VRR Flicker On OLEDs Is A Real Problem 

Thank you so much!😄

I concur most strenuously.

@@RTINGScomRD Please can you set the Refresh rate of the OLED Monitors to just 5-10hz below their Max Spec. That is said to fix the flickering issue even with VRR on. Please do test it.

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TFTcentral and MonitorsUnboxed are both great.

Hardware Unboxed/Monitors Unboxed, TFT Central, Techless and PC Monitors, also do excellent monitor reviews here on RU-vid.

100%

yes they are to trust rest are sponsoring to much things and not saying about problems

Ahead and lie that it is Oled issue while they admit later on that even lcd has it. Just because it is not about Oled but about vrr

@@kristof46 autism

@@kristof46 they didn't lie, the purpose of this video was to bring to people's attention that even OLED has drawbacks and one that's not talked about enough.

@@Tectosaurus kidding right? You want to tell me that they discovered flickering in VRR? No they don’t. A lot of people reviewers told about that but it is still vrr issue. When you this kind of title you can think that Oled is a crap while lcd is great. In fact only ips is fine in that case

@@kristof46 you’re taking this video the wrong way, clearly as you’re the only one mad in the comments.

Oof, yeah that's the kind of game where you'd really see it a lot, we feel for your pain 😭

Should have just turned it off. It's not necessary on OLED.

Have you tried to limit your VRR HZ Range down to 35-100 hz with the "CRU Toole" ? I had the same Problem on my AW3423dwf, measured the worst from Rtings. Now its completely Flicker Free. 🤩🥳

@@MrDutch1e It's never necessary. I think I've used V-Sync in like 2 games ever? I've only seen screen tearing on gaming laptops or during really dramatic frame drops.

@@Methos_ There _are_ people who apparently have a high tolerance for ugliness. You seem to be one of them. Nevertheless, screen tearing exists and is very ugly. But further, VSync doesn't just eliminate screen tearing, _it eliminates judder,_ as long as your framerate remains at or above your refresh rate. Judder is also a very ugly thing, which is essentially inconsistent frame pacing. Even if you have a framerate cap and you are nominally getting a solid say, 60 fps, you will still likely have ugly inconsistent motion. There are many people who don't even know they aren't getting smooth frame pacing because they've never used VSync, or have never used it while deliberately maintaining a framerate at or above the display's refresh rate. But _even further,_ the topic here is VRR, not VSync. There is no reason that VSync should cause flicker.

As someone planning to buy a TV for gaming this would be highly appreciated

I have been using 4k TV's as a computer screen since 2015, several different TV's most of them 55" . I don't think I could ever go back to using a PC "monitor" as a display, it's just WAY less bang for your buck. You get absolutely nothing that a modern 4K or even 8K tv will give you. You actually gain in the fact that you can also watch TV on the thing. I use an LG Oled CS 55", it has VRR, HDR, Free sync technology, dedicated game mode etc. Insanely fast response times and an incredible picture quality and obviously it's much bigger than pretty much all conventional PC monitors out there being that it is a 55". You could argue that the pixel density on a smaller screen at 4K is better but you sit further away from a screen this size so the pixel density looks exactly the same as if you were using a 27" screen sitting right up to it. And also on the plus side of using a high end TV like this as a monitor, it has a glossy display, none of this matt finish crap all over it which I really can't stand when I have a bright window behind me, the glare is just insane and unuseable, a sharp reflection on a TV screen is pretty much un-noticeable in comparrison, and obviously because it's glossy you get much richer colours and pure blacks.

​@@Ruben98RaptoRAs much as I love my QLED TV, sometimes the highlights get a bit wacky looking and they'll fluctuate on brightness. That could just be because I've got the smaller TV which has a VA panel.

its often happens on VA because VA are naturally white so it need more time to display black which is also the reason why black smearing happen. Its the other way around on IPS which is naturally black but new IPS tech like IPS Black works like VA(Naturally White)

It's really bad in WoW, yes. In general. And I think it's so bad because of WoW's super inconsistent framerate, especially in combat.

if you are getting flashing at a contact 60, you have a different problem than what this video is talking about.

In brawhalla for instance, changing the character in the menu also causes flicker.

Thank you so much for the kind words! We're always striving to do everything we can to help people 😄

A lot of comments here are saying that

@@mechanicalmonk2020 That's a nice surprise. I'm used to seeing negative comments on RU-vid videos in this regard. I'm new here, only watched a couple videos so far, and hadn't come across anyone mentioning it yet!

