What do all these benchmarks MEAN?

[live4optics]

Hi All, I am a bit of a newb to benchmarking...I keep reading about fps and understand that we want this as high as possible and all...but how does this relate to the refresh rate of the monitor? If say I get 60 fps and my refresh is 60 Hz then am I get 1 new frame per refresh?

If so, then what does the computer do when it has a fps of say 100 fps and I run at 60 Hz? Does it throw info away or auto set itself to try to get 60 fps? Am I WAY off on all this? And why we are at it, why is say 80 Hz better then 60 Hz? My eye is tricked well enough by anything above 30-40 Hz...


Also, anyone know of a nice summary of all the different settings and which are the best for say RTCW? Things like anisotropic this and that...

Thanks

[DocEvi1]

you are getting yourself confused I think.
The refreash rate is the number of times the monitor screen is drawn, i.e. 60Hz (which you shouldn't have) sees the screen drawn 60x a second.
FPS (frames per second) is the number of times the game is rendered on your card, not the speed at which it is shown on your screen.

I don't think the two have any correlation - many people use 85Hz refreash rate and get FPS in the hundreds (me :D )

Stefan