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ATI and 120hz

  • Thread starter Thread starter Seirrah
  • Start date Start date

Seirrah

Seirrah

After just buying a Samsung 2233RZ (120Hz) and an ATI 5770 (from here on Friday) I thought I should warn buyers that there is a big problem with ATI cards running at this refresh rate. You get screen flickering/tearing. So I'm now running the monitor at 60hz.

Big thread on this issue on the official ATI forum.


Will probably post this in the monitor section too.
 
It appears to effect all 120hz monitors, Viewsonic too.

There are apparently some workarounds, which 1/2 say work the others say don't.

1) Use amdgpuclock To overclock your 2D mode to around 300mhz.
According to a MOD at ATI's forums.
The cards 2D speed is too low to drive a 120Hz monitor. AMD are working on a fix to have a higher 2D speed should 120Hz be set. That will take a while though.
Click to expand...

2) The problem also occurs in 3d mode, again some appear to have had success others not. You need to have the 120hz monitor in the first port and a 60hz monitor in the 2nd port. This forces the card to clock higher than when just 1 monitor is used.

Eyefinity does not support 120hz at all. And is locked to a max 60fps output.
 
yup a lot of ppl have this problem running 120hz in css , there are a few workarounds but hopefully it will all be fixed with the release of new drivers
 
Blackbadger said:
It appears to effect all 120hz monitors, Viewsonic too.

There are apparently some workarounds, which 1/2 say work the others say don't.

1) Use amdgpuclock To overclock your 2D mode to around 300mhz.
According to a MOD at ATI's forums.

2) The problem also occurs in 3d mode, again some appear to have had success others not. You need to have the 120hz monitor in the first port and a 60hz monitor in the 2nd port. This forces the card to clock higher than when just 1 monitor is used.

Eyefinity does not support 120hz at all. And is locked to a max 60fps output.
Click to expand...

Again that Eyefinity supports 60Hz max. Eyefinity does not cap or lock games at 60fps, don't keep mixing the 2 to be the same because you will not see more than 60 fps on a 60Hz screen regardless of the true fps that does not mean that fps is limited to 60fps, the fps can be as high as they like its just that you will not notice them above 60fps on a 60hz monitor.
 
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Final8y said:
Again that Eyefinity supports 60Hz max. Eyefinity does not cap or lock games at 60fps, don't keep mixing the 2 to be the same because you will not see more than 60 fps on a 60Hz screen regardless of the true fps that does not mean that fps is limited to 60fps, the fps can be as high as they like its just that you will not notice them above 60fps on a 60hz monitor.
Click to expand...

Final8y you are very confused on this matter.

FPS is directly linked to what the monitor can display. It's not a case that you won't notice frames being displayed at over 60fps on a 60hz screen it's that they are not displayed at all. 60hz = the screen is refreshed max 60 times a second, therefore it cannot physically display any more than that.

Having a card internally rendering 80-100-200-400 fps is of little use if the card/monitor does not output this. You can not see it, as the hardware cannot and does not display it. There is no difference to a card rendering 60 or 400 fps on a 60hz screen, if you think you can see a higher fps it's purely a placebo. Just the same as there is no difference to a card rendering 120 or 400 fps on a 120hz screen.
If your card's minimum fps is higher than the max hz of your screen you cannot see it. It's not displayed in reality and thus is only useful for epeen from numbers in benchmarks.

There is a exception to the above which is when vsync is not enabled. If your card is rendering more fps than your card/display outputs you get tearing. Which doesn't increase the fps, it just makes a mess.
ggdsg19.jpg

in the example shown above you can see the card has tried to render multiple frames on the same image resulting in a image worse than what you would see if the fps was locked to the hz of the monitor.


To sum up. 60hz = 60fps max 120hz = 120fps max.
 
Blackbadger said:
Final8y you are very confused on this matter.

FPS is directly linked to what the monitor can display. It's not a case that you won't notice frames being displayed at over 60fps on a 60hz screen it's that they are not displayed at all. 60hz = the screen is refreshed max 60 times a second, therefore it cannot physically display any more than that.

Having a card internally rendering 80-100-200-400 fps is of little use if the card/monitor does not output this. You can not see it, as the hardware cannot and does not display it. There is no difference to a card rendering 60 or 400 fps on a 60hz screen, if you think you can see a higher fps it's purely a placebo. Just the same as there is no difference to a card rendering 120 or 400 fps on a 120hz screen.
If your card's minimum fps is higher than the max hz of your screen you cannot see it. It's not displayed in reality and thus is only useful for epeen from numbers in benchmarks.