I dont think very many people use vrr which is probably one reason it wasn't reported much.

​@@AndrewK117Probably not which is odd seeing as it's one of the best modern monitor features when it works. Especially as monitor refresh rates keeps increasing while game requirements also does. So you're limited to lowering refresh rate on a per game basis, using V-Sync or having screen tearing

What monitor do you have? :)

Haha great timing! Glad to hear we could help 😄

*Heroine. She's female not male.

The G2724d has way less flicker than that MSI monitor. Rtings' updated review shows that.

Yes, and we pay for that experience.

There is no reason that gamma (or brightness) should be affected by framerate, though.

@@bricaaron3978Monitor brightness changes with refresh rate, that’s why this happens

@@cjack2355 I said there is no reason --- I should have said no _legitimate_ reason --- that brightness should be affected by framrate.

It's technically the monitor, but it's also how the system is sending the frames to the monitor-- flicker comes from wide, sudden swings in FPS. I made another comment here with some advice (please let me know if you can't find it), but the main thing you wanna try is setting a frame cap. Good luck!

Do all OLED monitors have it?

@@notaras1985 technically, yes, as it's currently a limitation within the technology of oled panels.

@@richardwilliams877also LCD panels suffer from it. It’s a problem of variable voltage being fed to panels with variable refresh rate. On LCD panels is less noticeable but still happens…

@@richardwilliams877 It's monitors problem only. VRR was designed specifically for swinging and changing framerate/frametime if it can't take do that it is defective or should not use VRR function and marketing at all.

Bruh… it’s a VRR issue not a oled issue…

It is an oled issue. Many good ips displays do not have this issue. Every single woled does though​@@yanooo2007

I won’t get another screen without proper VRR ever again. It’s just too good. I downgraded from a 42 inch 4k to a 27inch 1440p, just because of stable VRR.

@@yanooo2007 It's OLED problem using VRR if you want working VRR and OLED in one package there is not a single model on the market.

I just dont use vrr

Interesting. Why does the gamma curve need to depend on the refresh rate though? Is this related to the TFT layer?

​@@FiveFiveZeroTwo Yes, has to be related to the tft. Dark levens raise when the panel is refreshed at a slower rate. One solution is to have an internal fixed tft refresh rate, like Asus did on one of their recent laptops. Use of a really high rate fixed rate like 1000hz won't be much detriment to vrr, at most 0.5 ms error vrr waiting for the next refresh

and turning it off doas solve it 100%?

If the problem with shadow detail / black crush can be solved by using PWM, I can't imagine why all OLED displays aren't using it. My LG OLED55B7A not only has poor near-black performance, but also has a nasty greenish tint that ruins dark/night scenes.

@@bricaaron3978 It would be best if they could combine both, first dimm the pixel with DC to a value where it is still linear and then dimm the rest of the way with as fast as possible PWM. That way the flicker wouldnt be as noticeable as when it would just use PWM from full brightness while it still provides great black performance. I can notice flicker a lot more than other people, so I noticed the flicker in a smartphone that had an OLED screen. Its also why I would never enable strobing blacklights to achieve less motion blur.

@@Heimbasteln *" It would be best if they could combine both, first dimm the pixel with DC to a value where it is still linear and then dimm the rest of the way with as fast as possible PWM."* Yes, I agree. Do you have an LG OLED display?

@@bricaaron3978your LG uses an old panel type which suffered this type of issues

@@or1on89 That's reassuring. I was hoping that when I buy a new LG display it would not suffer from some of the issues of my OLED55B7A. Nevertheless, there are a number of problems that OLED display manufacturers have chosen not to tackle, such as Sample-and-Hold-induced ETMB and near-black / shadow detail performance.

Thank you for all the kind words! We do our best to continue finding ways to test every facet of a product that people might care about or need to know! 💪

A fellow gamer who understands VSync! It doesn't just eliminate screen tearing --- it also eliminates _judder,_ as long as the framerate remains at or above the refresh rate.

