Disable CpuForceSyncEnabled for more stable FPS

General Discussion
1

Go to your documents>overwatch>settings.
Open settings_v0 with notepad.
Go to CpuForceSyncEnabled and change it from “1” to “0”.

How much of a difference did it make? Here are benchmarks:

CpuForceSyncEnabled on:

Avg: 258.091 - Min: 224 - Max: 292

CpuForceSyncEnabled off:

Avg: 264.301 - Min: 238 - Max: 300

As you can see average framerate increases slightly, but the biggest difference is to minimum framerate which is much better. Keep in mind I benchmarked during heavy team fight conditions in a costum server with bots that had zero ult cooldown and ability cooldown. So this would be great for people whose FPS drops a lot during heavy teamfights.

EDIT: There is a drawback, will cause more input lag, I would only enable it if your FPS is very low.

CPU: i7 7700k.

You’re welcome :nerd_face:

2 Likes
2

So… what is CpuForceSyncEnabled intended to do in the first place?

1 Like
3

Not a clue, I googled it but I couldn’t find any information.

4

This settings sounds like what “Reduce Buffering” would map to as an engine setting. Forcing the cpu to synchronize against the GPU is an established way to reduce input latency and is completely expected to cause a small overall perf hit in framerate because you’re removing the parallelism between the CPU and GPU.

I would be interested in knowing if this toggled this setting for you in the video options, and also if this impacted your SIM value in the statistics.

5

Are you allowed to do this? I’m sort of new to competitive multiplayer PC gaming. Isn’t editing the game files a big no-no?

6

It’s just a config file. You’re not altering the game files themselves. Whatever is publicly exposed in config files would be fair game. No different than editing key mappings or graphics settings.

1 Like
7

Sounds good I’ll have to try this.

8
  1. Help with latency/inputs/etc.
  2. Help your CPU not overwork itself unnecessarily when there’s a bottleneck somewhere.
  3. Matches CPU to the GPU, since the GPU is… You know… The thing that renders your video game.
9

Oh damn you’re right. With it on sim is very stable, 3-5 ms. With it off, sim flucatuates a lot more and sometimes have spikes up to 14.

10

I’d be wary of editing random settings in the config file if you don’t know what they do. OP may have gotten slightly better FPS but it may come at another cost. The devs are smart people and generally know much more about their game engine than some random person on the forums digging through config files. If the setting legitimately just increased perf across the board and had no downside, then it wouldn’t be a setting.

Like my above post mentions, this may just map to the Reduce Buffering option, in which case increased FPS is expected, but the result is increased input latency.

11

I’d only try it if you have very low fps.

12

Thanks for confirming (sorry I wrote the post directly above this one prior to seeing this).

13

CpuForceSyncEnabled is the reduced buffering option. It actually reduces mouse lag.

The only options that is not available ingame are:
ShaderQuality
MaxEffectsAnisotropy
MaxExtraQualityAnisotropy

ShaderQuality accepts value from 1 to 3
It is responsible for the hair glossy effect, bumpmaps on textures, and makes edges of buildings to appear softer.

14

If so, then those who make use of gsync or freesync really don’t need to worry about this setting.

15

This actually has nothing to do with gsync or freesync. Those users will also benefit from it.