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benq xl2411t is pretty nice, not sure if its the best though

btw. so many ppl tell ppl to set fps_max to hz*2+1, why plus 1?! cuz the netgraph has a bug and rounds ,99 down? the same with mouse dpi. there are “native” steps, u cant use 400 dpi, when ur mouse-sensor uses 90 dpi steps. just sayin

Quoted from fishyard

Can someone tell me why i can feel the difference between 120 fps and 60 fps, but yet films at the cinema are only 24 fps. If I cap my tf2 to 25 it feels laggy as shit.

Additionally to what shocky said perceiving a smooth motion(especially when intentional motion blur is used), perceiving an immediate reaction to your actions and noticing changes are 3 totally different things.
If you have 60fps every action(turning, moving etc.) has an average lag of almost 10 milliseconds. If this gets higher it can lead to motion sickness. For some people it’s possible to adapt to this and for some it isn’t. As the perspective in movies is fixed you can’t experience this effect in movies.
Changes can be perceived much much faster. Most of you peripheral vision exists just to detect changes. Gaming is a lot about noticing changes and tracking them with your eye. IIRC there’s more information about this somewhere on the blurbusters site.

Quoted from Selek

I will give you the benefit of the doubt that there are technical reasons (i.e. not biological) for having more fps than your refresh rate exceeding a value of 120. But what are those?

The biggest reason people don’t run vsync is because it can lag input.
It lags your input because (simplified) a game works like this:

1 read mouse/keyboard input
2 send/receive data from/to server if needed.
3 construct the next frame
4 render the frame
5 draw the frame

And when vsync kicks in, it means the game might have to wait to do step 5 until your monitors buffer switch is ready. Depending on your refreshrate, this can be anywhere from 8.3 (120hz) to 16.7 (60 hz) ms. This means that step 1 can’t be executed unless step 5 is completed. In situations where you need to be quick, this can be very noticeable.

This doesn’t happen when you have your fps unlocked. It means it can execute step 1 to 5 as many times per second as your fps. If your fps is 240 that means it can do step 1 to 5 in 4ms.

Why do people prefer their fps to be locked? They want their input delay to be the same every time, for consistency.

You have to remember that smoothness is not only the perception of the image, like with film, but also the responsiveness of your input. You’re interacting with the game.

Anandtech has an really in-depth analysis on input lag with or without v-sync on. You can see that in every test, for reasons explained in the article, no v-sync is better, unless your fps is low already anyways. http://www.anandtech.com/show/2803/

Quoted from Selek

Thanks for the elaborate answer. I am quite aware that V-Sync, especially without Triple Buffering, can and will lead to delay input.

However, V-Sync is different from a capped framerate and thus not directly related to my question.

The idea that if refresh rate = fps_max may lead to not optimally synchronised frames and thus a higher fps_max may be desirable is intriguing, though.

There is nothing in place ensuring that the frames sync up when you don’t use VSync, so yeah, having higher FPS is definitely desirable.