@@bricaaron3978 well but now you'll get judder if your framerate drops below 60hz or whatever your refresh is. why not just use VRR and set the cap to 120/80/60hz or whatever your choice is and forget about it instead of changing it all the time based on what game you play. using fixed 120/80/60hz is just worse if you care about judder

@@trivolous28 *"well but now you'll get judder if your framerate drops below 60hz or whatever your refresh is. w"* There are at least two reasons. The first is that a steady, consistent framerate is _IDEAL._ It doesn't matter if you are talking about video games or movies or television. The _ideal_ is to not have the framerate fluctuate. That is because it is very obvious when the framerate fluctuates. For non-interactive purposes such as TV/movies it's bad, but for interactive purposes such as games it's especially bad, because the player must _react_ to the visuals. To be as realistic as possible --- as immersive as possible --- the framerate should not vary, just like the "framerate" doesn't vary in reality. To answer your question: You don't change the refresh rate for every game you play: Rather, for every game you play, you adjust the settings/resolution so that the game achieves a consistent 60 (or whatever) fps. (And just to add this in... That's why CRT displays are superior to LCD/DLP/OLED displays... And I use an OLED display, so no fighting, lol)

​@@bricaaron3978 this is the basic definition, yes. We're using VRR when we _can't_ hit 60

@@mechanicalmonk2020 *"We're using VRR when we can't hit 60"* _Is_ that, in fact the reason most people use VRR? I didn't know. I hadn't heard of anyone using it that way. But even if that is the case, the next-best case is to target a VSync-locked 50 fps. If that's for some reason impossible --- even at 4K (which in the modern age bespeaks a poor console port) --- the next-next-best case would be to constrain VRR to within ~10 fps, e.g. 40 - 50 fps.

Thanks for watching! 😄

Thank you! 😄

Word.

Yes, mostly, but most games have stutters to less than 10 frames even if averages are 60+, and these stutters can't be fixed even with 4090, 7800x3d and gen4 nvmes and it will flicker no matter what, I experimented for weeks with my VA and all kind of frame caps, CRU and so on. After all this will need to go back to IPS.

@@PREDATEURLT I'm curious, what are the games in question?

@@deus_nsf One of the games is snowrunner, cant get 30s without flicker, second is skyrim. And there are a lot of games that have tiny stutters to very low frames (even if for only 0.1s) VRR picks it and flickers, if not flicker you would not even have how short of a stutter it was.

@@PREDATEURLT I wonder, can the LFC feature for VRR be completely disabled? So it just holds the refreshrate and introduce tearing in case of stutters? I guess it's possible, if you put your VRR low threshold just above max refreshrate /2, give it a shot I'm curious! Maybe you'll need to play with Vsync a little bit too.

@@deus_nsf It can be done, but on monitor that is 240Hz you have to use 121hz at least, so everything below 120FPS will have tearing and that's where it is most important not to have them, unless GPU drivers will force to hold at original 48Hz with tearing, that would only tear everything bellow 48FPS, but it is still not a fix people would want on monitors that costs 1000$+ and blab about freesync premium and gsync certified functionality.

Interesting! I have C1 and C2 and they both flicker to the point where g-sync is completely unusable. G-sync might as well not be an option in my case as the flicker is 10x more noticeable and distracting than any tearing or badly paced frames might be

@@lethalrave4621What CPU and GPU do you have? Also what games do you play? I play Helldivers, Kingdom Come Deliverance, Red Dead Redemption 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Bannerlord, and few others. My rig is a R7 5800x with a 4090 and previous a 3700x and a 3080

@@lethalrave4621I have a really sensitive eye for tearing and shader stutter. It really could be that I’m playing certain games with little FPS variance. I did see that obvious flickering in Cyberpunk and I have 130 hours in that game. Never once noticed VRR flicker. I admit I’m hesitant to look for it now as if I notice it I’ll never stop noticing it lol

@@copperypuddle3858 Don't look for it, it will ruin your gaming experience! I hate it. My specs are 3900x and a 4070 ti, the flickers also happen on another PC that I have. All games that have any stutters will induce strong flickers anytime they stutter. Some games can flicker continuously in dark scenes likely caused by bad optimization and bad frame pacing. Interestingly enough, in super rare cases I can get this continuous dark scene flicker even with perfect steady framerate while having no frametime issues or drops. But generally the more framerate issues a game has the more terrible it is! Example games: RDR2 (flicker in some dark scenes and via rare stutters) Cyberpunk (Used to have horrible dark scene flickers but maybe due to a patch or something is way better now, now mostly only flickers during stutters which are rare) Starfield (big fat stutter flickers that happen often, and continuous dark scene flicker) Dead Space (Stuttefest flicker disco but no continuous dark scene flicker)

As a fellow 4090 owner, that's why you don't notice it. The GPU just powers through everything and achieving high framerates at 4K and maxing out these 120hz displays is not a very difficult task. I rarely notice flicker, sometimes during loading screens or when dark games stutter but I'd say 98% of my gaming experience is flicker free, thanks to my rig. I do have the new MSI MPG 321URX on backorder tho and it being 240hz will 100% introduce more flickering opportunities, even with a 4090 this is completely unachievable in 99% of recent games so FPS caps will have to be introduced lol.

