Screen Refresh Rate and What Does It Do

Tha_Godfather

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 30, 2005
Messages
187
like the title says...

just wanted to kno how it works and what settings are best...

the higher the best or the lower the best

i use 1024x768 right now its at 60 HERTS cuz i dont kno what it does lol....someone help and explain.. thanks in advance :rolleyes: :confused: :( :confused:
 
refresh rate is how many times it refreshes the image on your monitor... Hertz is the unit for per second... 1/s . So it'd be 60 refreshes per second for 60 Hz.
 
It puts more of a strain on your video card because it has to redraw the screen that much more faster. On some CRT's I can really notice a differenc when dropping down from say 85hz to 60hz. The 60hz looks real shimmery and hard to focus on. 75Hz usually looks the same at 85Hz to me. Some CRT's can't do certain refresh rates, the image gets all wacky looking.

On LCD's though its a little different. Ever notice that "reaction time" on LCD's? Thats how long it takes for the LCD crystals to change (or redraw). So you may have seen 16ms (millseconds or 1000th of a second) on older/cheaper screens, well 1000 miliseconds divided by 16 miliseconds is 62.5. So that means at the very max it can only update at 62.5 times per second or 62.5Hz. So setting it higher on you video card is useless. The better monitors down to 12ms come out to 83.3Hz, and there are recently sub 10ms monitors on the market.

However on LCD's I do not notice the glimmer like on CRT's. So I usually leave it at 60Hz so the video card doesn't have to work any harder. I don't play much games anymore on computer either.

Thanks to better standards and stuff like DVI, most monitors and communicate the exact screen resolutions and refresh rates they can handle, so you don't have to guess like years before.
 
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