120Hz Valve Vizio TV Hacks
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> Vizio agrees to pay $3 million for alleged ‘false’ refresh rate claims
Oh man... story thread. We showed Steam Machines at GDC 2015, right? One of things we wanted to showcase was that you could make use of features current living room gaming systems weren't capable of at the time. So one of the segments was going to be a game running on a 120Hz TV.
Native 120Hz TVs were very rare at the time. We settled on a Vizio model that worked for that, everything is locked in at the office. The show was gonna have three demo rooms, we order exactly the same model numbers as our office setup, don't want to leave anything to chance!
Setup day at Moscone, we unpack our Vizio TVs for that segment and set up everything. No 120Hz. Same model number, just a few weeks later on the order. Still says 120Hz prominently on the box. Firmware update doesn't help. Press starts first thing in the morning. Panic.
After panic subsides I make an informed hail mary and walk someone still at the office back in Bellevue over the phone through dumping the EDID of the One Good Vizio, and override that EDID on our demo setups. 120Hz is back.
I can still hear Dalton to someone that was trying to follow up on how boned we were.. "Yeah Pierre-Loup just hacked the TV, we're good after all, no need to change plans..."
I suspect they (half-assedly) patched it out because it never worked right in the first place. When using 120Hz they would underflow every ~20 minutes with a few seconds of black. I don't think it happened during any of the live press demos, it was just one of the short segments.
From Pierre-Loup Griffais