People ask me about this constantly, usually right after they buy a new graphics card and watch a menu screen run at 900 fps.
So here’s my answer up front. Yes, you should cap your frame rate, in almost every game, on almost every setup.
The reason nobody does it is that uncapped fps feels like free performance. Like you’re getting something extra for nothing.
You’re not.
Think of your GPU as a car with a brick sitting on the gas pedal. Uncapped, it floors it every second you’re in a game, whether the road in front of you needs it or not.
Capping your frame rate is cruise control. Same trip, same arrival time, a lot less noise and gas and wear on the car.
What actually happens when you don’t cap your frame rate
Your GPU has one job when nothing is holding it back, and that job is to render as many frames as physically possible.
So it pins itself at 99 to 100 percent usage and stays there. It does not care that you’re staring at a pause menu or playing a pixel art roguelike from 2019.
The result is a card running flat out to produce frames that get thrown in the garbage. Your monitor cannot show you a single frame past its refresh rate.
A 144Hz panel updates 144 times a second. If your game is pushing 400 fps, roughly 256 of those frames every second exist for a few milliseconds and then die unseen.
You paid for that in heat, fan noise and electricity.
Frame rate isn’t the number that matters, frame time is
Everyone quotes average fps, and it’s the least useful number on the screen. What you actually feel is frame time, which is how long each individual frame takes to show up. Steady frame times feel smooth, and inconsistent ones feel like garbage no matter how high the average is.
This is why a locked 90 fps feels better than a game bouncing between 70 and 140.
Back to cruise control. A steady 100 km/h is a calm drive, while surging between 80 and 130 the whole way makes everyone in the car carsick.
The other number worth watching is your 1% lows, which is basically the worst 1 percent of your frames. Capping usually pulls your lows up closer to your average, and that gap closing is what people mean when they say a game “feels” smoother after a cap.
If you have a G-Sync or FreeSync monitor, this is not optional
Variable refresh rate is the best thing to happen to PC gaming in a decade, and it has one hard limit.
It only works inside a range. Once your fps climbs past your monitor’s maximum refresh rate, you fall out of that range and you’re back to either screen tearing or regular old V-Sync stutter and lag.
That’s why the standard advice, and it comes out of Blur Busters’ testing on this, is to cap at least 3 fps below your maximum refresh rate.
Real numbers, so you don’t have to do the math. On 60Hz cap to 57, on 120Hz cap to 117, on 144Hz cap to 141, on 165Hz cap to 162 and on 240Hz cap to 237.
There’s one setup step people get wrong here. You want V-Sync turned On in the Nvidia Control Panel or the AMD driver, and V-Sync turned Off inside the game.
That sounds like a contradiction and it isn’t. The driver-level V-Sync acts as a safety net that keeps you from tearing if you ever brush the top of the range, and because your cap is holding you below the ceiling, it never actually adds the lag V-Sync is famous for.
When you shouldn’t cap it
There is a real exception and it’s a narrow one.
If you play competitive shooters like CS2, Valorant or Overwatch on a high refresh panel, running uncapped genuinely does shave a bit of latency off. When frames come faster than the display can show them, the one you do see is fresher.
We’re talking a few milliseconds. If you’re grinding ranked and every millisecond matters to you, fine, run it uncapped.
If you’re not playing for money, those extra 200 fps are doing nothing for you.
The better answer for most people is Nvidia Reflex, which cuts the render queue latency directly instead of brute forcing it with frames. In a game that supports Reflex, turning it on with G-Sync active will also handle the cap for you automatically, right below the G-Sync ceiling.
So what number should you actually pick?
Start with your monitor, then check it against your GPU.
If you have a VRR monitor, use the numbers from earlier and you’re basically done. That’s your ceiling.
If you’re on a plain 60Hz panel with no VRR at all, cap to 60 and stop thinking about it. Everything above that is pure waste on a display that physically cannot show it.
Now the part people skip. Pick a number your GPU can hold in the worst part of the game, not the best part.
Your card hitting 141 fps in an empty hallway means nothing if it drops to 95 the second you walk into the busy town square. That cap isn’t a cap anymore, it’s a suggestion, and you get the exact stuttery mess you were trying to avoid.
So play for twenty minutes, find your ugliest area, and cap a bit under whatever you can hold there.
This is also where a half refresh cap earns its keep. On a 144Hz panel, capping a heavy single player game to 72 gives you a rock solid lock that your GPU will never miss, and every frame still lands cleanly on the display’s timing.
72 that never wavers beats 110 that keeps hiccuping. For a slow, pretty game where you’re looking at scenery instead of flicking crosshairs, it’s an easy trade.
In-game, RTSS or the driver? They are not the same
Three ways to set a cap, and they behave differently.
The in-game limiter gives you the lowest latency because it sits earliest in the rendering pipeline. If the game has one and it works properly, use it.
Plenty of them don’t work properly, which is where the other two come in.
RTSS (Rivatuner Statistics Server, and it’s free) produces the flattest frame times of anything out there. The trade is up to about one frame of extra input lag, which you will not notice in a single player game and might notice in a shooter.
The driver cap, meaning Nvidia’s Max Frame Rate setting or AMD’s frame rate limiter, lands somewhere between the two. It’s the reliable fallback for games with no built-in option and it works everywhere, which counts for a lot.
Try them in that order. In-game first, RTSS if the in-game one is broken or you want the smoothest possible pacing, driver if neither of those pans out.
And use one of them. Two caps fighting each other is a fun afternoon of confusing frame time graphs.
The stuff nobody mentions until the power bill shows up
A modern GPU at 100 percent load pulls a lot of watts, and capping drops that usage down to whatever the game actually needs.
Less power in means less heat out. Cooler card, slower fans, quieter room.
Coil whine gets better too. That electrical squealing noise scales with how many frames you’re pushing, so the guy hearing his card scream during loading screens at 900 fps has a cap-shaped problem.
A capped GPU is a quieter, cooler, longer-lived GPU.
On laptops and handhelds it’s not even close. An uncapped Steam Deck burns through battery and thermal throttles itself into worse performance than a capped one would have given you.
Cap a Deck game to 40 or 45 and you’ll get a steadier experience and noticeably more playtime out of the same charge.
Setting it up in about five minutes
First, check what refresh rate your monitor is actually running at. Windows display settings, Advanced display, look at the refresh rate dropdown.
Do this even if you’re sure. People run 144Hz panels at 60Hz for years without ever noticing.
Second, turn on G-Sync or FreeSync in your driver control panel if your monitor supports it, and set V-Sync to On there while leaving it Off in your games.
Third, set your cap using the numbers above.
Then test it. Pull up an overlay and watch the frame time graph, not the fps counter, because a flat line there is the whole point of doing any of this.
Go do it now on whatever you’re currently playing. It takes five minutes and it’s the closest thing to a free upgrade you’re going to find.