New PC bottleneck... my monitor?

[Skippman]

Ok, so here's the deal. When I'm playing games like Crysis, HL2, Far Cry 2, etc every once in a while my video will just SKIP (no pun intended) for lack of a better description. Take for instance the Counter Strike 2 benchmark. It shows my frame rate to be well over 100 at 1920x1200 yet every so often there's this jerk like the monitor is out of sync with the video. It's very wierd. And given it's a motion artifact I can't just take a snapshot of it. This seems to happen regardless of the resolution I run the video at (1920x1200, 1440x900, 1680×1050).

I'm currently using a Dell 2405FPW, one of the first 24" LCD's to come on the market. I believe my monitors native refresh rate to be 60hz. I got to thinking about the 120hz monitors that are coming on the market these days and started to wonder... is this my monitor causing this? What do you guys think, is this a monitor effect or am I nuts?

[mr_noname111]

Have you tried turning on vertical sync?

[pwcmed]

I have the same monitor and Sapphire 4870 1g, the only thing I have noticed is some lines but the vertical sync fixes that.

[Skippman]

I have the same monitor and Sapphire 4870 1g, the only thing I have noticed is some lines but the vertical sync fixes that.

Maybe that's what I'm trying to describe. Are you enabiling vertical sync via drivers or game?

[InspectahACE]

Usually drivers...but with Vista I noticed that usually leaving it to the game is best in most games(assuming you're on Vista)

[Skippman]

Yeah, I'm rocking the Vista64 Ultimate and running the latest ATI drivers (released this month).

[InspectahACE]

if the drivers let you have the v-sync controlled by the game/app i would say do that. I'm on same OS as you and I leave it to the app/game's decision..every time I've tried to force it on through the drivers it never really did it..I've always been on nvidia hardware though so im not sure that makes a difference..it shouldn't

[martini161]

do it in game.

[DJ Tucker]

as all others have said just turn on VS in game. if this dont work then i really cant say what your problem is.

[Skippman]

I tried enabling it in Far Cry 2 last night and from the 20 minutes I played it does seem to have made a diffrence.

[skier]

i experienced this once, with my rig on our 46" Samsung in 1080p.... i had to turn the settings down a bit from my 19" lol

i hope vsync continues to be the solution skipp(it didnt matter in my case:\ )

[Skippman]

Well, it most def won't be the GPU. I just ordered a second 4870. I was missing Crossfire since I gave up my 1900XT's.

[skier]

haha, yeah, a performance boost is nice in any case,and i only played DiRT on the samsung, initially on Ultra Settings as i normally do(which is intended for DX10, not on XP PRO) but on Ultra with the samsung it bogs down to 30FPS(normally 50-65) and it was really bad with the vertical-sync(the TV would be divided into five sections or so, each lagging behind the one...above it? by almost a half second)

i dont recall how xfire scales now, but my framerates in most games get just short of double with SLI(but with both cards and on acting as physx, the framerates are just barely better than single(i commonly forget to re-enable SLI after i've been folding for a week or two))

[Major_A]

Maybe I missed this but is your monitor hooked up DVI (Digital) or RGB (Analog)?

White plug = digital
Blue plug = analog

[Skippman]

DVI. Has been for a LONG time.