Is it intended for retroarch to lower my 120hz monitor refresh rate to 60 when fullscreen exclusive mode is enabled? I minimized retroarch and noticed the mouse was moving a little slower and saw in monitor settings that it was lowered to 60hz. It changes back as soon as i close retroarch but was just curious if this is normal or if theres a setting I should change so retroarch keeps my monitor at 120hz.
Yes, it’s normal. You can change video_refresh_rate to 120 instead of 0.00000 in your cfg, but be sure to also either enable black frame insertion or set the vsync swap interval to 2, or else your games will run double-speed. Menus will also be throttled to 60 fps by default because they are hard to navigate at 120 fps. That can be disabled, but I don’t recommend it.
They don’t go double speed, but you get stuttering at 120hz without black frame insertion or swap interval set to 2. I wish if you enabled either of those options it wouldn’t force 60hz in exclusive fullscreen. It completely nullifies the usefulness of swap interval 2, since it goes half speed at 60hz. I have to use windowed fullscreen to avoid this problem. And with the Vulkan driver, 60hz is forced even in windowed fullscreen 
setting the refresh to 120 in the config doesn’t resolve it for you with exclusive fullscreen?
With audio sync on, is there any difference whatsoever between vsync swap interval 1 n 2? At 1 games are still running at the correct frame rate at least the ones ive tested.
I was mistaken earlier (I haven’t used a high-refresh monitor for a couple of years…). It won’t make it run faster, it just makes it stuttery unless you raise the swap interval.
Hmm, looks like it doesn’t force it anymore with the GL driver, no matter what the refresh rate is set at (tested default and 120). That’s good. Vulkan still does even with 120 set as the refresh, however. Strangely, with swap interval set to 1 it doesn’t. At least until I hit the fast forward key, then it forces 60hz.
What I find odd is this text describing black frame insertion
Inserts a black frame inbetween frames.
Useful for 120 Hz monitors who want to play 60 Hz material with eliminated ghosting.
video_refresh_rate should still be configured as if it is a 60 Hz monitor (divide refresh rate by 2).
video_black_frame_insertion = false
Is it saying you should leave retroach at 60hz? I’m guessing thats only in windowed mode where retroarch doesnt change your actual monitors refresh rate to 60. Also thanks for the help hunterk.
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Edit: this is all on windows 10 and using the glupen core, issues occur regardless of audio sync settings and i get 100 fps in the area when i uncap it
Something else I wanna add, when using exclusive fullscreen im getting pretty major slowdowns in certain areas of banjo kazooie with fps set to 120 vsync interval 2 AND with fps set to 60 vsync interval 1. 120 fps vsync interval 1 gets rid of the slowdowns but I’m not sure if its causing any syncing issues.
After testing a little more, playing in a window gets rid of the slowdown issues also regardless of whether i have retroarch set to 60 or 120 fps. By slowdowns I mean it gets massively choppy in a certain area standing still and im using a save state to be in the same spot between the settings.
To simplify when fps is set to 60 or 120 and in windowed mode frame rate is fine, but the ONLY fullscreen exclusive mode that doesnt get very choppy with vsync enabled is fps set to 120 and vsync swap interval has to be set to 1.
So not sure if maybe glupen has issues with exclusive fullscreen or with vsync.
nm, the answer to all my questions is basically triple buffering. enabling it makes fullscreen exclusive perform the same as windowed
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Like others have said you can set your refresh rate, but when you’re on a tv with a high refresh rate it’s best to turn off vsync to ensure the least amount of stuttering.
None of these suggestions work with my monitor. It’s set to 120hz, i also set the cfg to 120hz. But the “estimated screen frame rare” is always 60hz. The games always stutter and swap interval “2” does nothing. The only thing that works is black frame insertion but that makes the screen dark and the colors wrong (the clouds in Sonic get a dark line around them for instance) so that’s useless too.
Is this a known issue with 1.7.4? I’d like to use my monitor’s 120/240hz ability to clean up the blur a bit but black frame insertion looks horrible. Is there something else i can try?
Indeed the menu is hard coded at 60hz (as long as you have “throttle menu” enabled in “frame throttle”), so the detection shows that.
In the video menu you can directly click on “set display reported refresh rate” it seems to be right.
Then, is your screen g-sync or Freesync compatible?
-If so, enable “sync to exact content framerate” in “frame throttle” menu.
-If not, change “vertical sync swap interval to 2” (if you’re at 120hz, if your screen is at 240hz then it’s “4”).
You won’t get any kind of blur reduction if the content run at 60fps like in most emulators.
Even on a monitor set to 480hz, 60fps is blurry exactly the same. You can see it in practice here.
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Thanks. “sync to exact content framerate” fixed the stutter when the monitor is set to 120 or 240hz.
But i’m pretty disappointed by the fact that i can’t avoid blurry graphics. I just came back from a crystal clear CRT monitor that died on me so i thought a fast monitor would at least come closer to the CRT than a regular 60hz one. Yet, 60hz content is still the same blurry mess. Black frame insertion fixes this indeed but the colors are simply dreadful and incorrect. You can’t just increase the brightness and call it a day.
I hate modern technology monitors 
It looks like Vulkan is broken on Nvidia with 120hz monitors again. I’ll test some more but with up to date nvidia drivers and RA 1.7.5, it changes my monitor to 60hz and wont stay at 120hz. OpenGL on 1.7.5 still works fine and so does Vulkan on RA 1.7.3.
Ok Im asking awakened to reopen this https://github.com/libretro/RetroArch/issues/3494
1.7.4 is when the vulkan regression occurred. At least theres no black screen issues but changing the monitors refresh rate is annoying and causes issues.