In another thread, someone talked about Monitor and Refresh rate. Is there such a difference beetween a 60Hz monitor and a 144Hz monitor ? While playing a game like PS2, would 144Hz bring any consistent improvement (general awreness, competitivity) compared to a 60Hz monitor , 2ms response time?
i hope to find out for myself soon, saving up for the ASUS MG278Q 144Hz but yes i think it will give me a new game experience or at least a better response time and refresh rate
You need high FPS too for it to make a difference. 144hz is useless if you can only run a game at 60fps. That said - yes, for me at least 60 vs 144fps is like day and night now. Going back to test 60fps now in an first-person-shooter it feels "barely acceptable" and a very long shot from 144fps. I'm sure this does not affect everyone the same way. After all some people swear they can't see the difference between 30 and 60fps (although that seems beyond absurd to me). I would recommend it. High refresh montors are not a gimmick, and I would never buy a monitor now with less than 100hz. When you can keep the frame-rate high it definitely helps with control. PS2 is maybe not the best example though because the fps can fluctuate so much. Yes it will help in that small fight where you can get 100fps, but not in the huge one where you dip to 45fps. -Stigma
Interesting. Thank you for your help. (I have a GTX 960, with that "old" but really cool and reliable 60Hz monitor.)
Well some people are stupid. In reality, we don`t even know how many FPS our eyes can see, it is well over 1 000. There IS difference between 60 and 145, to everyone who has healthy eyes.
Yep I couldn't go back to a 60hz monitor for gaming now. There are diminishing returns the higher you go but 100 or 120hz feels and looks so much smoother than 60hz. Even just moving your mouse around on the desktop there is a very noticeable difference. As you say though the game has be running at high framerates in the first place otherwise having a higher refresh rate is pointless. In PS2 it will mostly be nice at the fights that aren't massive zergs. High refresh Gsync/Freesync monitors are actually sort of ideal for PS2 since the framerate can vary so much between a large fight and a small fight. For anyone who doesn't know about them it basically syncs your monitors refresh with your framerate, so if you are getting 45fps one second your refresh rate will be 45hz, if you are getting 120fps the next moment your monitor will run 120hz. The biggest issue in PS2 is still network/server lag and hit detection though. With high refresh rates that stuff is probably even more noticeable than anything because it sticks out like a sore thumb amidst your smooth gaming goodness.
I actually decided to buy 60hz 1080p Freesync monitor instead of 144hz. Thanks to freesync i don´t mind if i get over 60 FPS on some games, but i do mind if i get lower than that. So i much rather just get better hardware than monitors. I can`t play Planetside 2 or lot of other games at over stable 60 FPS, and there is no way i could play VR games. When i get 120 FPS in VR i will upgrade the monitor as well. Yes i would love to have 4k 144hz IPS monitor. But i don´t have money or perfomance to do that. Though i may buy 144 hz 1080p monitor at some point, but that depends on money. I hate low FPS, so if i buy monitor that is more accurate than 1080p i don´t have good enough perfomance. If i buy monitor that is 144hz IPS, i don´t have the money and may still not have the perfomance. My rough upgrade plan excluding hardware: 1. 144hz monitor 1080p. I will only buy this when i get 120 FPS as stable standard 2. 144hz monitor 1440p. I will only buy this when i get 200 or so FPS as stable standard in 1080p 3. 144hz monitor 4k. I will only buy this when i get 200 FPS or so stable standard in 1440p 4 VR headset. I will only buy this when i get 120 FPS or so stable standard in 4k 5. 200 hz VR headset and 200hz 4k monitor if i see need for monitor. Unless i am too tired for my brain to work, that is how i will be always playing at over 60 FPS on new monitor, and over 120 FPS on VR. Sorry for messy post, i am tired.
Yep I just stuck with 1080p for my 144hz monitor because I knew I wouldn't be able to upgrade my graphics card often enough to get high framerates at 1440p or 4K.
I want to add a consideration in here though... 144hz is nice, and it is always better to have the option for it than 60hz. It doesn't even add that much cost to most comparable monitors. So what is the downside?... Well, 144hz requires a lot of speed from the panel, and that limits the types of panels that are viable. It boils down to: TN panels: very fast, very cheap, often bright with good contrast - but overall subpar quality, colors, viewangle IPS panels: slower, so the 144hz capable ones cost 2-3 times more, and even then they still tend to have more input latency and ghosting than TN panels (although generally acceptable). Amazing quality. So if you are a potato-settings tryhard gamer who worships at the altar of performance but doesn't care THAT much about quality then 144hz is an easy choice. 100+ fps is achievable without godtier hardware and the TN panels are inexpensive. It's not hard to pay 15-20% more to get a 144hz capable one over a more common model. For those that want the eyecandy and vibrant colors with lots of detail then going 144hz can be a tall ask. Panels are 2-3x more expensive (although awesome) and you will often need a monster PC to run the latest games at 100+ with high details. Still... not all games are competitive shooters, and maybe you don't really care THAT much if you dip down into 60-70fps playing Skyrim... Not having to photoshop on a TN panel will sure help too. One last thing is that I'd recommend looking into Gsync/freesync. (both are technologies that makes your update refresh variable and the same as your FPS instead of them being desynced from eachother). These technologies can very much make significantly lower FPS feel more responsive and smooth, as well as lower input lag. It's a much smarter (and long overdue) way of handelig refresh rate which is honestly just a leftover from the analoge era. The only problem is that I don't think that it's 100% clear yet which standard is emerging as the winner, so getting stuck with something that might not be relevant or easily compatible a few years down the road is a risk. Gsync seems to have an upper hand, but is Nvidia based, and they don't want to share without heavy licensing, and last I heard it also needs a special hardware component in the monitor. Freesync is more open and seems promising, but it won't matter if it goes the way of the betamax (god I feel old now...) I think for gaming, the ideal monitor now IMO has 100-120hz or more (beyond 100 I feel like there are strongly diminishing returns), plus the capability of dynamic refresh rates like described above. I've only had less than 5 minutes experience with Gsync, but I have to say that it was very impressive how smooth even 40-50fps felt and looked (felt more like 60-80'ish fps). It is definitely on my criteria list for whatever next monitor I get. note: I haven't researched Gsync/freesync heavily since about a year back now, so the climate may very well have changed. Id be interested to know if anyone here has a more up to date view of how that battle is turning out. -Stigma
Even if you cannot perceive 144 images per second, the frame time determines how late you get feedback from your actions: 144fps = 6.9ms is a huge improvement over 60fps = 16.6ms as long as your monitors refresh time is lower than those values. Actually you make yourself look stupid since there is scientific data and you do not need to insult anyone. The article "The effects of age on sensory thresholds and temporal gap detection in hearing, vision, and touch" provides exact values on visual gap detection thresholds. For young people that can be 12ms for example which equals 83fps.
