So I bought a new monitor today. Big purchase but I had no choice. It’s a bit of a downgrade too. Boohoo. I went from 2560x1440 to 2560x1080. So I lost like 4 inches of screen!
But now I’m confused because it was advertized as a 75 Mhz, but it booted at 60 Mhz and when I tried to change it the first time I got a pop-up from LG saying it was recommended to use the monitor’s native or default 60 Mhz.
Should I ignore that pop-up?
Or maybe there are settings somewhere I’m not aware of?
And do I need to reboot when I make these changes?
That “But” comes down to the occasional piece of software which simply wasn’t designed to accommodate for it. And I don’t mean some obscure indie things you never heard of - the two titles off the top of my head are Dead Space 3 and Fallout 4. Both of these are designed to run at 60fps or a fraction there-of, else they run into issues with timing and synchronisation. Fallout loses sync with its physics engine as it’s designed to operate at 30ups, and Dead Space runs 25% fast in some areas as it times off the frame rate when syncing.
There’s also the obvious caveat that trying to maintain 75fps is more demanding on your hardware, meaning if you run v-sync you’re more likely to see times where it drops down to 37.5fps - even if only for a frame. If you’re not using v-sync, or using fast-sync (NVidia technique which only turns on V-sync when you pass your refresh rate) then it could be a little more jarring in some cases.
Small correction for you, though - it’s only Hz, not MHz. You’re getting either 60 or 75 refreshes per second - not 60 or 75 million refreshes.
Well that’s certainly scary. As long as it doesn’t break anything I should be fine though.
And I only play WoW anyway, so I’ll be fine.
I’m venting about the loss of screen space, but the colors are slightly better, and everything is more fluid, even with a small difference in Hz like this I see a difference.
And I don’t know if I’m imagining things, but I think my gpu is struggling less than before. It’s fan is quieter now. I know 75Hz needs more power than 60Hz, so maybe it’s the screen resolution that makes the difference?
Resolution, particularly in WoW, can make a considerable difference.
2560x1440 is nearly 3.7 million pixels per frame. 2560x1080 is closer to 2.8 million. When you’re only rendering 75% of the pixels per frame, it isn’t unreasonable to expect to be able to run 33% faster without any extra load being applied. It isn’t quite that simple (geometry doesn’t change based on resolution) but you’re only asking for a 25% increase (60 * 125% = 75) so there’s potentially a little extra overhead in there.
Other games may not necessarily scale quite so well with pixel count, but there’s definitely going to be some improvements to be had just by virtue of the new, lower resolution.
I wouldn’t be too worried about breaking anything, though. Those two titles might be the first to come off the top of my head but I’m struggling to think of any more. Maybe Space Engineers? Even so, they’re very much the exception rather than the norm.
Little anecdote: I actually ran my screen at 50Hz for a while. Seen as I’m used to PAL transmissions (25fps) and 50Hz mains frequency for overhead light flicker, I figured it would be a good way to lower loads and keep frame rates more consistent with V-sync. Worked really rather well, save those few times where games just didn’t like it (and fullscreen ones which simply wouldn’t let me try).
It was Shiftydruid who recommened to lower my resolution because I have a weak 1060 3g. At first I wasn’t sure if I was going to take the advice, but the salesman at the store kinda agreed. And I did not expect to notice a difference in gpu performance, but here we are!
No I recommended there was no reason to buy a NEW 1440p monitor on a GTX 1060. I said you will get more FPS and better performance on a 1080p monitor. So to keep your old one.
It works like this…
1080p= CPU heavy
1440p and up= Graphics Card heavy.
The higher resolution you run the better of a graphics card you need. GTX 1060 will run most games at 1080p no issues. 1440p is a different story
I’ll go back to 2560p when I can afford to spend on a new gpu and power supply. But to be honest I’m not in a hurry. I’ll even wait for this system to be obsolete. You know how my monitor got busted? We lost electricity twice in the span of 5 seconds. It was enough to mess with something, like circuits or I don’t know what. And MSI Afterburner was making my fans go nuts. Now I think I’ll keep my system off whenever there’s a storm outside.