refresh rates question

[puar]

Everything is working relatively well.

I have a GF3 Ti something (I forget off the top of my head),
Athlon 1600+, 768 Megs of RAM, and my monitor is a Sony E400.

Redhat 7.3 is installed. It detected the monitor on setup.

I play quake3 sometimes. My monitor however, seems to be locked at 85 Hz no matter what resolution I'm in. I know in windows I can get at least 100 Hz if not 120 Hz at lower resolutions like 800x600.

Where and how can I set this? I'm assuming I'll have to change something in my XF86Config-4 file, but I'm not exactly sure what. Someone had told me that the "best" refresh rate would automatically be chosen based on my video card, monitor and resolution by X, but I know I'm capable of more.

Some people might wonder why I want 100 or 120 Hz instead of 85Hz. Believe it or not, I can see the difference.

Thanks in advance,
Puar

[bwkaz]

120Hz can seriously shorten the life of your monitor... and not just if it can't normally handle that high of a rate. Even if it can do it, the electronics inside monitors die faster when they get switched faster.

As a clarification, do you mean refresh rate, or the game's frame rate? You can turn off syncing to vblank in most games (there are cvars for Quake 2, so I'm sure there are some for Q3 as well), so that the game will render faster than the screen is updating.

[puar]

Yes, I do mean the actual refresh rate of the monitor versus the frame rates. I get over 120 fps in game, but my monitor is only running at 85Hz. I guess that does make sense that running at 120Hz would shorten the life of my monitor, but I would only want it to run at about 100 Hz.

[JBravo]

I have the same problem in RH8.0. Did you ever figure this out ?

[puar]

Actually, yes.

Apparently Redhat 7.3 as well as 8.0 and any newer distro of linux will automatically choose the "best" refresh rates at any given resolution chosen.

In the "old days", apparently the method of configuring Xfree86 also included configuring what is called a modeline.

Essentially in part of the Xf86Config, down where the resolutions are, you can set your own custom resolution and set a bunch of values. Although it's not "difficult" per se, it's not exactly for the faint of heart. It requires the knowledge of all the specifications of your monitor, as well as several calculation and guestimates. There is a document that covers the creation of modelines...

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/XFree86-Video-Timings-HOWTO/index.html

There is a link on how to do it. If you look, there are some small utilities that try to build a modeline for you for any given resolution. They work ok, but don't think they'll magically come up with the modeline based on your monitor model, you'll still need a lot of the monitor statistics to do this. I actually searched for a person on the web that had the same monitor as I did and compared his modeline with the modeline I created to make sure they were close.

Good luck.