Shovel Knight Vsync settings

For speedrunning Shovel Knight on PC you must play with vertical sync enabled. The reason being that with it disabled your frame rate can skyrocket, allowing you to infinitely punch with dust knuckles in some situations (like the tinker knight fight). Other things in the game also become inconsistent with vsync disabled or set to legacy. There are sections where as Plague Knight you can burst and double jump and not hit a section of spikes; this can only happen with vsync enabled. With it disabled or legacy you will hit the spikes. I have no idea why. Now onto issues with vsync enabled.

Shovel Knight on PC tries to make itself look like it runs at 60 FPS with vsync enabled. The game is supposed to be at 60 FPS and is capable of this. The issue that can occur is that the game might only look like it's running properly when in reality it is running much slower. To test, turn off vsync and open the main game menu. If it seems sluggish to open and if your character moves slowly then the game is not running properly. This happened to us at AGDQ 2016 and we determined that Nvidia's bloatware was the cause. In order to get the game to run on the practice PCs we had to disable nearly every Nvidia service and also open Geforce experience. Only under those circumstances would the game run properly and without lag. (we also tested the game on the main stream PCs and some staff laptops. The laptops were laggy and the stream PCs had no issues at all. We made no changes to the laptops or stream PCs). The main point is if you run Shovel Knight on PC make sure the game is actually running at 60 FPS with vsync enabled.