I played Oblivion for over 1000 hours with vSync disabled, with no ill effects. Close to 300 hours with Fallout 3, and no ill effects. I've had Arthmoor vouch for me, trust me, vSync didn't cause issues like this in previous games.

And it seems people here are very...suspicious, for which I'm not sure how to respond. I'm simply stating my findings and many others findings. If you want to continue to have iPresentInterval disabled then go right ahead, I'm just warning people of the issues that can occur for a lot us.

I love you! Thanks -- this thing was really bugging me.
One problem, of course, remains: If we assume that some NPC behaviour is broken by the calendar drifting, we would need to make sure that we reset the weekday transition to where it should be, and not just the closest one like this.

Does anyone have confirmation of quests breaking due to calendar drift?

Did you play on XP or Vista? Because Oblivion, FO3, and FONV all have these weird fps issues with vsync turned off. Now I'm not in a position to test the game right now, but this got me thinking. Anybody will to try something out for me?

Open an elevated command prompt (right click on command prompt and run as admin) and type the following:

bcdedit /set useplatformclock true

And press enter. Exit command prompt and then REBOOT for it to work.

Remember to reboot or it won't work. Games rely on QueryPerformanceCounter to accurately measure the time in the Windows. Windows 7 changed the way timing works. The above change will measure time based on the 'old' way

Don't worry there are no ill effects and it is completely reversible. If you want to undo it, open an elevated command prompt and type bcdedit /deletevalue useplatformclock and press enter and reboot again. I'm not even sure if that is what it is, but I can't try it for a few hours. I bet that's what it is and if it's true I still wouldn't count on the devs to change the timing code. I'm not sure how easy that would even be

@Astronomer: Generally, NPCs react to changes to the time nicely. The days themselves don't drift out, just the physical name of the day. Generally it'll only be a few hours slower, so this fix won't have any adverse effects, it just corrects your time to where it actually should be

So Bethesda designed their game to break because I turned off a feature on my GRAPHICS CARD DRIVER that has now broken my game? I'm sorry, but I'm calling bug on this no matter how utterly wrong you are here. This is outside the control of the game now. I turned vsync off because it artifically screws up the frame rates on several games, only to have it come along and do this because of some idiotic timing issue Gamebryo has?

I'll have you know that the damage is permanent once inflicted, and it matters not whether one has touched iPresentInterval or not, because I haven't, and now my calendar is shifted 8 hours from its proper place. It already caused me to forfeit a bonus in the DB quest line because the target wasn't supposed to be executing AI at the location I killed them at the TIME I killed them. I suspect the mission I'm on now is about to break as well, and that's just plain wrong.

I have no idea how many other things are now completely screwed up, but I've been noticing people wandering the streets in the middle of the night because they think it's still daylight hours. It nearly got the Jarl of Morthal killed by local wildlife that's not normally there in her regular schedule.

So yes. This is squarely Bethesda's fault for coding something that can be affected by using a feature supplied by the manufacturer of my video driver. One I didn't have to hack up ini files to do.

Arthmoor, try the "fix" I posted earlier (or rather, a hack). It seems to have fixed everything for me.

For some reason when I opened the game console up I cant seem to type the "+" in "Set GameHour to GameHour + 1.33", 1.33 being the time I calculated. Any thoughts?

Strange. You could instead try:

Show GameHour

Which will give you a value. Add up this to you 1.33 and then do:

Set GameHour to xxx

Where xxx is the two values added up (if the value is above 23 however, you'll need to wait until an earlier time and then do it (the addition) again).

Try using the numpad key, maybe? Unless you tried both?

I just want to add to this. I'm not trashing anyone but I'm simply sharing my experience with v-sync off.

I'm level 20, going through the main questline. Last night I made it into Black Reach. Taken aback by how awesome this zone is, I had to explore every inch of it. There's a stair case that leads to two Frost Trolls..I killed them and made my way down to the water, found a node to mine and got stuck, literally stuck, couldn't move or anything. Loaded my last Autosave and made my way back down to that spot and as soon as I touched the water the game force quit to the desktop.

Frustrated I came here and found this thread and thought, ok, since I have disabled V-Sync I might as well try this out. Because it is sort of annoying to go into an inn, talk to the innkeeper, and as soon as I turn to face him/her I hear nothing but pots and pans banging together....I don't experience the shift in hours, the sun always rises and sets at 8 and there are never any people walking around in towns at 3am.

