For me, no doubt it's one expensive, over-charged monitor. But really, grabbing it ... no regrets. I ain't get into those modern PC games. Anyway, my display card is not powerful enough to bring them up to that frame / refresh rate, but it's already a pleasure seeing my games, say, BF1, varying from 5x FPS to 8x FPS with no shuttering and tearing.
Running GM on this monitor gives even more pleasure and that's why I'm here sharing my experience. Sorry that I've been lazy and slow actually. I got my Alienware AW2518H 6 months ago. Before and after getting it, I had checked everywhere for "MAME on G-SYNC monitors." Still, I don't see many mentions about it even now.
Finally I had some spare time to try it myself:
Intel i7 8700
Palit Nvidia 1070 GPU
Alienware AW2518H
The latest GM
I only changed a few things in mame.ini:
monitor lcd
lcd_range 50-240 (I read Calamity's post about LCD with GM that GM would only recognise the desktop refresh rate. I run my desktop at 240Hz; setting the range with anything below 240 here would not give the Switchres line in Machine Information in MAME)
throttle 1
syncrefresh 0
autosync 0
waitsync 0
triplebuffer 0
#sync_refresh_tolerance 2.0
verbose 1
And I enabled Alienware AW2518H's on-screen FPS counter and also the G-SYNC indicator in Nvidia Control Panel so I would know when G-SYNC kicks in. And for the look (scanlines!) I copied and pasted some basic HLSL lines.
I wish I have taken some photos and maybe I will upload and update again later ...
R-Type, G-SYNC indicator up, FPS counter going between 54-55, at the title screen the R-Type logo flies from the right to the left smoothly without tearing, side-scrolling is perfect in game.
MK1, G-SYNC indicator up, FPS counter going between 54-55, keep inserting coins to stay at the famous character portrait scrolling screen on both sides, perfect scrolling. And also the stage tower scrolling from top to bottom, ain't jerk at all.
Samurai Spirit 2, G-SYNC indicator up, FPS counter going between 59-60, the scrolling background is like silk during character selection. No flickering and strange block on character's shadow, but can't really tell ... the shadows are very light and thin. Kinda hard to notice. Able to see clearer in some scenes or when the character is running. Light but very solid.
Sega System 24 Bonanza Bros ... I thought I was looking at an arcade machine.
I'm no expert ... should I assume my setup and configurations are running the games in their native rates?
Please also allow me to ask a few questions:
1. Do I still need to turn on frame_delay?
2. Kinda strange: even without frame_delay and HLSL, the F11 frameskip / framerate counter keeps going up and down, between 98-101, with the display's on-screen FPS counter (54-55, 59-60, etc.). But I didn't feel any slowdown or shuttering in game. And the info shown after quitting the game usually reports 100% average. Is it normal?
3. May you all please advise more other optimisations, if any?
And, yes ... frame_delay + HLSL fails to launch a game. When it goes blank at launch you can Alt-Enter to window, the game would load windowed. Once it's loaded you can Alt-Enter back to full screen. But some games, like MK I tested, failed to launch no matter how. I had to disable either one to run them in full screen.
Thanks for watching!