You skipped the "in a new resolution" part. I'm talking about mode switch time. Change resolutions or swap an input on your monitor and watch it dance for a few seconds trying to "resync" in a digital environment where AT MOST you need to wait through one frame of data to find the right timings.

Yeah, the fact that it's not a single frame but, in fact, like 1 to 3 seconds to switch resolutions is absolutely insane. Trying to watch a PC bios boot on my new-ish monitor is an exercise in frustration—it spends more time off than on!

For some reason most if not all screens even cycle their backlight when switching modes.

what are you walking about? OP just used 30 ms as example, replace it with 9 ms or 3 ms or whatever the example of a new resolution from OP still works..

> replace it with 9 ms or 3 ms or whatever the example of a new resolution from OP still works

No, it doesn't. I missed that they were talking about mode switch, but if the mode switch happened in 9ms the OP's example doesn't work anymore because the switch becomes faster than refresh rate.

In an ideal world it would only take one frame to switch resolutions, and even if the frame time is usually 16.66ms, it is sometimes faster than that. Since mostly what a monitor needs to do is resample the image from the source resolution to destination resolution, and possibly composite in the UI for adjusting the settings, it seems quite possible to implement. I'm sure if we actually looked at what all the layers are doing (X, video drivers, PCIe commands, etc) then we would probably be pretty horrified. Hacks and work-arounds and backwards compatibility at every level.