I know this was talked about before but I can't seem to find it using the search feature so I will ask again. I have a 17" Sony SDM-HX7 flat screen monitor and currently I have the refresh rate set at 60Hz but I can set it as high as 180Hz. What are the advantages of the higher settings (if any) and what is the best setting to run FS2004?

The advantage of setting it higher than 60hz is that 60hz is terribly eye-straining. At 60hz I can actually see the image wavering as it redraws. I find anything over 75hz is fine and I'm not sure if there is much benefit to running higher than 100hz.

Thanks! I will try and set it between 75Hz and 100Hz then see if I can see a difference.One more question, does the higher settings mean more framerates? (My framerates are not bad now, but any extra framerates is a good thing!)

It doesn't mean more frames, but if your system happens to be pumping out more fps than your refresh rate, it will act as a limit to framerate. In other words, the PC may be able to process info fast enough to compute 120 frames per second, but if your monitor refresh rate is set to 100 you won't actually see 120fps. 20 of them will be processed "between" screen refreshes.

I tried 75Hz and 100Hz and didn't see a difference between that and 60Hz. So either my eyes are real bad or I have a very very good monitor. :-lol

wether you can see the difference or not, 75hz is alot easier on your eyes than 60hz. Regardless, it doesn't hurt anything running it at 75hz - it's not like its any sort of performance drag on your system or anything...it's a physical setting in the monitor itself...but of course, suit yourself. :)

Well even though I did not see a diffence I did leave it on 75Hz. :-)

What refresh rate you need depend on your eyes. Some people can

I teach people how to adjust and repair very high end video display devices that can run up to S100,000 each or more and are used in Simulators all over the world, so maybe I can shed some light on this subject. The reason for having a higher vertical "refresh rate" is to avoid flicker. Everyone see's flicker at a refresh rate of lower than about 45 hz, and this is because of a factor called persistance of vision that is a visual property of your eye. In other words, lower than 45 hz and your eye will perceive that the light is blinking on and off rapidly ( flickering) and above that, it looks like it is steadily on) . That is why refresh rates of standard broadcast systens are either 50 hz in Europe or 60 hz in the US. When I travel to Europe and watch TV there, I see "flicker" because I am not used to 50 Hz refresh. Usually after a few days there, I don't notice it anymore. Once you go higher than 60 hz, very rarely do people perceive flicker anymore. They found out, however, some years back that eye strain, and eye fatigue and headaches were much worse at lower refresh rates even though the person was not seeing any visual flicker. That is why we have refresh rates today on our monitors of 70 hz, 80 hz and so on. Now what is the difference between frame rate and refresh rate? Frame rate is how many pictures per second you see. If you are using progressive scan, frame rate and refresh rate are exactly the same. Each frame is generated by one refresh or one complete scan of the picture tube . If you are using interlaced scanning , as the TV systems Pal and Secam and NTSC use, then the frame rate is refresh or scan rate, divided by 2. In other words, 30 frames ( 30 complete pictures) are scanned in two steps, all the odd lines of video, 1,3,5,7, ...... and then retrace back to the top and do all the even lines 2,4,6,8,...... This has the scannning rate running at 60 times per second, to eliminate flicker yet only 30 complete pictures per second are displayed ( each picture has to be scanned a half a picture at a time. The 1/2 pictures are called fields.) This was done to keep video bandwidth within reasonable limits for our TV broadcast standards. If you displayed 60 complete pictures per second ( non-interlaced or progressive scan) you would need twice the video bandwidth. Almost every computer monitor uses progressive scan today, so frame rate almost always equals refresh rate. In other words, if you PC monitor is scanning at 80 hz, it is being sent 80 pictures per second from the computer video card. If FS 9 is only able to display 20 frames per second, due to the processing limitations of your PC, then obviously some of these pictures will have to be duplicated. So each picture will be scanned 4 times. Eitherway, you don't see flicker, and you don't get a headache after 6 hours of staring at FS9 :). FS9 sends the video car X number of frames per second, the video card is always going to send the monitor exactly whatever number of frames per second it is set at, so the video card obviously will have to send multiple scans of each FS9 frame to make up the number of frames the video card has to crank out per second. Now comes the Frames per second output to the video card from FS9. In order to see motion, about 20+ frames per second is necessary for smooth motion. PAL TV uses 25 FPS as we already discussed, and people never complain about motion problems watching tv, or the 24 FPS at the movie theater, so as long as your PC can crank out more than about 20 to 25 FPS, you will probably be very happy with what you see on the screen, motion wise. If your video card is set for a vertical refresh of 75hz, that means that each one of those 25FPS will have to be scanned 3 times, so you can't possibly see flicker and or get eye strain. If I set my video card to refresh at 100 FPS, I still get only 25FPS of video from FS9, but now each picture is scanned 4 times on the monitor instead of 3. What can happen, if you set your Vertical scan rate up too high, you may exceed the bandwidth capabilities of your monitor and you will start to get distortion of your image caused by this. Just to give you a rough idea of bandwith of a video display, multiply the horizontal pixels by the vertical pixels times the number of pictures per second and that will give you the minimum bandwith that you monitor should meet or exceed to produce a high quality picture. For example SXGA would be 1280 x 1024 x 60 fps. This would equal about a 78 Megahertz requiment for all the video signal circuits in the monitor. I frankly doubt that any affordable PC monitor has anywhere near that bandwidth. Now lets increase the Frame rate to 80 FPS . 1280 x 1024 x 80= 104 Mhz. So you can see, by just cranking up your frame rate on your video card 20 hz, about all you are producing is a bandwidth problem. The higher the resolution of your display, the more this problem is going to appear. This also will bring the video card to it's knees, having to produce over 100 million pixels per second, and it may not be capable of doing that well. When you deal with DLP and LCD displays, this adds another dimension altogether, which I won't go into here. Hope that clears up some issues.

