Monitor question

[Andy Burns]

Yes, even if it requires nvidia H-Sync/AMD FreeSync to do 75Hz, it'll still do 60Hz with any graphics.

Either will cope with fullHD at those refresh rates.

[Andrew]

So does Edge.

Remember this monitor uses a VA panel (hence the name) although it still claims to have a 178 degree viewing angle, which I thought was only possible with an IPS panel.

Do you do a lot of photography or use Lightroom or Photoshop or similar ?. If so an IPS panel *might* be a better choice.

[Scott]

I got my new monitor, which seems fine for my purposes. Thank you for your advice and patience.

As you predicted, the default refresh rate is 60Hz. However, there is an option in W11 to change this to 74.97Hz (which works okay). Is there any reason not to do this? It claims to use more power, but is this significant?

[Paul]

Some of your software uses "compositing", but this is not likely to use a lot of extra power. You take a set of windows, each stored in a pixmap -- the compositing arranges them on the Z-axis, some being in-front-of others, and masking them off. The purpose of doing this, is you can move windows around on the screen, and the program generating the windows does not need to compute a new view. Each program thinks it is drawing a rectangular pixmap (even though parts of it, or all of it, is covered up).

Linux, Windows, and Mac do this. It is quite a common feature.

Web browsers similarly composite, even when the scene in the browser window is static and unchanging, something is recomputing the stack of content, at frame rate. A browser could have seven tasks running in Task Manager, one task generates nothing but a movie rectangle, and that is composited into a web page of text with the movie rectangle scaled to fit within some dimension on the web page. Several tasks then, could be preparing content for a single web page.

All of this takes some electricity, but if asked whether it was 1 watt or 100 watts, I would think nearer the smaller end of the scale.

The web page can be worse, because web pages, while executing Javascript, ran rail the CPU on one core. And that uses enough electricity, you can hear a fan speed up.

if anything, close browser windows when not using them. So they cannot get into mischief.

Paul