch” against the dark background. It seems pretty obvious, to me.
What gives?
Edit: Just turned on v-sync and it’s fairly substantial improvement. Something is still wrong when v-sync is disabled. As a g-sync user, I always play with v-sync disabled. So something is apparently still up. I’d rather not be forced to play with v-sync enabled. And even at that, there is still some noticeable stuttering (when v-sync is enabled).
Edit #2: I disabled g-sync and tested again with v-sync disabled/enabled. It’s hard to say, but both seem to feel a bit better (in terms of stutter) than when g-sync is enabled.
On a positive note, I do see an improvement with v-sync enabled (at least when I also have g-sync enabled, which is kind of pointless), so it seems like it’s moving in the right direction. I just hope that it improves further and that the game becomes more friendly with g-sync, if that is indeed where the issue lies (or at least one of them).
Edit #3: Alright, I did some more extensive testing. I captured four different modes (all combinations of G-Sync and V-Sync on/off) with the high speed camera on my iPhone X. What I seem to have found is that unless both G-Sync and V-Sync are enabled, screen tearing occurs, as well as what I can only describe as uneven frame timing (perhaps because I don’t know the correct terminology).
If you pause the video and use the comma and period buttons on your keyboard you can advance frame by frame. And if you do this throughout the different modes, you will notice where screen tearing occurs (the top portion of the image starts to update before the bottom portion for example). You will also notice that advancing frame by frame does not advance the image at the same rate from one mode to the next, and sometimes the number of button presses required to fully update the image varies even within the same mode.
So, to summarize, the best experience seems to be to have both G-Sync AND V-Sync enabled. This seems to prevent screen tearing and seems to have the most evenly spaced frames. However, to my eye, it seems that some kind of stuttering still occurs even when both G-Sync and V-Sync are enabled.
Best practices for G-Sync users states that V-Sync should be disabled within the game. If this is done, however, and only G-Sync is enabled (as it should be), then problems occur as described above. Problems as described above also occur if only V-Sync is enabled (so these issues don’t only affect G-Sync users). As a G-Sync user I should not have to have V-Sync enabled to avoid these problems (unless something is broken). It seems clear that something is not exactly functioning as it should be…
Furthermore, and I didn’t pay a ton of attention to this, but it seems as if my FPS was not decreasing accordingly when v-sync was enabled and seemed to remain mostly similar to what it was previously, and also seemed to fluctuate quite a bit even when doing nothing.