Difference between 60hz and 120-240hz lcd monitor for gaming?? OT

Question

I don't have an apple display but have a 40" lcd tv. Does this higher Hz really help with motion and will it help with games that play at a higher Hz rate?
After editing all day its nice to play a game now and then but there is one problem I have. *Ghost Recon* will not play on this lcd tv. Every other game I tried will work but I don't mess with those much. I just can't figure out why this one game will not work with this 60hz lcd tv.
I can plug a dvi and sub-15 out of my *MDD G4* together into the monitor and then it will work. I have to mirror the monitors together to make it work tough.
It's very odd that this will work even with the crt monitor off, but they both still need to be plugged in.
So should I try to buy a 120hz lcd tv and see if that works but thats a $700 mistake that would be really bad to the budget.
Obviously this is this game only. I borrowed a friends new Acer 22" computer monitior and put it on 60hz and the game played today.
I really am confused about this.
Thanks for the help
Tony

Answer 1

The way a 120 Hz monitor/TV works is to insert an interpolated image in between the two actual images that were passed to the display by the video source. Consider the example of a a ball in motion, like say you a watching a tennis match. Consider that 60 frames per second of video are being passed from the video source (computer, cable box, whatever...) to the display. In frame one, let's say the ball is at position A. In frame two, lets say the ball is at position B. So as rendered on the display the ball would appear to jump from A ---> B and the next frame to C, like A---> B--->C, etc.
What a 120 Hz display does is insert extra images between frames one and two, and two and three and so on. In that case a "fake" image of the ball is computed by DSP and inserted between the other "real" locations so the ball moves like this: A->A'->B->B'-C, etc. so the appearance is smoother motion of the ball as the display is updated not 60 times per second, but 120 times per second.
This would improve the appearance of motion in video games. The downside can be latency because there is a delay penalty that will occur from the required frame buffering and processing. You should probably find a dedicated game website and read up more about this kind of technology before committing $700 to it. And it won't make a game play that, for whatever reason, isn't currently playing on your system. So Ghost Recon isn't playing for some other unrelated reason.