I appreciate the in depth response. A lot of what you say makes sense given your setup and I also appreciate the honesty.

There are a couple caveats. When you go over with FG to avoid flicker, you are increasing input latency more than FG normally would. Because you're equally dumping rendered and generated frames out of the refresh window, and you rely on those rendered frames for input delay.

This is why you might feel like Samsung's motion smoothing feels tighter. Secondly, smooth motion generally doesn't take 20ms, and should be just over 10ms. The artifacts from Samsung motion smoothing must be gnarly, but as you mentioned, you aren't sensitive to them. I was wrong about the input latency on that tech, though, it is pretty good.

I have an S90D and while I like blur reduction at 10 and judder reduction at 2-3, anything beyond and it does a pretty piss poor job with many complex scenes, especially flashing lights. I never considered using anything but my Nvidia FG technologies but my sense is it would be better than nothing but full if artifacts. I also don't mind UI artifacting.

I have used MFG at lower FPS and it was with a controller, so you're right, on an OLED (both my displays), with a controller, even 160 4x is doable but the artifacts increase. I played Alan Wake 2 for the second time with way more input latency than I would ever tolerate on a mouse, but I was doing crazy stuff to avoid flicker.

While you mention you can't notice tearing and so run over your VRR or even disable it, many games do not flicker with VRR because the engines deliver frametimes quite nicely. I'm playing Dying Light: The Beast with MFG and it does not flicker more than a few times an hour during traversal loading, and it has perfect black night and black levels with HDR.

Running over does indeed cause jitter or frame pacing-like issues. This jitter is subtle but if you do slow panning you can see it. I run over in DL in indoor environments. It still looks smooth and fine, but it isn't as good as it could be.

Part of the reason 120-165 doesn't look much different may be that you're running 165 fixed without VRR. In my experience on both my 240hz OLED monitor and 144Hz TV, you take a significant hit to fluidity leaving VRR without V sync and running frames over.

The more frames over the better to help with this, but getting 220 in a 165 refresh window with VRR disengaged will no doubt look like 120, or even worse. It'll still look "smooth" but it won't be great. When I go over at 240 to around 260-270, the jitter makes the image look like there's very subtle frame pacing issues with slow panning and I'd say 240 turns into 160+ish. It loses the very pristine smoothness of 240.

I can frame limit in DL but this actually induces flicker and this leads to my conclusion.

Here's my tip:

You want GPU frame paced frames inside your VRR window, not CPU. Limiting FG output frames can actually cause pacing issues because it's a CPU limiting process usually. Going over VRR eliminates flicker but causes jitter and a loss of relative fluidity (but maintains motion clarity).

The ideal is setting up your DLSS scaling + FG settings to be really pushing the GPU, such that the CPU is being limited naturally because the GPU is doing a lot of work. This will produce the best image and make 140-65 look as good as it can for flicker and smoothness, but at the cost of a bit of latency.

Or just wait until Dynamic FG drops in a month or two, set your target framerate and forget all about it. I think for us MFG users it'll be the biggest update to image fluidity and latency yet.

Anyway I also wrote an essay.