Can't aim with mouse any more

[Alien]

Some people still have CRT monitors with 100Hz freq.

[Ed]

Some people still have CRT monitors with 100Hz freq.

Some people have CRT monitors with 120Hz frequency, however CRT's display images differently and use 2 clock cycles to do so. Therefore a 100Hz refresh rate actually means only 50 fps to the eye.

[Alien]

Ok, so having framerate of 100 won't help me. I'll know that.

[GreEn`mArine]

Well a lot of players lower they effect to zero just to be able to aim and see and hit better

Or so they think. I'm convinced that the 'I must have 5000 FPS, I play sooooooooo much worse with any less' mentality is entirely made up in peoples own heads. Without any kind of FPS counter they wouldn't be moaning about 40 fps. Guaranteed.

A TFT monitor can only display at 60Hz, so anything over that is entirely irrelevant and you should enable v_sync to prevent tearing. Unless of course your graphics drivers source code was cobbled together from old newspaper cuttings and can't do triple buffering in which case you most likely won't be achieving that kind of framerate anyway.

There is also the other side to it of people lowering the settings unreasonably with gl_picmip values so high that everything is nigh-on flat shaded which verges on cheating.

that's bs in my opinion (no offense), sorry.

there are several things you can feel:
a) FPS drops like drops from 500 to 150 fps. it is noticable and disturbing
b) having higher FPS on my TFT improved the image quality by A LOT (when NOT using vsync). I've played for years with vsync disabled and FPS limited to 130 (because I had a weak graphics card that could only give me stable 130 FPS) and when I upgraded my PC to a GeForce 8800 (with which I have constant 500 FPS most of the time) I could see a visual difference of the image once I set cl_maxfps to 500 compared to the old 130, it seems as if the tears (which affect certain areas of the TFT screen) got smaller (i.e. the areas affected became smaller, the disturbing .. dunno .. stripes .. became smaller).
c) having 60 fps is smooth for the eye, but not smooth for the feeling of how fast your actions done with your mouse/keyboard become visual on your screen. Having 60 fps causes you to have some lag between your actions until it is shown. I've tried that myself. So for your visitor it may look fluently, but it doesn't feel that great when playing by yourself. Please note that I am currently talking about the kind of 60fps you get because the graphics card can't do more, it's a different thing when your FPS are artificially limited .. in this case the image quality just is bad (for TFTs). The other possibility is to use vsync. The exception with vsync is: image quality is good, because the image doesn't have any tears. But it is having horrible input lag. Well, horrible is relative, depends on the machine, the OS, and the person who sits in front of it and the conditions this person has already been exposed to. A person who has played with a crappy 50-60 FPS PC will think it is fluent and that the actions done by his keyboard/mouse are fluently transferred to screen. If you would let this person use my PC for a week and then let it use his own PC again, you'd hear him/her whining all day. Trust me.

[Ed]

a) FPS drops like drops from 500 to 150 fps. it is noticable and disturbing

You are not noticing the FPS falling to 150. The FPS counter does not work on a single frame by single frame basis. If it's suddenly dropped to saying 150, it's quite likely that what is upsetting you so much is the 10 frames in one second which took perhaps > 50ms to render. The other frames may only take 2ms but the average is irrelevantly high and it is only that short slow bit that you notice, which is not running at 150fps but much lower. If you were to somehow log frame by frame with 6 digit precision, you could see this.

b) having higher FPS on my TFT improved the image quality by A LOT (when NOT using vsync). I've played for years with vsync disabled and FPS limited to 130 (because I had a weak graphics card that could only give me stable 130 FPS) and when I upgraded my PC to a GeForce 8800 (with which I have constant 500 FPS most of the time) I could see a visual difference of the image once I set cl_maxfps to 500 compared to the old 130, it seems as if the tears (which affect certain areas of the TFT screen) got smaller (i.e. the areas affected became smaller, the disturbing .. dunno .. stripes .. became smaller).

The tearing became less for the simple reason that the interval between the two frames forming the tear would have been smaller and hence there was less visual difference in the frames. In no way did the tearing stop though, in fact there would have been more of it it's just that you would have been much less likely to notice as I've explained.

The exception with vsync is: image quality is good, because the image doesn't have any tears. But it is having horrible input lag.

I have never had a problem with input lag from v_sync or cl_maxfps. This can not be a graphical problem though. I wonder if there is some kind of test that can be done to determine whether any of these factors make any difference or not? A persons reaction times will be so much slower that it may make the time from frame to frame irrelevant.

I've come across a similar thing in my work as a medical engineer with electrophysiology systems that display intracardiac signals in real time on a set of monitors for a doctor to view during a cardiac catheterisation. On certain sweep rates there would be awful tearing and blurring on a lot of systems which could be very distracting to the doctor. The manufacturers said it was because of the limited bandwidth going to the monitors which I refuted and after hooking up a set of different monitors it looked fine. All it was was the response characteristics of the Eizo monitors in use which may have an 8ms refresh rate but still aren't very good for moving images as they're aimed at CAD use.

[MirceaKitsune]

I'm not quite sure about this but while I had my monitor set at 60hz (LCD) when the game went up to 75 fps and dropped back to 60 I did get the impression that it was noticeable somehow, even if 60 was also the refresh rate of the monitor. I'm not sure and it could have just seemed that way to me but maybe there is a tiny little improvement even if fps > refresh rate. Either way even if there is it's certainly not something to get an obsession for... I'm pretty well with an average of 50-60 fps