Hello guys, I've been playing osu!mania for a bit of time now, around a few months daily, but I've ran into a LOT of problems with higher scrolling speeds and the notes onscreen with my ASUS VG248QE. I didn't know whether to put this in the osu!mania subforum or here, but since it's more of a question/inquiry about vertical scrolling with a specific screen, I put it here.

To put it in words, the notes are unreadable because I have very clearly visible ghosts of them, in random intervals, so trying to hit them accurately is as effective as tossing a coin each time I press a key. I was told that it's a problem related to framerate actually not being the same as screen refresh rate, but even trying to sync it caused the very same problems to occur even more.

I've tried lots of things, playing with the strobelight utility tool to get a better view of things, trying to sync the game framerate with the screen, toying around with NVIDIA Inspector, game settings... I'm usually disabling Aero before launching the game too for less delay. I'm playing on full screen 1920x1080 @144/120Hz Strobed, and the skin in game renders properly if I take a screen. I'm at a wit's end, and am seeking help to solve this before having to sell this screen for a better one.

I've made a post on Blur Busters about this, if you want to check quickly what I've tested and whatnot, to no avail, here it is : https://forums.blurbusters.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4984&sid=6edcc2f95cc84bead3bcbe26834afcf8

The thing is that I'm not even using abnormal speeds either, I'm on 22-23, but if I didn't have this problem, I could step up and read 26-28 easily (tested on another 144Hz screen at a convention) and easily clear some of the songs I just can't at the moment. It's even more abnormal that I DON'T get this in Taiko whatsoever. The horizontal scrolling is buttery smooth (I could play on scrolling speeds way higher than what I now have on osu!mania), but vertical is just unbearable.

Which leads me to this: Do any of you guys have a VG248QE and experience the same problems? If not, what kind of setup, what settings do you have?

If you did have the same problems, but switched to another monitor, what did you choose, and did it help resolving them?

If you don't have a VG248QE, it's fine, if you have a 144Hz 1080p monitor and don't have any problems with duplicate images, what's your monitor and setup and what do you find great/annoying about it on osu! ? I'm considering changing my screen if all else fails.

Thanks for reading this, and I hope anyone has any hints or ideas that could make me keep this monitor that would otherwise be fine for me.

Higher scrolling speeds will produce more ghosting. That's the trade-off. No way around it but getting a monitor with an even higher refresh rate.

Do you have your VG248QE's tracefree setting set to 80?

Lower or higher tracefree really showed a lot of ghosting on that monitor.

Mine was crystal clear with lightboost 10 and the monitor settings dialed in, could easily read PixPerAn at max, but that was horizontal scrolling and I don't play mania so it's probably not directly applicable.


Also, /some/ of the blur in the pictures you uploaded is definitely artifacts from your camera shutter being too slow. (Very first picture you posted of the problem, third column, about halfway down, that trailing edge triangle without any surrounding panel overshoot blur. Yeah, that's entirely your camera. I'm not trying to say that you don't have a problem - you obviously do or you wouldn't be posting about it - but some of those pictures are misrepresenting what's happening.)

abraker wrote:

Higher scrolling speeds will produce more ghosting. That's the trade-off. No way around it but getting a monitor with an even higher refresh rate.

The problem here is that I see players with 60Hz/120Hz monitors playing at speeds like 26-28, yet they don't have any problems at all reading the patterns, while patterns are almost unreadable at 22 here, hence why I'm asking if other people have problems with the VG248QE. I mean, I can't even read "I" at all on Advanced since 22 is way too slow so notes are too packed to read, and more than that just gets even more ghosting so it's also unreadable. My fingers follow the song easily, I just can't see anything at all past the first part so I just crash anyway.

Implojin wrote:

Do you have your VG248QE's tracefree setting set to 80?

Lower or higher tracefree really showed a lot of ghosting on that monitor.

Mine was crystal clear with lightboost 10 and the monitor settings dialed in, could easily read PixPerAn at max, but that was horizontal scrolling and I don't play mania so it's probably not directly applicable.


