Railworks America

I have an Acer monitor that's about 2 years old, set at 1680x1050 (60Hz). I've started noticing that the brightness seems to be fading. With my new computer and graphics card I'm getting fps anywhere from the mid 20's to as high as 100+, with an average fps around 70-80. Is it possible that the high fps has been slowly burning out the monitor.

Thanks,

Hi, Doug. Is it an LCD, or a CRT (tube) monitor? These comments are for the LCD (LED) type of monitor. If it's getting dimmer all over and not in any kind of pattern, it's probably the backlight. The game has no effect on the backlight, but it may have an effect on the pixel matrix. Doesn't sound like that is your problem. I assume you've gone into the monitor's setup and changed things like the brightness and contrast settings? If so, your monitor may simply be wearing out. Of course, excessive use of any monitor can prematurely age it. Do you shut it off when it's not being used? I had an HP 20" LCD burn in pretty badly once with some Ham Radio software I kept running. It corrected itself after I shut it off when I wasn't using it actively. Got better after about 5 power cycles.
Don't know if this helps, but something to think about.
Best,
Marc
BTW - if it's a CRT, there's very little hope for improving a dimming image.

Marc's right about the backlight. LCD monitors use a fluorescent tube as the backlight, and after a while they just get dimmer and dimmer, until they finally burn out. An LED backlit monitor will never dim. Also, and LCD monitor will start dying if left on all the time, as the tube slowly consumes all that "gas", LED monitors can be left on all the time with no degradation. I pretty much leave my Asus 24" LED on all the time when I'm home, unless I'm sleeping. I think there's more wear-and-tear on the electronics constantly turning one on and off.

As for the frame rates your video card sends to your monitor, it doesn't matter, because the monitor only displays at 60Hz. Anything above that rate is "downsampled" and locked to 60. The human eye is pretty much no good at telling the difference between 30Hz and 60Hz and up anyways. These new fancy 120Hz monitors only run at that rate when they are doing 3D rendition (60Hz to each eye, basically)

Thanks for the replies fellas.

It's a 22" Acer LCD monitor and when I fire things up in the morning I generally leave everything running all day until I head off to bed, unless we're going out. Don't like leaving our computers running if we're not home as hydro is a little iffy out our way, especially during the winter with snow and winds we tend to get a lot of power outages and fluctuations. We've even purchased a UPS so if we loose power (at least when we're home) we have time to shut things down. I guess it may be time to look at a new monitor and this time I'll look into the LED types. Things just don't last like they used to.

Just as a side note, the monitor is brighter this morning. Go figure.

Thanks again,