Not entirely true. Your monitor refreshes at a nearly precise 60 hz/frames a second (or whatever its refresh rate is). Your computer on the other hand does not render frames at an even rate. It may take longer to render one frame and then shorter in the next. Even though your compy says it is producing 60 frames a second, it may take longer on one frame and miss the mark of sending it to your monitor before it refreshes the screen (one frame takes 1/61 of a second and the next takes 1/59 is still an average of 60 fps). Then before the monitor refreshes again the compy sends it another frame resulting in that first frame essentially being lost. So even if both are at the same rate you can still be seeing a lower frame rate than what it is saying. A faster refresh rate on your monitor will help reduce the frame loss.
You are right, and what you are touching upon here is exactly the reason why dynamic update monitors like Gsync are so superior in theory. My statement was meant more generally, as in "144hz has limited value if you game at 60fps anyway". You have inverse issues too where if you have a perfect 60fps then 60hz is actually smoother than 144hz because 144hz does not divide evenly into 60 - and thus you will have frames being shown twice, and some being shown 3 times - making the video more jerky and less smooth than it could have been (although at 144hz it is subtle). Of course, in games you rarely/never have the luxury of being able to render a perfect framerate. All games vary in load, and on average given an unpredicatble framerate, the higher your frefresh rate is the better since it will lower the average delay of frames being shown. With Gsync/freesync these issues are largely if not completely mitigated since the monitor just waits until a frame is done and then displays it immediately. There is no longer any need to over-generate frames in order to lower the display-delay (which is the whole reason why 200fps still FEELS much smoother than 60fps even on a traditional 60hz screen). You essentially get that smooth feel at a much much lower fps - and since getting enough FPS is usually a limiting factor that is a pretty huge deal. Although I have limited hands-on time with Gsync I firmly believe that you can actually get significantly smoother gameplay on a monitor like that even on slower hardware. Ever since we stopped using analogue screens it has been ***-backwards that the computer has had to wait for the monitor rather than the other way around, so this is a gamechanger for those that are sensitive to these issues (I think almost anyone is given enough gaming experience honestly - I don't think it's some unique biological trait). Even with Gsync I'd still recommend 100hz or more though, because I have tried out perfect 60fps/60hz (by capping the framerate on old games using modern hardware) and while good, it's not perfect. -Stigma
It hasn't changed much. Gsync is more expensive because it requires a special chip in the monitor (and also so Nvidia can make some more money). The markup on Gsync monitors seems to basically be a "flat rate" markup though. So if you are looking for a cheap monitor Gsync can easily double the cost at the low-end which is hard to justify, but if you are looking at higher end monitors the price difference is much smaller percentage wise. Pretty much all Gsync monitors will work from 30fps-144fps/hz. If you go below 30fps the Gsync stops working and you just have a regular monitor basically. Gsync only works on Nvidia cards Freesync is generally cheaper since it doesn't require a special expensive extra chip in the monitor. The biggest downside with Freesync is some of the monitors have a pretty limited FPS/hz range where Freesync works. Some will only work from like 45-75fps, and if your FPS goes above or below that you don't have Freesync. If you are going to buy a Freesync monitor I'd get one that has a wider range than that. AMD has a nice list of all the Freesync monitors and their ranges if you go to the bottom of this page on the "Monitors" tab. As before Freesync still only works with AMD graphics cards. Intel says some of their future integrated graphics will support Freesync as well, but none of them currently do and their next CPU Kaby Lake (coming out end of this year on laptops and early next year on desktops) sounds like it won't support it either. Basically you are vendor locked into buying AMD graphics cards or Nvidia graphics cards if you go with either of them. Technically any graphics card will work with those monitors but if you have a Nvidia card and Freesync monitor the Freesync won't work, and if you have a AMD card and Gsync monitor the Gsync won't work. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like this will change in the foreseeable future. For now we are stuck with a Betamax/VHS or HD-DVD/Bluray situation.