Also, /some/ of the blur in the pictures you uploaded is definitely artifacts from your camera shutter being too slow. (Very first picture you posted of the problem, third column, about halfway down, that trailing edge triangle without any surrounding panel overshoot blur. Yeah, that's entirely your camera. I'm not trying to say that you don't have a problem - you obviously do or you wouldn't be posting about it - but some of those pictures are misrepresenting what's happening.)

Tracefree is set to 80 at all times. Ghosting is still present vertically. Horizontally it is pretty fine, I'm still playing Taiko from time to time and never have a problem with horizontal scrolling, at way higher scrolling speeds than for osu!mania.
Also, I'm aware of the smearing due to camera, but I don't have anything else I can use to try and show what the problem is. It's hard to explain, even harder to show, unfortunately. But I can definitely say that most of it DEFINITELY isn't smearing. I can see almost all the frames in some cases.

Trying to sync the framerate of the game to the refresh rate is not a good idea in this game. Having low fps makes the game detect your inputs less accurately (which is really bad, if for example, you are trying to get near 1 million scores). With your PC you should easily achieve over 1000 fps, or less than 1 ms of frame time (the number below the fps counter in-game), which is really good for gameplay; for that you have to disable all settings that enforce v-sync (both in the game menu, and in your GPU settings).

In the photos you took to show the problem, it looks like you enabled the in-game vsync, the game thinks your screen refresh rate is 120Hz, but something else is causing the game to run at 60 fps. With that happening, it is expected ghosting is very visible, since the difference between each consecutive frame is very high.

I don't recommend using vsync at all, but if you do, change the "RefreshRate" value in the osu!.<windows_username>.cfg file in the game folder (open the file with notepad) to match your screen framerate. Also disable all vsync settings that your GPU (or any other external application) are enforcing.

Note that having high fps causes another issue with the visuals, which is screen tearing (which is a result of the screen showing you several different frames at the same time, the higher the fps, the more "screen tears" there are, but the less different each vertically stacked consecutive frame is). Screen tearing has more visual impact with big pictures that are moving horizontally, which is a reason using vsync is more common among taiko players (despite vsync having negative impact in accuracy).

Full Tablet wrote:

In the photos you took to show the problem, it looks like you enabled the in-game vsync, the game thinks your screen refresh rate is 120Hz, but something else is causing the game to run at 60 fps. With that happening, it is expected ghosting is very visible, since the difference between each consecutive frame is very high.

I don't recommend using vsync at all, but if you do, change the "RefreshRate" value in the osu!.<windows_username>.cfg file in the game folder (open the file with notepad) to match your screen framerate. Also disable all vsync settings that your GPU (or any other external application) are enforcing.

Note that having high fps causes another issue with the visuals, which is screen tearing (which is a result of the screen showing you several different frames at the same time, the higher the fps, the more "screen tears" there are, but the less different each vertically stacked consecutive frame is). Screen tearing has more visual impact with big pictures that are moving horizontally, which is a reason using vsync is more common among taiko players (despite vsync having negative impact in accuracy).

The reason I used vsync in the first place for the videos is because people on Blur Busters asked me to try and sync it so that the ghosting would be less visible. Most of these pictures are "tests". I always play on unlimited normally, and even tried changing the framerate within username.cfg inside osu!'s directory. Also, I never used VSync on Taiko, as the stutters bothered me way too much.

Other tries before that are because I've already read about the importance of frame rate = strobe rate = refresh rate, since it reduces the problems drastically. And I've noted this, inside the Blur Busters forum posts! It reduced the ghosting by a LOT, but it's still there and still unreadable, while adding stutters, making it unusable.

The problem still persists in all tests I've done, plus when I play normally, of course. Be them with way higher framerate, or way less. However, like you say, I do usually have 0.70ms of frametime, but that's not that important to me. I can get behind a little more latency (I'm used to up to 10ms) if it means I can see the things I'm supposed to push, because I can get used to latency, but absolutely not for unreadable notes. It's like being permadrunk vertically, or trying to hit cloning ninjas!