Why is the engine frame-rate limited?

[Spiegelman]

Speaking of v-sync, I don't think vsync works at all in this game.

Turned it on, tearing in the sewers all over the place.
Tried forcing vsync and triple buffering via d3doverrider, still tearing.

Am I doing something wrong?

I had tearing before I turned it on, but haven't experienced since then (in the Prison now). Maybe try changing your monitor refresh rate to 60 if it isn't already? Or maybe Eigen will come back and can help.

My refresh rate of my monitor is 60 though...

I'm not sure then... If I experience the same problem in the sewers with v-sync enabled I'll post in here or my compiled bugs list.

[Eigenmusic]

My refresh rate of my monitor is 60 though...

Right, so your situation indicates that something in the pipeline of game->opengl->gpu driver->gpu->monitor is not working properly; no idea what it might be, and I don't know enough about what could be wrong to help unfortunately.

Nonetheless, your graphics processor KNOWS what refresh rate the monitor is using; after all, your graphics driver is what TELLS the monitor what refresh rate to use.

If someone has their monitor set to refresh at 120 Hz and has v-sync on, I sure hope that their gpu is capable of producing a constant 120+ fps! If not, then the processor is going to be dropping your framerate in order to keep the frames synced. The important thing to note here is that v-sync will sync to the vertical refresh rate (60/75/120/etc Hz), not just 60 Hz; therefore, that is not the problem for you.

Also, thanks MulleDK19 for posting that image; I had wanted to make something similar, but was far too lazy.

[lillmarcus]

for all of you that have 120hz monitors... go into Redist > Config > default_main_settings.cfg and change "UpdatesPerSec="60.000000" to "UpdatesPerSec="120.000000"...

Looks marvelous!

[bugmenot]

It's not about the speed; it's about the timing.

Imagine two clocks.

They're both ticking the same speed, 60 times a minute as clocks do.

Does this mean you can only hear a single tick each second?
Maybe, but it's more than likely that one is ticking a liitttttle bit later than the other.

VSync makes them both tick at the same time.

[Mr. Mock]

Whats all this hubbub about not being able able to tell the difference between 60 and 120 fps? 120 looks a fair bit better in first person games to me, although if you can get 60 min (not 60 avg) that looks pretty good.
Anyway fps limiters are nice if for some reason you don't want v-sync on, they limit card heat (and fan noise) and prevent you from getting multiple tears per monitor refresh.