Refresh rates

Quick question:

With my 3870x2, I can get 120fps on Crysis at high settings and 1280x1024. But that's pointless right, given that my monitor has a refresh rate of 60Hz? I'm basically aliasing 2x.

What I'd like to know is: if it's even possible to get a monitor that refreshes at 120Hz, would that make any visible difference to the gameplay?

I have "friends" who swear that playing any game at 80fps on an 80Hz monitor is "awesome in a fundamentally life-changing way" (I quote them), as opposed to 80fps on a 60Hz display.

PS: I say "friends" because I wish I didn't know them.

if you use LCD's then no hope in hell of getting 120hz. if you are looking for a crt, i do not know if they are really made at reasonable prices anymore.

however, alot of the reason people liked crt's with high refresh rates had nothing to do with the gaming experience and everything to do with them subconsciously "seeing" the refresh lines which can give some people headaches at 60 or even 75hz.

that is also a reason why some people like higher fps due to the flickering images being noticable, again though, does not affect LCD's.

if you are still on CRT's, why?

What model is the Dell monitor? A 19" flatscreen should support much higher than 60hz refresh rate. It should support at least up to 85hz unless it is simply just a very, very cheap model.
Have you loaded the drivers for it? They are really just an .inf file that tells windows what options your monitor will support. Without loading them, your video card may not know what will and won't work, so it simply defaults with no other options to 60hz, insuring you don't select a setting too high and ruin the monitor.

I'm pretty sure the threshold for distinguishing video is lower than that. It's more like 40fps IIRC. The reason CRTs are supposed to be run much faster than that is that they have a strobe effect, where the screen darkens between frames. This can be slightly visible at 60Hz as a subtle flicker, and very annoying. It also gives me a headache. Since LCDs are always on, this isn't a problem. I doubt you'd see a difference between 60 and 80Hz on an LCD.

Many CRT's will have a refresh rate over 60hz I know at least one of my CRT's goes over 130hz... Personally I DO find high frame rates on a CRT preferable to a LCD, but then to me LCD's have only 4 advantages over CRT's - they look better sat on the desktop, They have more clearly defined text for office packages, they use less electricty and they are readily available.

Not all CRT's are equal, but a good CRT can produce far small size pixels than an lcd leading to a far sharper image, and magnifying the effects of AA by actually reducing the size of the physical pixel. CRT's have no viewing angle issues, and a good CRT gives far better colour than all but the very most expensive LCD's. Personally I hat gaming on LCD's

Whilst not many people are sensitive enough to put a definite label on 25 fps or 30 fps, there is a big and easily perceived difference in smoothness of animations between a game running at 30 fps and a game running at 60 fps. Its easiest spotted in running characters where you see limbs moving and even at 30 fps you are more likely to see limbs "jumping" from one point to another rather than smoothly moving in the space between.

As far as maximum frame rates the human eye can see

The USAF, in testing their pilots for visual response time, used a simple test to see if the pilots could distinguish small changes in light. In their experiment a picture of an aircraft was flashed on a screen in a dark room at 1/220th of a second. Pilots were consistently able to "see" the afterimage as well as identify the aircraft! Thats 220fps the human eye was able to see 1 frame in 220 well enough to identify the type of aircraft!

Our vision is NOT limited to 30fps we dont see in frames at all!

theres a big difference in smoothness between 40-60, the higher you get the less easy it is to "guess" the fps. If you want to test your friends run some blind tests or better yet double blind tests, get a third person to change the refresh rates between tests record the refresh rates and your friends guess's at the refresh rate Im pretty sure theyd soon hit a wall at which they couldnt reliably guess the refresh rate, but that doesnt mean the cant still perceive a smoother animation.

that test has no relevancy to the sort of thing people talk about when discxussing fps in games.

The fact that someone can identify an aircraft frolm one frame in 220 has no bearing on how people can discern smoothness of an animation at 60fps??

That's due to the effect of the image lingering in your vision for far longer than it was actually on the screen. It really has no relevance to the smoothness of video. The real test would be whether you could determine the difference between one flashed for 1/220 second vs 1/110 second (or 2 frames at 220fps). If not, you don't need 220fps to replicate everything you can see.

Built in GPS and camera phone with bluetooth.