Anyway, back to Black Reach. After reading the OP and making changes (triple buffering, force v-sync on) I booted the game. Normally with FRAPS on I get like 1500 FPS at the start up screen. V-sync on I was getting like 20, and the mouse was way sluggish. No matter, I loaded my last save and made my way to the same area only to find HUGE artifacts all over the water, in nothing but the water. It was like shimmery rainbow color effect. And my FPS was 20-45.

Needless to say, I turned V-sync off again.

You do realise that 1500 fps is very likely harmful to your hardware, right?

You do realise you have no idea what you're talking about, right?

The 2D performance of the menu screen is usually always in the thousands of FPS, it matters not.

First of all, I think the skyrim menu is in 3D?

Secondly: I'm not claiming to be an expert, so I could be wrong. However, when SC2 was released they didn't have a framerate cap in the menu, resulting in reports of damaged hardware (not a compelling argument), and Blizz hotfixing the issue.

SC2 has so many players there's got to be a few among them with inadequately cooled GPUs and in a completely CPU work-free scene like that, the GPU might overheat, yes. But imo any GPU that breaks because it's being run at 100% load was already broken and deserves to burn. Most of them just generate unusually loud fan noise, after all.

See also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRo-1VFMcbc

I turned Vsync off and enabled framerate limiting in Bandicam at 65 FPS. It works better for some strange reason.

Does not work for me.

For my save - when I wait 1 hour, the day changes (around 5pm, Middas -> Turdas).

If I don't use the wait ability, and just watch the minutes go by, the day does not change even after two hours (when it should have changed in less than one), so waiting to the minute the day changes doesn't work for me at least.

Did this and worked (though I skipped the math and tried numbers on trial-and-error till I got it right)
Thanks

I was right, it's a Windows 7 timing thing. You can play with vsync disabled without any issues if you do the following:

Open an elevated command prompt (right click on command prompt and run as admin) and type the following:

bcdedit /set useplatformclock true

And press enter. Exit command prompt and then REBOOT for it to work.

Remember to reboot or it won't work. Games rely on QueryPerformanceCounter to accurately measure the time in the Windows. Windows 7 changed the way timing works. The above change will measure time based on the 'old' way

Don't worry there are no ill effects and it is completely reversible. If you want to undo it, open an elevated command prompt and type bcdedit /deletevalue useplatformclock and press enter and reboot again.

Seriously? If that's true, it's great news.

I assume by "v-sync" you mean setting ipresentinterval = 1?

Actually the date change issue has nothing to do with vsync.

I just tested it on PS3, the day (the actual name of the day, not the numerical date) changes on the wrong times as well.

This is pretty much the same thing for me. I was standing around waiting for the day to change (and using Tab to check the time), but it never happened and it always stayed the same day. The day only changed when I used the Sleep or Wait function.

I managed to get it to sync using just the Wait function by starting at the top of the hour and then waiting to see how many hours from that point the day would change at. Then I set the time to that many hours before midnight. It did sync for a little while but soon after, the day started changing an hour later (and still only on the Sleep/Wait functions).

Yeah, turn it off in skyrim.ini (you have to add it). I have it in skyrimprefs but I think it only works if set in skyrim.ini:

ipresentinterval = 0

Then open an elevated command prompt and type bcdedit /set useplatformclock true, press enter, and reboot. This has something to with Windows 7 timing and bios timing or something like that. I really don't understand it, but came across it in a discussion regarding overclocking and game speed anomalies. I just guessed it was the same thing (and I was right)

Here is some info about it:

http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/184992-win7-enabling-hpet-bcdedit-set-useplatformclock-true-command.html

Little over my head, but basically a Windows 7 timing thing

Clocked a hundred hours with it disabled and none of the aforementioned problems exist in my game :\

^ Then you just don't notice it.

Y-axis sensitivity changing with framerate is a known issue. If you have vsync off it's just more noticeable because you can get 300+ FPS and then the vertical sens becomes insane. Unless you're the one person in the world that doesn't have this problem. Stand next to a wall so you get triple digit FPS, then look around... should be easy to see. OR limit your FPS to something low, like 20 FPS... you'll see vertical speed becomes significantly slower than normal.


And what does this fix? The name of the day changing at the wrong time?

How does that explain why it happens to the PS3 version as well?

It's a game problem.

I don't believe this has caused any of my NPCs to bug out though. They do exactly what they should be doing at certain times of the day... their actions seemed more governed by the actual numbers rather than the name of the day.