Hi Bob,Thanks for this info. This is something that I've been trying to get my head around for some time now. I am not bothered by visible flicker nor am I prone to headaches, but I have always run my monitors at their highest possible scan rates. But then I read:"Just to give you a rough idea of bandwith of a video display, multiply the horizontal pixels by the vertical pixels times the number of pictures per second and that will give you the minimum bandwith that you monitor should meet or exceed to produce a high quality picture. For example SXGA would be 1280 x 1024 x 60 fps. This would equal about a 78 Megahertz requiment for all the video signal circuits in the monitor. I frankly doubt that any affordable PC monitor has anywhere near that bandwidth. Now lets increase the Frame rate to 80 FPS . 1280 x 1024 x 80= 104 Mhz. So you can see, by just cranking up your frame rate on your video card 20 hz, about all you are producing is a bandwidth problem. The higher the resolution of your display, the more this problem is going to appear. This also will bring the video card to it's knees, having to produce over 100 million pixels per second, and it may not be capable of doing that well."Is that to imply that video card performance might improve, if I reduce the scan rate? I will give it a try and see if there are any noticable difference but I would still like your opinion because I'm quite immune to subtle changes.I would also appreciate reading your take on the same subject concerning LCD monitors. I just bought a new LCD and the docs recommend that it be run at 1280x1024x60Hz for "best performance." I did set it to its native resolution but set the scan rate to the maximum (75Hz). "Why," you may ask? Because I always set the scan rate to its maximum, no other reason.Thank you for this information.R-

Yes performance will improve somewhat but not greatly. That is why MS decided to use 60 hertz as default for win xp because it was great for benching but not convenient for us gamers ;).Just set it to a level where you won

I think that I can understand the concept that if the Sim is set to (say) 25 FPS and the monitor is scanning at 100 Hz, then the Vid card has to send the same information to the monitor 4 times each cycle.But what happens if the monitor rate and the FPS rate are not exact multiples. eg - I was using a refresh rate of 75 and FPS set to 24. Should I set the FPS to 25 ? Will there be a noticeable difference. I know that I can do it and see for myself - but I am interested in the "theory".PS Someone said that a higher monitor refresh rate will mean a better 3D perception while flying and so far, I think that I would have to agree- after having bumbed it up to 100 hzBarry

