I recently built a new computer. It's not mind-blowingly amazing but it's pretty solid, and I can play any game in my Steam library on it. I've been messing around with graphics settings in Borderlands 2. Right now, I have everything on high, with the FPS set at unlimited. The FPS-counter wildly varies from 60-200. Although during normal gameplay, it stays pretty close to 70-90. I have not experienced any screen tearing. I've noticed that there are settings for limiting the frames per second. The settings are:
smoothed 22-62
capped 30/50/60/72/120
unlimited
Is there any reason to NOT go with unlimited?
Best Answer
Capping your framerate can have a few benefits:
Capping your framerate is especially beneficial to laptops or any other sort of mobile computers as it provides an excellent way to keep a laptop from eating its battery alive and also from burning a hole in your crotch.
Keep in mind that capping your framerate isn't the same as using v-sync.
Using a framerate cap will not provide a reduction in screen tearing. Framerate caps simply throttle a number of frames your video card can produce; they do not force the video card to wait until the monitor has begun a new refresh cycle.
If the framerate you are producing is around 55-75 fps then you might want to cap it a 50 or 60 as the spikes where it is 75 will feel like your game is slowing down when it goes back down to 55, this is just an example and your actual frames per second may vary.
Using v-sync conveys all the benefits listed about framerate caps above, with the added benefit of eliminating screen tearing; however, it does have the drawback of adding some latency.