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Display ?'s for Gamer dudes / Computer nerds

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Sean Smith:

--- Quote ---So, for the ideal game experience, you up your resolution as far as you can while maintaining a decent framerate. Bearing in mind that framerate is monitor-limited, too, which is something the gaming rags won't tell you. If your monitor is refreshing at 30 Hz (not uncommon for flat-panel monitors), any framerate over 30fps isn't being shown. The only advantage to a framerate higher than your monitor's refresh rate is that when it bottoms out due to in-game activity, its low point is still at least as high as your monitor's refresh rate.

(This is why the tests they run where machine A gets 178fps on Uber Game X, while machine B gets 193fps are so meaningless. If your monitor can only show you 60 different images a second, what use are the extra 118 images, much less the extra 133?)

Um, that's not really correct.  The frames per second and the monitor's refresh rate aren't related that way, unless you enable Vsync.  Also, modern LCDs have extremely fast response times now, and most modern CRTs are running at 72-100 Hz at high resolutions.

Control Group:

--- Quote ---The frames per second and the monitor's refresh rate aren't related that way, unless you enable Vsync
Vsync ties your fps to your refresh rate, true, which can help eliminate image tearing (if the scene is updating mid-scan on the monitor).

But there's no getting past the fact that your monitor's refresh rate dictates how many individual scenes it can display per second: that's the definition of refresh rate, after all. If your monitor is refreshing at 60Hz, it's drawing one full picture every 60th of a second. If your game is running at 120fps, it's generating two pictures every 60th of a second. The monitor can't display both, whether or not you've got Vsync turned on.

I won't disagree with your comments on LCD response time or CRT refresh rate - I haven't been shopping for a display in several years, so I'll believe that we're doing much better now than we've done in the past.

Hawk:
Thanks, guys.

I put Doom3 and HL2 on 1600X1200 and the FPS are passable for the way I tiptoe through 'em.

Doom3 is 70 with no AA "high", everything else "on"; HL-2 is 91 with AA2, AF8 - only improves to 93 with no AA (?!). The HL-2 timedemo was Anandtech's "Coast" thing.

The monitor's a 16ms 75HZ thing - y'awl were right. I believe there's actually a diff at hi-res, not just something I'm talking myself into seeing.

I guess that HL-2 really is a lot kinder to hardware than doom.

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