Any way to experience 120hz HTPC content on an HDTV?

I'm impressed you made it work at all. Out of curiosity what type of HDTV are you using that survived the punishment?

That is certainly creative. I both love and hate PC gamers at the same time, lol. I don't think your Yamaha receiver can pass through a 120Hz signal to begin with.

HDMI 1.4b was released on October 11, 2011.[149] One of the new features is that it adds support to 1080p video at 120 Hz.

From wikipedia.

I might be wrong but I don't think any video cards support hdmi 1.4b yet. I'm fairly certain your receiver doesn't. Heck, your TV might not even. It might only support changing 60hz and 24hz to 120hz by sending the same frame multiple times.

I don't know of any way to make a cloned display not use the same refresh rate. I also don't know of any "good" reason to have 120hz on your monitor. Can you see the difference between 120hz and 60hz? Most people likely can't tell 30 from 60.

" Most people likely can't tell 30 from 60."

30 to 60 is easy to see. Most people just don't know enough about the tech side to know that the nasty 30hz judder is what they are finding unpleasant, so they can't tell you that 30hz is too slow. Man, it's like 80% of my time in this subforum is spent on correcting specifically your misinformation. We see brand new users create threads here all the time "Why my console make all stuttery!?", with the result being that 30hz 360/PS3 renders on their new plasma/LCD are suddenly a lot more juddery that their recently replaced CRT. They just didn't have the words or background to understand why.


"but from what I'm understanding -- there is no way to truly display 120fps on my monitor."

Correct, but it shouldn't be that way. The limit that you are running in to is that HDMI that you find on current TVs doesn't officially accept 120hz inputs yet. In one special case, they kind of do though: 720p/60 3D. Two 60hz frames = 120hz. As John Carmack pointed out, there is no reason on the hardware level that video card drivers could not abuse the 3D spec to spit out 120hz 2D video. The user would just need to turn on 3D mode for their TV, but not put the glasses on. The support just hasn't been written.
Edited by darklordjames - 2/19/13 at 2:31pm

As far as I am aware there are no current consumer grade HDtv's that accept and properly display a 120Hz signal.

This will be big news if/when it happens.

Jason

Ohh, so 30hz looks fine on CRT but not on plasma/LCD?

I said "most" not all, maybe you should take a look at your reading comprehension you angry, angry, lil man.

"Ohh, so 30hz looks fine on CRT but not on plasma/LCD?"

Obviously, yes. A new frame at 30hz takes two fields to update on an interlaced 60hz CRT. In effect you are getting new information every update. The result is smoother motion than a progressive 60hz panel that just shows you the same frame twice.

Seriously dude, you've now been around here long enough that you should know that I am not the person to compete with on applied technical knowledge. You will lose every time. You have also now been around here long enough that people should be getting a feel for your high error rate.

Also too, get some new personal insults. You already tried that one without success.

I don't have a good explanation for it but 60hz on 120hz TV's looks bad. If you go to the store and compare a normal 60hz TV to a 120hz TV set to 60hz. The 120hz TV looks horrible, even with fairly slow paced motion.

Maybe my opinion of people is low in thinking that they can't tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps, maybe they just don't care. Do 360's still outsell graphics cards by a huge margin?

I doubt it will work but you might be able to try 70hz or 85hz and see if you get better results. As far as your screen tearing issue, VSync or a fps limiter might help. If you are just talking about when you whip around really fast in a fps then this probably won't help.

No.

I game on a 120hz Samsung LCD TV using the PC input (1080p @ 60hz), which restricts processing and any frame interpolation, and it looks fantastic. There's no tearing with v-sync on.

I found your solution.

VGA cable to your TV.

the hell? That's more confusion than solution.

VGA cable from video card to TV.

I'm not sure what is so confusing about this!

The old reliable analog connection on a digital display, gotta love it.

The only real issue with using VGA is most digital displays will disable some, most or all of your image calibration options.

The other thing to keep in mind is when using VGA you'll want to make sure your tracking/phase is optimized since not all digital displays get this right automatically.

Jason

I'm assuming you have thoroughly tested this at 120Hz, or are you guys trying to start smoke signals?

Using a vga connection it should/might be possible to do 1920x1080 at 120hz. Try it out and let us know what you find. I did find where a couple people on yahoo answers claimed this works. YMMV

In other words, you walk through the mine field before me, YMMV (lol). Always trust the internet!

It might have been an issue with that particular TV. I haven't looked at 120hz seriously since. I don't notice the issues with going from 24hz to 60hz though, which is what 120hz really came out to fix.(2x 60hz, 5x 24hz)

Reading it a second time it was someone running 1080p60 with the smoothvideo 120hz crap.

It looks like you are SOL. I still think you should try 85hz and 70hz and report back on if either works.

I'd respond to macks here, but man, I'm sure his comments speak for themselves. Yahoo Answers as a source worth sharing? Lulz.

Anyway: http://www.atrandom.iansharpe.com/setres.php

Until you find a better solution, you can look at a shortcut-based resolution/refresh switcher. That way you can at least switch between 1080p/60 and 1080p/120 by hitting a toggle on the desktop instead of digging through the control panels. That will get rid of your tearing without sacrificing 120hz all the time. It's not the most elegant solution, but it's the best I can think of at the moment.

What I'd do? Keep it simple. Just use 60hz.

I think some here are confused regarding the VGA discussion as that still will not yield a 120Hz input -> 120Hz output solution on any current consumer level HDtv's AFAIK.

You likely know this but... if you clone then you are sending the same exact 'locked' signal to both displays, if you run one as extended then you can send different resolutions and refresh rates.

However...

You can always leave them both connected on different outputs from the graphics card and have them set individually (tv @ 60hz / monitor @ 120hz) and then simply leave one disabled while the other is in use (so a swap where they are not both active at the same time). Your driver controls should allow for this set-up and it should be a click or two to swap them (at least it is on AMD drivers, I have not used Nvidia drivers for about a year).

On a digital display the main benefit for VGA would possibly be less input lag (as been mentioned). Also with VGA the level (0-255) and colors (RGB) can be set properly for you providing the particular display handles it as it should (some displays require a renaming of the input used to do this but generally speaking the VGA connection should handle this properly, at least it has on most of the displays I have worked with over the last several years).

In the early days of flat panel digital displays the VGA connection was usually superior for gaming once set-up and adjusted properly, now it varies by display make/model.

Best of luck,
Jason