As we've seen, the resolution of a monitor is important, especially when line blanking is used. But resolution isn't the only factor, and maybe not even the most important.

Whether you use line blanking or page flipping, the refresh rate per eye is half of the actual refresh rate. Since a normal TV refreshes at 60 Hz a refresh rate of 120Hz, 60 Hz per eye, should be acceptable, as long as you're not right in front of the monitor. A refresh rate of 70 Hz, 35Hz per eye, on the other hand, would result in a lot of flicker!

So if we set the monitor to 1600x1200 with a refresh rate of 120 Hz we would seemingly have an ideal setup. If you can do this,congratulations!

Odds are, however, that you can't. Why not?

Monitors have a limitaton called MAXIMUM HORIZONTAL FREQUENCY. To understand how this limits the modes you can select, you'll first need to know what horizontal frequency is.

If you think of a screen of being composed of horizontal lines stacked on top of each other then the number of lines would equal the vertical resolution. If we multiply this by the refresh rate, then we have the number of lines produced per second and thus, theoretically, the horizontal frequency. However, the dot is not on the screen the whole time, so to get the actual horizontal frequency, we must multiply this by 1.0471 or divide it by .955 (the recripricol).

We then would have the following formulas, expressed in computer notation:

     H=1.0471*V*R      V=.955*H/R      R=.955*H/V

Where:
H=Horizontal frequency
V=Vertical Resolution
R=Refresh rate

So in the above example:
      1.0471*1200*120=150,782.4 or 150.7824 Khz
So we would need a monitor with a maximum horizontal refresh rate of about 151 Khz. But what if your monitor can do "only" 111 Khz?
(which is actually pretty good!)
If you set the resolution to 1600x1200:
     .955*110000/1200=87.54
You could set the refresh rate to 85 Hz, which isn't too bad actually. What if you wanted 120 hz, what maximum resolution could you set?
      .955*110000/120=875.41
So you could easily set the resolution to 1024x768. Indeed:
      .955*110000/768=136.78
At 1024x768 you could set the refresh rate as high as 135 Hz!