The point is not to be GPU or CPU bound. You limit your FPS so you have headroom in both directions and the FPS counter doesn't move.

@@Phil_529 Doesn't work for me. Tried Special K and RTSS. If the GPU isn't 100% I experience flicker. For example in Mass Effect LE with a cap at 117fps and actual FPS way above it I still experience flicker. Simply because FPS ! = HZ. I can observe my refresh rate going over 117hz in my TV display as there is no rock solid way to marry FPS and HZ, best is to be 100% GPU bound.

@@charno_zhyem Right but this is a video about OLEDs. You can go watch "LG CX & C9 Unlikely to Get Fix for VRR Gamma Issue Caused by OLED Panel" by HDTV Test if you want. OLEDs are optimized for a certain static refresh rate and getting as close to that number as possible will alleviate the flicker. Being GPU bound really doesn't matter.

@@charno_zhyem No offense but this video is about OLEDs which are inherently different from VA panels. Look up LG CX & C9 Unlikely to Get Fix for VRR Gamma Issue Caused by OLED Panel if you want to learn more. Being GPU bound really is irrelevant.

Lol just no that doesn't make sense, in your instance it does because you have a very very slow cpu paired with a fast gpu. So yes YOU should upgrade your cpu... But most games ARE GPU bound, meaning most games entirely depend on what GPU you have, and not what CPU you have. Most games use 4 cores some very new ones can use 6, that's about it. As long as you have a semi new, strong-single core performance cpu, even like a i3 12100k ($100) will do the job for just about all games. You talk about being 100% gpu bound but your setup is 100% CPU bound lmao... So all around upgrade your GPU, not your CPU.. For UR case upgrade the $30 CPU and not the $300 GPU... yeah?

There are actually games that have such an unstable framerate (not many though). There are also games that have a very unstable framerate cap, better to use Rivatuner for that.

@@003Jetfire I know I was messing around.

@@inceptionsd Yeah I figured your comment was sarcarstic after they explicitly explained it was intentional.

I happens often when fps are on edge of LFC range

It can never be the gpu. The gpu can not alter how the display functions, at least not at a level that can cause flickering.

Cap your frame rate low enough so that the lowest frame rate you are seeing isn’t all that much lower than the cap you put in place. For example if usually you are seeing say 60fps most of the time and sometimes it’s dipping down to 45-50ish but if it’s a really lite scene you fps may go up to 110. Putting a cap at say 70 fps would help to limit the maximum swing you see and should reduce the flicker you see or eliminate it completely depending on the cap you choose and the max variance dip below that cap you experience.

I have never noticed this on my LG C2 with a 4090. Can you tell me what game and area I can use to test?

​@@jjlw2378Yeah, OP should share which games is causing it.

It hasn't been out for six months but I have noticed some minor flicker.

​@@veilmontTVpossibly referring to the 34 ultra wide. I have the aw3423dwf and have only noticed flicker once or twice in the 4 months I've owned it.

I noticed in my C1 that i used before not in my Alienware.

Did you watch the video? Flickering is only a problem when you're running a game with really inconsistent performance. If you play nothing but esports games or well optimized single player games you will never experience vrr flicker.

Yeah there’s flicker it just depends on the game. Some games are flicker free, some are not.

Yeah this is true, my 144hz monitor has a VRR range of 40-144 or 48-144 depending on if you use DP or HDMI. So having it behave correctly outside that range would be odd if anything.

I agree I think it’s unexpected for VRR to be engaged below 60 FPS

You are.

Yeah all VA and OLED flicker and there is barely any information in some reddit forums or YT videos, for me working VRR is more important than nice blacks, HDR or even nice colors, it rips my eyes apart tearing and flicker.

Get IPS, no flicker. "Worse" contrast until you tune it