>Hi Bob,>Is that to imply that video card performance might improve, if>I reduce the scan rate? I will give it a try and see if there>are any noticable difference but I would still like your>opinion because I'm quite immune to subtle changes.>>I would also appreciate reading your take on the same subject>concerning LCD monitors. I just bought a new LCD and the docs>recommend that it be run at 1280x1024x60Hz for "best>performance." I did set it to its native resolution but set>the scan rate to the maximum (75Hz). "Why," you may ask? >Because I always set the scan rate to its maximum, no other>reason.>>Thank you for this information.>>R-If the video card in your PC together with the Motherboard and CPU in your PC,is able to render and process the image without bogging down, then lowering the output resolution of the card will not have a noticeable effect. If on the other hand, when you increase your FS9 resolution to a higher res, and your FPS starts dropping, then you are loading your system down. As far as the picture quality suffering with higher resolutions, this is more the bandwidth issue of the monitor that comes into question. But one other important thing must be considered , FS9 has to generate this resolution , so these pixels must be created by FS9 in in order to feed your video card the data it needs. This number crunching of data, on both your CPU, video card processor, and data busses connecting the two may start bogging down when set to high. (Like too much traffic on the highway during a rush hour.) Once you go past the point where you can see a change when you increase the resolution, you are just creating unnecessary traffic for the digital processing of your PC. No point to it really. LCD monitors do not have flicker as do CRT monitors. Crt monitors have flicker because if the decay of light from the CRT after the video is scanned on the picture tube. CRT lights up , fades out, lights up and fades out and if it is not fast enough, you see flicker. The LCD behaves more like a slide projector, where instead of scanning from top to bottom, the entire slide is loaded at the same time. This slide is changed 60 Frames per second usually. The change from one slide to another happens very rapidly, so there is no dark period for your eye to see flicker. What you may see with very fast moving scenery, is a lag effect, when you are trying to reload the LCD with the next new pixel. Each pixel acts like a capacitor in an LCD and actually has to charge and discharge which takes time. The main resolution limiting factor on the LCD or DLP display is the actual native resolution of the device. Some commonly available resolutions today are 1024 x 768 (XGA ), or 1280 x 1024 ( SXGA) and something called SXGA+ is starting to appear which is 1400 x 1050 ( 4 x 3 aspect ratio like XGA) The more money you spend , the higher res you can get. My company makes a high light output video projector that has a resolution of around 2000 x 1000 pixels. You should see what FS9 looks like on that on a 10 foot wide screen in your living room. Anyway, here is the rule with DLP or LCD, the best picture you can get is one to one bit mapping of your video output card and the native resolution of your display. In other words, if you have a 1024 x 768 panel on your LCD monitor, that is what you should set your video card to output. One to one!!! Anyhing higher resolution being fed to you Panel, is just going to have to be down converted before applying it to the panel anyway( scan converted) , and in this conversion that is where compression artifacts and motion artifacts rear their ugly heads. The best situation you can get with a DLP or LCD display, is to buy one with a DVI input. Then put a DVI video card in your PC. All digital from your PC's output right to the display. When you power up your PC and it is connected to the Display, by a DVI cable, the Video Card sends a message to your display asking what the native resolution of your display is. The Display sends a message back to the video card saying , " I am 1280 x 1024". ( this is called DDC) Then the video cards say's, OK, that's exactly what I am going to send you, no more ,no less. One for one mapping...... The best you can get.....Hope that helps

>I think that I can understand the concept that if the Sim is>set to (say) 25 FPS and the monitor is scanning at 100 Hz,>then the Vid card has to send the same information to the>monitor 4 times each cycle.>>But what happens if the monitor rate and the FPS rate are not>exact multiples. eg - I was using a refresh rate of 75 and FPS>set to 24. Should I set the FPS to 25 ? Will there be a>noticeable difference. I know that I can do it and see for>myself - but I am interested in the "theory".>>PS Someone said that a higher monitor refresh rate will mean a>better 3D perception while flying and so far, I think that I>would have to agree- after having bumbed it up to 100 hz>>BarryThe circuitry in the video card will figure all that out. The digital video that FS9 feeds your graphics card is stored on Ram on the graphics card so it can be utilized at the proper time by the cards processor. The card figures out how it is going to convert 24 FPS to 75 FPS on it's output to your monitor. I doubt if you would see a noticeable difference going from 24FPS to 25FPS, and most times , the frame rate of FS9 is varying around a bit anyway.As for the higher rate, depends on what kind of monitor you have. Are you talking about CRT? Remember the bandwidth problem again..Not enough bandwidth can degrade what you see on the screen pretty quickly.

For an LCD monitor, 60 Hz is fine (unlike a CRT!).No need to select 75 Hz even if your monitor supports it.