When your FPS is higher than your monitor’s refresh rate, your GPU is producing more frames than your display can show. The extra frames don’t just vanish, though. They create a mix of benefits and drawbacks that depends on your settings, your hardware, and what you’re playing.
Screen Tearing Is the Most Visible Effect
Your monitor refreshes from top to bottom at a fixed interval. If your GPU finishes a new frame while the monitor is still drawing the previous one, the display ends up showing part of the old frame on top and part of the new frame on the bottom. This split is called screen tearing, and it’s the most common side effect of running uncapped FPS above your refresh rate.
Tearing can appear as a single horizontal line across the screen or, at very high frame rates, as multiple tears stacked on top of each other. The faster your GPU pushes frames relative to your refresh rate, the more frequently the two fall out of sync. At extremely high frame rates (say, 300 FPS on a 60Hz monitor), each individual tear becomes smaller because the difference between consecutive frames is tiny. This makes tearing less noticeable in practice, even though it’s technically happening more often.
Input Lag Actually Decreases
This is the main reason competitive players run uncapped frame rates. When your GPU renders frames faster than your monitor displays them, the most recently completed frame is always closer in time to the current moment. That means the image you see is a more up-to-date snapshot of the game state, which translates to lower input lag.
Intel’s gaming resources recommend pushing to double your monitor’s refresh rate or more for a “small but noticeable improvement in input lag.” On a 60Hz monitor, going from 60 FPS to 120 or higher won’t show you more frames visually, but your mouse movements and key presses will feel more responsive because the pipeline between your input and what appears on screen is shorter. This is why professional esports players on 144Hz monitors still aim for frame rates well above 144. The visual gain is zero, but the responsiveness gain is real.
Microstutter Gets Better at Higher Frame Rates
When your FPS sits just slightly above your refresh rate, you can get a rhythmic stuttering effect. Running at 61 FPS on a 60Hz monitor, for example, produces one visible stutter per second. The same happens at 145 FPS on a 144Hz display. This is caused by a harmonic frequency clash: the frame rate and refresh rate are so close together that they periodically collide in a way that produces a noticeable hitch.
The fix is counterintuitive. Running at a much higher frame rate (say, 200+ FPS on a 144Hz monitor) actually reduces these microstutters because the harmonic interference between the two rates becomes less perceptible. According to testing by Blur Busters, visibility of both stutters and tearing gradually decreases as your frame rate climbs further above your refresh rate, assuming V-Sync is off.
Your GPU and CPU Work Harder
Rendering 300 frames per second takes significantly more power than rendering 60, even if your monitor throws most of those frames away. An uncapped frame rate means your GPU runs at full load constantly, drawing more power and generating more heat. If you’re playing a lightweight game that your hardware can push to extreme frame rates, you may hear your fans spin up for no visible benefit.
High frame rates also shift the bottleneck toward your CPU. At lower frame rates, the GPU usually does the heavy lifting. But as FPS climbs, the CPU has to prepare draw calls, game logic, and physics updates fast enough to keep up. Many games handle most of their rendering work on a single CPU thread, so even a powerful processor with many cores can hit a wall if its single-thread speed isn’t fast enough. This is why some players see stuttering at very high frame rates even when their overall CPU usage looks low: one core is maxed out while the others idle.
V-Sync Fixes Tearing but Adds Delay
Traditional V-Sync solves tearing by forcing your GPU to wait until the monitor finishes its current refresh before sending a new frame. The result is a perfectly clean image with no tears. The tradeoff is input lag. With V-Sync enabled, AMD’s own testing measured response times around 80.7 milliseconds, compared to roughly 40 milliseconds with V-Sync off. That’s double the delay, which is immediately noticeable in fast-paced games.
V-Sync also introduces a new problem: if your frame rate dips even slightly below the refresh rate, V-Sync can force it down to the next clean divisor (from 60 to 30, for instance), causing dramatic stuttering.
Better Sync Options Exist
Modern sync technologies offer a middle ground. AMD’s Enhanced Sync and Nvidia’s Fast Sync both let the GPU render freely at high frame rates but intelligently select which frame to send to the monitor. When FPS exceeds the refresh rate, Enhanced Sync measured at 39.2 milliseconds of response time, nearly identical to V-Sync off (40.1 ms) and far better than traditional V-Sync (80.7 ms). You get a tear-free image without the input lag penalty.
Adaptive sync technologies like FreeSync and G-Sync take a different approach entirely. Instead of syncing the GPU to the monitor, they sync the monitor to the GPU, adjusting the refresh rate on the fly to match whatever frame rate your system produces. These work best when your FPS fluctuates within the monitor’s supported range. Once your FPS exceeds the monitor’s maximum refresh rate, most adaptive sync implementations fall back to standard behavior, so pairing them with a frame rate cap just below your max refresh rate is a common recommendation.
When to Cap and When to Uncap
If you play competitive shooters where every millisecond of input lag matters, running uncapped (or capped well above your refresh rate) gives you a genuine responsiveness advantage. The visual artifacts are a worthwhile trade for many players in this category, especially on high-refresh monitors where tearing is less obvious.
If you play single-player games and prioritize visual smoothness, capping your frame rate to your monitor’s refresh rate (or using adaptive sync) eliminates tearing and gives you a consistent, clean image. It also keeps your GPU cooler and quieter, since it’s not doing unnecessary work.
A practical middle ground: cap your frame rate at roughly three times your refresh rate if your hardware can sustain it. This minimizes microstutter, keeps tearing small enough to be nearly invisible, and maintains low input lag without letting your GPU run completely unchecked. Pairing this with Fast Sync or Enhanced Sync cleans up the remaining artifacts with virtually no latency cost.