A <i>game</i> doesn't have control over the refresh rates. What a game has is an ability to display in different resolutions, and these resolutions have refresh rates, or how often the screen is redrawn each second. Most modern games default to 800x600, with 16 or 32-bit color, and a refresh rate of 60Hz.
Normally, this is easily adjusted, because a game will use Windows settings for refresh rate control. Preset the refresh rate at your preferred resolution and color depth, and you are good to go. (Which is why a good monitor will have user-defined presets.) But with operating systems like Win2K/WinXP and a combination of the video card drivers, with some monitors (not all), the RAMDAC of the monitor is incorrectly identified, which causes OpenGL and D3D games to display at 60Hz (the default), no matter what you might have preset for a resolution.
This can also affect 2D, causing some displays to be locked in at 60Hz, 72Hz or 75Hz, even if the monitor is capable of much more. I recall spending nearly six months with the older 12.40 nVidia reference drivers while running Win2K, and not being able to use more than 75Hz for any resolution, even though I've got a 22" monitor. At that time, there was no tool that could permanently fix the problem, although a refresh rate fix finally arrived that was similar to this one. Some people went so far as to start breaking off pins on the monitor connector, or using BNC cables to bypass the RAMDAC detection. For Win2K users, the problem really didn't go away until the 20.xx series was released.
When WinXP was released, the whole thing started all over again, and this time, it was much more widespread. Interestingly enough, it doesn't usually happen with GeForce4 cards. The problem occurs much more often with older video cards.
The next thing to understand, is after using the NVRefreshTool, it really won't be necessary to check the refresh rates in a game. The lower refresh rates or "modes" will be erased from the Registry. For instance, you might see several resolutions in the Display Properties that support a 60, 70, 72, 85, 100, and a 120Hz refresh rate. But, after checking your manual, you may discover that your monitor can easily use a refresh rate of 85Hz in all those resolutions. Run the tool, select your changes, and afterwards, nothing but 85Hz, 100Hz and 120Hz will be available for that resolution.
What you <i>really</i> want to be able to do after running the tool is to check the average frames per second that the game can render at your preferred resolution. With V-Sync disabled, the FPS should be able to exceed the refresh rate, if you have a fast video card.
You may actually be getting much higher frames per second before using the tool, but with the refresh rate locked in at 60Hz, even if the game is running at 120fps, you can only see 60fps of that. It's like having V-Sync enabled all the time, which restricts the video card from delivering more FPS than the refresh rate.
How this is displayed or tested per game depends entirely on the game itself.
Most people rely on benchmarking programs to give themselves an idea of the performance level of a video card once the refresh rate fix has been applied ... and after other kinds of eye candy are disabled, like antialiasing.
I'm not really a hard-core gamer, so if a game comes without some kind of console or a set of commands to display the FPS ... I can't tell you what to do, besides trying a different games that <i>does</i> comes with these features. Perhaps someone else wandering around the forum might have an answer for that.
I normally use Quake 3, MDK2, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Unreal Tournament, and the MadOnion 3DMark2000v1.1 and 2001SE benchmarks to test a video card.
Toejam31
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