Game changer in 2014: variable refresh rate LCDs

[bulbousbeard]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7436/nvidias-gsync-attempting-to-revolutionize-gaming-via-smoothness

Oh BOY this is exciting. If this technology pans out, I will BUY Calamity one of these LCDs so he can support it in GroovyMAME.

We're going to be getting 30hz - 144hz support. Take this, combine it with HLSL, and do black frame insertion, and you're left with GIDDY UP.

This is probably the first truly good gaming news I've read in 2013.

[Calamity]

Hi bulbousbeard,

Those are great news indeed. I had read before about making this possible in the future but I didn't know it was already real. This is simply a revolution for fixed resolution displays. We won't need to struggle trying to reprogram to video card's clock to achieve the target refresh rate, on the contrary, we should be able to rule the refresh rate based on the CPU timing, no need for v-sync. So just the plain -throttle option of base line MAME will achieve perfect results in terms of smoothness and tearing free video. Of course if you want to have CRT quality zero blurriness you'll still need to implement black frame insertion.

[Dr.Venom]

That seems like nice news indeed.

But looking at the chart at the end of the article it says G-Sync 2D refresh rates are fixed to 60, 85, 100, 120, 144Hz. See this enlarged picture of the chart:



Does that possibly impact the usefulness for MAME?

[bulbousbeard]

It's my understanding that you won't be running in "2D" mode. You'll be running in G-Sync mode, which is "30 - 144hz."

[Dr.Venom]

Interesting. Personally I don't think I'll be one of the (early) adopters because of my love for authentic CRT, but hopefully it'll work out well for MAME. The more happy MAME users the merrier

With regards to black frame insertion, it appears that you might want to be careful when buying your new monitor. WinUAE also has the black frame insertion, and apparently there are (quite?) some monitors that don't handle black frame insertion well because of technical reasons.  The results of black frame insertion on these monitors is apparently image retention.

See the following thread on EAB, from post #4 onwards: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=70194