monitor bottleneck?

[jlo82585]

Hey guys I just have a question. my monitor a 36in samsung 720p television. My brother keeps telling me that If I would switch to a 1080i monitor it will work my GPU less and possibly give me better frame rates on games as well as giving me obviously better resolution. he also said that since the televisions refresh rate is 60hz I cant do any better than 60fps visually. My brother only recently got into computers and electronics in general so I just want to validate what he is telling me. the 60hz/60fps seems reasonable but I have never heard of a GPU having to work harder to display on a TV than a dedicated monitor. can someone shed some light on this please?

 

[4K_shmoorK]

Fairly certain that if you connect your PC via HDMI and the PC's resolution is set to 1080, the TV would downsample the signal to 720p. This can create a grainy, blurry image. Perhaps this is what he means, essentially you are rendering 1080 but the image is downsampled to 720. But if you were to switch to a native 1080 panel, the GPU would still be pushing the same number of pixels, the performance would remain unchanged.

Yes at a 60Hz refresh rate, 60FPS is the maximum you will benefit.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

1080i is interleaved which means it only needs every other horizontal row of pixels, the effective resolution is 1920x540 which is 1,036,800 pixels, where as 720p is 1280x720 which equals 921,600 pixels. It will take slightly more GPU power to run the 1080i picture.

GPUs don't have to work harder to display on a TV compared to a monitor, all the significant work is done to output to a frame buffer, what that is displayed on doesn't make a difference.