Even though my monitor is capable of faster refresh rates, in many (all?) DX10 games they default to a 60 hz refresh and there seems to be no way to change it. How can we get Microsoft to give us manual refresh rate control in DX10? I can't stand it when a company keeps a viable, supported option from me in order to "protect" me in some way.
What GPU? Look in the control panel to force it. As an aside, why did you go for an mATX motherboard in the system in your specs?
Most newer LCDs at higher resolutions (1080P for example) run at a default of 60hz (or 59.997) This is normal.
Refresh rates only really apply to cft anyhow,
From wiki,
Much of the discussion of refresh rate does not apply to the liquid crystal portion of an LCD monitor. This is because while a CRT monitor uses the same mechanism for both illumination and imaging, LCDs employ a separate backlight to illuminate the image being portrayed by the LCD's liquid crystal shutters. The shutters themselves do not have a "refresh rate" as such due to the fact that they always stay at whatever opacity they were last instructed to continuously, and do not become more or less transparent until instructed to produce a different opacity. Most of the TFT LCDs used in portable devices and computer monitors need a continuous refresh. The driving voltage determines the transmittance of the liquid crystal.
The closest thing liquid crystal shutters have to a refresh rate is their response time, while nearly all LCD backlights (most notably fluorescent cathodes, which commonly operate at ~200 Hz) have a separate figure known as flicker, which describes how many times a second the backlight pulses on and off. However they also have a refresh rate that governs how often a new image is received from the video card (often at 60 Hz).
Refresh rates
The monitor is a cheap Acer 19" LCD which supports both 60 and 75 refresh at it's native resolution. The main reason I'd like to select a refresh greater than 60, is because when games are played with vsync on (to avoid tearing), the frame rate delivered by the video card is often (depends on circumstances) limited to half the refresh rate. Unless the video card is stout enough to provide the full 60 fps, which mine is not. So with a refresh rate of 60, games like Crysis are locked to 30 fps on my system. If I could run the refresh at 75, then I'd be seeing in-game framerates more like 37-38, a pretty good increase. In short, a higher refresh rate should mean a higher fps rate (when vsync is on). If vsync is off then the refresh rate won't matter.
Triple buffering can improve frame rates when vsync is on, but as far as I can tell, DX10 games don't allow triple buffering either. It's like Microsoft hates gamers who play with vsync on.
Somebody asked about my motherboard, this was a prebuilt system that came this way and could not be reconfigured. It's kind of unbalanced because it has a pretty stout CPU but a less-than-current video card and a budget motherboard. Price was right though.
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