Hi all !

I know this board is not really a board for gamers, but since I'm not a gamer I figure I'd ask anyway.

I've had a Matrox G400 Max card for 3 (or was or 4?) years now. Great card, but since it began to show it's age I believed my pc deserved an upgrade. So I bought a G-Force3 card (Asus Ti200). I would have bought a new Matrox card, but it seems that since the G400 series Matrox has kissed the 3D scene goodbye.
Well, I normally don't play games on my PC, but I figured I'd try anyway since I wanted to see what this card could do.

So I bought Jedi Knight II (yes, I'm a Star Wars fan ). When I loaded it up, all seemed fine, only the screen seemed to flicker somewhat. I check my monitor and it affimed my hunch : the monitor was operating @60HZ.
Now I don't understand this. In windows (2D) mode, I can have the card go up higher frequencies than my monitor can cope (+100 HZ), but in games (3D) it automatically seems to lock itself at 60Hz. I've looked in the game also, but there is nowhere mention of how to adjust the screen refresh ratio. I also can't find a slider bar in windows to set this rate. (there's only a slider for 2D mode)

Because I wanted to make sure this is not an isolated case I borrowed Medal Of Honor from a friend. It also ran @60Hz.

Is this normal? Surely this card should be able to reach the 75Hz needed to be flicker free??

Am I doing something wrong? Can anybody help?

There is an nvidia refresh hack that you can get that will "hide" all the low refresh rates. What happens is windows is defaulting to the slowest hz on the list (the first one it finds). So the hack will hide all the available refresh values except the one you want. Works.

Calvin

Both Medal of Honor and Jedi Knight II use the Quake3 engine, so you'll have that problem with any Q3-engined game (such as Q3 itself, or Star Trek: Elite Force which by the way was made by the same team as Jedi Knight II, so if you see any similarities in the style it's not a conicidence).

For me, whenever I have refresh rate trouble, I just edit the system registry's refresh rates for that display and then use MultiRes to switch resolutions. I forget the key name, and it's not the same key in 98 as on my 2K box here, but I think it was somewhere in HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Class\Display. You'll see multiple entries (0000, 0001, 0002) etc. for each video card that you've ever installed and it will have all the available resolutions.

I've had problems where certain games would try to run at 800x600x72hz on one of my old monitors that wouldn't do that resolution (it would only do 640 and 1024), and pounding on the registry took care of the problem.

I don't know if the DirectX video drivers are used in the Q3 engine for controlling the display refresh, but running DXSETUP will also let you force DirectX to a specific refresh rate.

Being a heavy player of online games, I hope this helps:

Are you using XP? if so, XP using Nvidia has a nasty bug. It defaults all resolutions to refresh at 60Hz. Pitz huh?

So, get yourself a copy of the NV refresh rate fix program from : http://www.planetquake.com/ztn/nvreffix/

This will work will all Nvidia drivers EXCEPT the latest as nvidia have changed the format of the drivers.

Hope this helps.

Fancy a duel?

Thank for all the fast replies guys!

Just FYI, I'm using win2k. I've tried that refresh rate fix program, but it doesn't work. I guess I'm using those latest drivers that don't work. Shame.
If I get this thing to run, I may take you up on this duel.

Tony, the key you provided worked up to "HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services".... I could not find a key called class, so I did a search for display instead.
Under the above mentioned key there is sub key called "NV". This one shows four (0-3) devices (I don't know where those four come from - I've only had this card in the system since it's been compeletely reinstalled) which show a whole lot of video modes. I'm stuck here : don't know what to do now. What are my options?

Oh, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you say :" I don't know if the DirectX video drivers are used in the Q3 engine for controlling the display refresh, but running DXSETUP will also let you force DirectX to a specific refresh rate. "

Don't the Quake engine games use Open-GL instead of directX? I know it used to be like that once, but things may have changed A LOT since I've played my last PC game.

You won't find that key under Win2k, it's stored differently. I don't know how to set the refresh rates in Windows 2000.

Regarding the OpenGL/DirectX thing... I know they use OpenGL. Sometimes, though, I've heard of programs which use OpenGL for certain things, but also have to use DirectX for certain other things. I don't know enough about the subject to know exactly what things get done by which engines. It was a wild guess, I know that there is a force-refresh option in the DirectX Setup software so I thought it would be worth a try.