Simviation Forums

Being a newcomer to FS2004 can I ask what is probably a daft question, does the refresh rate on my monitor make any difference to the framerate in flightsim ?. Also has anyone overclocked a nvidia geforce4 Ti4600, if so what settings were used .

robc,

Don't know if anyone has said it yet...... welcome to SimV.

If you don't have the refresh rate over-ridden in directX, and vertical refresh is "on", the top refresh rates set on the monitor will be the max frame rate in the sim.

Thanks for the welcome John, yes just the info I wanted.

As for fps, I'm not sure.

The monitor is responsible for the display so it should be fps independent, but the card will only support certain refresh rates at high resolutions.

Me thinks you would need to test it in a controlled environment for your specific hardware and settings.

refresh rate is for CRT moniters. (If you have an LCD moniter, the refresh setting is useless).

FPS is the amount of frames a vid card can ganerate in a second.

the refresh rate is how fast the moniter can display these frames.
Vertical tearing is where the video card is updating the frames so fast that the moniter can't display them that fast so that 2 (or more) frames a displayed at once and a visable tear is seen between the two frames.

Vertical sync prevents tearing by limiting the FPS so that the moniter can catch up.

Here's an analogy.

You have a resterant that can make 50 meals an hour. You have a truck that can ship only 30 meals per hour. The resterant would be your vid card and the truck would be your moniter. Whether or not the truck can deliver meals has no impact on the resterant's abilty to make meals.

However, 20 meals are wasted because the truck can only carry a certain amount of meals. So the resterant will only make 30 meals an hour so that no meals are wasted. That is vertical sync.

Its a crude analogy, but it works.

So, to answer your question more clearly, the refresh rate only affects your FPS if and only if vertical sync is enabled.