In my earlier post, i had written about refresh rate as pertaining to CRTs.
As LCDs are gaining popularity (as evinced by vicky's post), it is important to understand
refresh rates as pertaining to LCDs:
LCD technology differs at a fundamental level from CRT technology.
While pixels on CRTs need to be continuously refreshed to maintain a constant picture, LCD pixels need only to be set initially - they will retain their state (and hence the overall picture) until the pixels are changed.
Effectively, an LCD will maintain a constant picture display with a 0 Hz refresh rate.
The maximum number of different frames an LCD can display per second - it's refresh rate - depends on how quickly the LCD display can change the value of it's pixels, thereby displaying a new frame. This is refered to as the
response time.
Everyone knows that the lower the response time of an LCD, the better it is for gaming/movies/other apps involving a display of motion. The standard explanation is that lower response times eliminate "ghosting" - pixels which are unable to change quick enough to match the front buffer contents.
What a lot of people don't realise, is that response time is inversly proportional to refresh rate. A low response time increases the number of frames which can be displayed.
Converting response time into refresh rate involves taking the inverse of the reponse time.
A simple calculation yields the following results:
16 ms >> 62.50 Hz
12 ms >> 83.33 Hz
10 ms >> 100.0 Hz
8 ms >> 125.00 Hz
6 ms >> 166.67 Hz
4 ms >> 250.00 Hz
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Dependent on - (a) LCD display response time
(b) Video card
Independent of - (a) Game engine/Application
(b) Video settings within the game/application
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hmm...
a 4ms LCD + card capable of supporting 250Hz = 250 visible frames!! :hap2:
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@mods - plz consider merging this with my previous post in this thread
