High refresh rate monitors

1
We have been looking to buy a new monitor with refresh rate
over 150Hz. Fortunately, there are lots of good choices on the
market (e.g. for $599 you can get 21' SONY CPD-E540, that,
according to spec-sheet, can run at 170Hz - of course, at lower
resolutions).

My question is does anybody know if these numbers hold for
Mac's (this seemed to be too hard of a question for SONY
tech-support :-). We currently have SONY GDM-F400, that is
supposed to run at 160Hz (according to spec-sheet), but we can
only drive it at 120Hz. Does anybody else have the same
problem of not being able to use maximum specified refresh
rate on a Mac? Can this be solved by getting an appropriate
video card - and, then, what would be a good card.

Thanks,
Duje
------------------------------------------------------------
Duje Tadin
Dept. of Psychology / Vanderbilt Vision Research Center
Vanderbilt University
Email: duje.tadin@...
Phone: 615-329-2780 Lab: 615-322-5565 Fax: 615-343-8449
------------------------------------------------------------
2
> My question is does anybody know if these numbers hold for
> Mac's (this seemed to be too hard of a question for SONY
> tech-support :-). We currently have SONY GDM-F400, that is
> supposed to run at 160Hz (according to spec-sheet), but we can
> only drive it at 120Hz. Does anybody else have the same
> problem of not being able to use maximum specified refresh
> rate on a Mac? Can this be solved by getting an appropriate
> video card - and, then, what would be a good card.

Yes, the limitation is the video card. We use VillageTronics cards
www.villagetronics.com. We have used both the MP860 and MP960 cards to
drive monitors at 160Hz, and the cards are capable of 200Hz if you could
find a monitor that will refresh that fast. I notice on their web page
that these products are discontinued, though they apparently have some
quantity still available. Their new product does not seem to support such
high rates, unfortunately.

keith
3
>> My question is does anybody know if these numbers hold for
>> Mac's (this seemed to be too hard of a question for SONY
>> tech-support :-). We currently have SONY GDM-F400, that is
>> supposed to run at 160Hz (according to spec-sheet), but we can
>> only drive it at 120Hz. Does anybody else have the same
>> problem of not being able to use maximum specified refresh
>> rate on a Mac? Can this be solved by getting an appropriate
>> video card - and, then, what would be a good card.
>
>Yes, the limitation is the video card. We use VillageTronics cards
>www.villagetronics.com. We have used both the MP860 and MP960 cards to
>drive monitors at 160Hz, and the cards are capable of 200Hz if you could
>find a monitor that will refresh that fast. I notice on their web page
>that these products are discontinued, though they apparently have some
>quantity still available. Their new product does not seem to support such
>high rates, unfortunately.
>
>keith

dear duje and keith

actually the situation is a bit more complicated than that, and the
details may be of interest. There's no problem at all at the hardware
level: the monitors and cards are fine. It's my impression that all video
cards made today are very highly programmable and can produce a huge
range of frame rates. However, under Mac OS, the manufacturer-supplied
video driver (the software) is usually quite limited, and offers only a
fixed list of spatial and temporal resolutions. [Incidentally, we've just
enhanced SCREEN 'Resolutions' to report ALL the resolutions in the
driver's table.] If you knew how to program the video card you could get
virtually any frame rate, but that's not easy. In some cases, particular
users have convinced engineers at the card manufacturer to add a
high-frame rate resolution to the driver's list. (This is quite easy for
them to do; they're just adding another row of parameter values to an
existing table.) I once succeeded in doing that with an engineer at
Apple, which resulted in a fairly popular driver for the PowerMac 7500
(available on our download page).

Over the years I lobbied off and on for Apple to provide a way for us to
specify a custom resolution at run time. I was told that something like
that was in the works. There are several hints that it has come to pass,
if you look in the current Video.h file in Apple's Universal Headers. It
refers to using cscGetNextResolution to select a resolution with
"programmable timing". I'm guessing that one would use the new driver
calls cscGetDetailedTiming and cscSetDetailedTiming to get and set the
timing. It's not clear where one should go to for documentation of this.
Probably the best start would be for an Apple Developer to write directly
to Apple Developer Support. I'm a developer, but i don't have time to
plunge into resolution programming now; that'll be a nontrivial project
for whoever undertakes it, but it would be a great boon to all Mac users.

best

denis

p.s.
You can download the latest Apple Universal Headers from here:
ftp://ftp.apple.com/developer/Development_Kits/UniversalHeaders3.4.1.img.bi
n

NOTE TO ALL: denis.pelli@... is my preferred email address. Please
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