This jitter is minimized, although not eliminated, with technologies such as Freesync, now part of HDMI and DisplayPort specs.
This is worth consideration when selecting a screen today.
It does quite a bit. e.g.:
If your refresh rate is 60Hz, that's some 16.6ms per frame.
If the frame takes 16.7ms and thus isn't ready by the deadline, you get either tearing (very visible, annoying, experience breaking) or your frame takes 33.3ms, which is a lot of Jitter.
Jitter between 16.6ms and 33.3ms or tearing, are both much worse than 16.7ms you could get with freesync, which is just some 100µs of jitter.
Even at 120Hz, the barely miss deadline case would be half the jitter, but still 8ms vs 50µs. And the tearing alternative is still every bit as horrible.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/got...
https://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/got...
^^ I don't want this.
Yeah, the average is 60 and VRR will prevent tearing and jitter, but won't magically solve the issue I'm referring to. What I want is this:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/fra...
I want the same consistency for terminal input delay. Suckless terminal, for example, has higher latency, but P99 is much closer to avg than Alacritty and urxvt. While on the subject of terminals: st will stay mostly the same when there is additional load present, while all GPU-based terminals will start slipping if I'm doing something that involves GPU (discord voice call, screen sharing/recording, spotify).
I prefer to cap FPS in games for the same reason, if my PC can't deliver consistent frame rate.