Let me interject since I had the same monitor. There were times when I loaded mw2 and noticed it was in 60hz rather than 120hz. I noticed it right away. I eventually had to lock the refresh in my video card to 120hz.
ok, thats a much better comparison than. Can you quantify the differences a little for us on NWN @ 60Hz and @120Hz on that same monitor? I would appreciate it.
The 2ms/3ms/10ms are response times which are different than refresh rate. The lower the resonse time the lower the ghosting. Refresh rate helps keep the game smooth with no stutter.
Technically speaking, LCDs don't have a refresh rate as the term is used in CRTs, their pixels are always on.
However, monitor makers have decided to call TWO completely different things "refresh rate" in an LCD monitor:
1. The frequency it takes pixels to change color (measured either black to white, gray to gray, or green to green), (this if a function of the LCD panel)
2. The frequency in which the monitor polls the video card for frames & initiates a frame change (these are not clearly separated, as they are assumed to be the same, but some monitor makers have fake higher refresh rate monitors that only poll the video card faster but update @ the same rate), (this is a function of the controller much more than the LCD panel)
All frequency is measured in Hz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertz
There are many other things that are simply not even named / measured. For example, I calculated that it takes a minimum of 6.2ms to transfer a 1920x1200 image over HDMI/single link DVI. So if your monitor has a 2ms g2g rate, well, it has to get an image before changing the pixels to it, and thus will take 8.2ms.
#1 and #2 are indeed completely different things, but both of those are often called "refresh rate" (or "response time" or "response rate" or anything else marketing came up with) by monitor manufacturers, despite the fact that LCDs do not refresh at all (according to the definition of refresh rate used in CRTs). That is understandable since the word refresh is generic and versatile and all of those changes (including line refreshing on a CRT) are technically a "refresh" according to the dictionary definition of the word, but it would have stood to reason that a new name would have been invented, rather then new definitions given to an already existing term. Thus "refresh rate" has 3 meanings in monitors terminology.
That being said, some monitor makers are more responsible and call #1 "response time", wikipedia seems to agree with those and tries to separate the two, which is a lot less confusing. Visio was calling their response time refresh rate in their documents which I just looked at, which threw me off as I was copy pasting from them.
For ease of communication I will refer to #1 as response time in our further communications (I typically do, because its a lot better a name than refresh rate, but the visio documentation threw me off)
this is still confusing btw because there are so many other things called "response time", furthermore, it only marginally has anything to do with "response"... for ideal clarity, lets call it "monitor response time" though
PS. in regards to manufacturers seperating #2 into its components and using only one (or maybe they are flat out lying?)...
480Hz refresh rate TVs are perfect example... the samsung 480Hz refresh rate TV supposedly has a response time of 4ms.
480Hz = 2.083ms
yet it takes 6.2ms to transfer the image over, and takes 4ms to change pixels. those numbers do not add up. A theoretical maximum refresh rate of a 4ms display with 1920x1200 resolution can be acquired via:
time to transfer + time to change pixels
aka 6.2 + 4 = 10.2ms = 98.04Hz
to be fair its probably 1920x1080, so thats 5.58ms to transfer, so 5.58ms + 4ms = 9.58 ms = 104.4Hz
EDIT: I goggled it, samsung is just flat out lying, their 480Hz refresh rate plasma TV is actually 60Hz
explained in detail here:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1047145
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