There is a exception to the above which is when vsync is not enabled. If your card is rendering more fps than your card/display outputs you get tearing. Which doesn't increase the fps, it just makes a mess.
ggdsg19.jpg

in the example shown above you can see the card has tried to render multiple frames on the same image resulting in a image worse than what you would see if the fps was locked to the hz of the monitor.


To sum up. 60hz = 60fps max 120hz = 120fps max.
Click to expand...

Thanks a lot for this useful post.
It all becomes so clear why I like playing CS with max fps @ 100 on a CRT 1600x1200@100Hz so much better than my TFT @ 60hz....

Sooooooooo.... TFT with 100Hz upgrade time? ;D
 
is it worth getting this 120hz Samsung at all? I mean i got a 27inch Dell, I was kind of hoping not to go down 4 inches :(
 
Blackbadger said:
Final8y you are very confused on this matter.

FPS is directly linked to what the monitor can display. It's not a case that you won't notice frames being displayed at over 60fps on a 60hz screen it's that they are not displayed at all. 60hz = the screen is refreshed max 60 times a second, therefore it cannot physically display any more than that.

Having a card internally rendering 80-100-200-400 fps is of little use if the card/monitor does not output this. You can not see it, as the hardware cannot and does not display it. There is no difference to a card rendering 60 or 400 fps on a 60hz screen, if you think you can see a higher fps it's purely a placebo. Just the same as there is no difference to a card rendering 120 or 400 fps on a 120hz screen.
If your card's minimum fps is higher than the max hz of your screen you cannot see it. It's not displayed in reality and thus is only useful for epeen from numbers in benchmarks.

There is a exception to the above which is when vsync is not enabled. If your card is rendering more fps than your card/display outputs you get tearing. Which doesn't increase the fps, it just makes a mess.
ggdsg19.jpg

in the example shown above you can see the card has tried to render multiple frames on the same image resulting in a image worse than what you would see if the fps was locked to the hz of the monitor.


To sum up. 60hz = 60fps max 120hz = 120fps max.
Click to expand...

Im not confused on the matter.
And reading what your saying is exactly what i have been saying the only point is the distinction LOCKED that is the issue when its a fact that the card is not being locked by the display.

The fact that tearing is the result of exactly what i mean as the card render is not V synced to the start of the monitor refresh & because the card is rendering more FPS than the monitor can display or less than the display rate.

The noticed part or not displayed at all is irrelevant to my point that the card can render as many fps as it likes regardless of the limited refresh of the display the display looking bad is another matter with tearing.

To sum up. 60hz = 60fps Vis-able 120hz = 120fps max Vis-able .

You putting it across like
To sum up. 60hz = 60fps max 120hz = 120fps max.
Eyefinity does not support 120hz at all. And is locked to a max 60fps output.
Click to expand...
this all the time will give the impression to people who are not in the know that the card will cap frame rate to 60fps because you keep saying locked when the card does not lock the FPS to the monitor unless told to do so with V-sync or cap options from with in some game configure consoles.
Capping at 60fps still can have the tearing issue but noticeably less & not as good as V sync when it comes to getting rid of tearing.
 
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Blackbadger said:
To sum up. 60hz = 60fps max 120hz = 120fps max.
Click to expand...

It's a shame I find most games completely unplayable with v-sync enabled, you used to be able to counter this by using higher refreshrates which would greatly reduce tearing but now it's either tearing or unplayable, nice options we have today, things have really progressed.
 
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ebilcake said:
It's a shame I find most games completely unplayable with v-sync enabled, you used to be able to counter this by using higher refreshrates which would greatly reduce tearing but now it's either tearing or unplayable, nice options we have today, things have really progressed.
Click to expand...

Well i cap COD at 180FPS as it keeps the tearing to a minimal as V-sync adds far to much lag in that game.

I used to cap at 240FPS to get the Physics benefit but some servers used to kick if set that high.

I will not be seeing a 30" 2560x1600 120Hz monitor until there are interfaces that can handle the bandwidth like Quad-link DVI port.
 
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Hairybudda said:
Capping at 240 over 250 isn't really going to yield a noticible difference when it comes to tearing (unless your frame rate is constantly 240).
Click to expand...

No in real terms there is no difference but I did hold 240 most of the time or I would set it to 180.
 
Is this a problem for all ATi cards? I'm interested in higher Hz monitors but I'm not looking to upgrade until we get some S-IPS models or better - I'm not paying over the odds for a crappy TN panel.
 
It's hardly a problem, the desktop 2d profile is underclocked to save power/heat and doesn't have the juice to drive a monitor @ 120hz, it just needs clocked up (you can BIOS edit this or even use rivatuner).
 
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