pircddrgn said:
Ok to better understand what it is you are trying to get at, let me take you a little bit into the film school realm.
It was discovered many years ago that for a picture to look real in film, it needed to be shot and played at 60 frames per second, well as you can imagine that would take film out of budget for alot of projects. So up until the makings of one George Lucas mixed with Sony and Panavision lenses to create a film quality on a video format (HD), the standard in film was 24 frames per second.
Now the NTSC standard (TV's before HD) consisted of 486 interlaces scan lines (aka 480i). Meaning it would have 2 sets of lines in the screen, each half was replaced at 30Hz. Therefor giving the old NTSC standard of 720x486 29.97fps 60Hz.
With the advent of High Def came progressive scan. Where instead of interlacing 2 images to create 1 image, it just does the entire image all at once, like how film would go through a projector. No loss of images and a better picture overall. So when you see a HDTV that is in 24p mode, that's like how you would see it on film at the theater. Or if you are going all out for 1080p, that means 1080 scan lines in progressive mode.
The Hz at which that is displayed is the refresh rate of that 1080 progressive scan lines. So if it's being displayed at 1080p 60Hz that is just how fast each frame is being shown. The higher the Hz, the faster the progression to the next frame is.
The Stereoscopic 3D technology combines the idea if interlace and progressive scan to create the 3D image you are seeing. Each eye is receiving a full progressive scan of an image at a time, and your brain then interlaces them to create the Image. Now once again the Hz at which this happens just means how fast it will refresh for you. So if you have a screen outputing 240Hz in Stereoscopic 3D, each eye is then recieving a 120Hz refresh rate.
Now how does this translate into Gaming? Lets say you are playing a game and receiving 50fps and your screens are outputing at 240Hz or 120Hz Stereoscopic 3D. Each eye is still receiving that 120Hz refreshed rate of the game being displayed at 50fps. In other words the hardware of the display to show you the images and the hardware of the PC to get the images to that display are 2 seprate things entirely. If they were depenedant on each other, that would be like saying that your standard 3D Bluray Player is more powerful than your Thousands of dollars computer.
So to run 3D on multiple monitors/projectors you need a video card that can send a signal to muliple monitors, and have the monitors able to support 3D. How the game looks while being displayed, that's where your PC's hardware, internet connection and cabling comes into play. The better it looks going to the display, the better its going to look overall.
If you don't believe me, get a 3d monitor, a cheapy computer w/ the minimum for 3d, plug in well lets say EQ2 because I know it's an online game capable of 3D, and hook it up to a dial up connection. You may only be recieving 1fps, but that 1fps will still be in 3D.
I hope you feel more informed and better educated.
I second this except one smart ass comment.
60fps wasn't because it looks real at that time it was because electricity runs on 60Hz so it was the maximum the electron ray could travel. in Europe it is 50Hz.
So then they figured that the picture can't be drawn that fast by the electron ray so they drew half of it (fields) which brings us to the 30fps (in Europe PAL has accordingly 25fps because of the 50Hz).
So motion-wise interlaced footage feels more fluid if actually shot that way since the half frames are recorded at a different time and its really 60 separate half frames.
Same slow camera pan in a theater with 24 full (progressive) frames for example is stuttering (freaks me out each time).
If you create interlaced footage out of progressive footage the "half frames" are actually the same content and time and will look the same as progressive. Only point is to play it on a interlaced device.
Remember pausing a VHS? how the freeze frame was flickering or jumping between two half frames on your old TV?
Or watch something on cable which comes usually as 1080i (interlaced) and stop it. it wont jump but show both half frames at the same time (on LCD or LED devices). A moving object will have streaky feathered edges because the object in one half-frame (every second line) actually moved further than in the other half-frame.
To get back to the topic, yes you need 120Hz display but how many new frames are rendered in 60Hz per eye is less important!