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Comment by squaredot | Hacker News Reader

Question: is 240Hz beneficial in practical terms wrt let's say 120Hz?

One thing you do all the time on computers is moving your mouse. And 240hz doubles how smooth that is.

Sounds boring, I know, but honestly the thing I love most out of my 280 monitor is how nice and snappy the mouse moves around. It's neat.

You are right that this is one of the easiest ways to notice the low frame rate of a monitor.

It is very easy to move the mouse cursor across the screen in less than 100 ms, in which case on a standard 60 Hz monitor you will see less than 6 images of the mouse cursor jumping across the screen, instead of a continuous movement.

60 > 144 hz jump is very noticeable. Day and night. 144 > 240 hz not so much. It's still really good though.

For an e-sports professional, maybe. For the rest of us, no.

LinusTechTips did a good comparison with an actual pro player iirc.

I haven’t tried anything faster than 120Hz, but I think 240Hz is probably nice. Not because of the volume of frames per second but because of the latency. At 60Hz there are 16⅔ milliseconds between frames, at 120Hz there are 8⅓ ms between frames, and at 240Hz it’s 4⅙ milliseconds.

Does it make a difference? I think so: When working with music software, the difference between those latency numbers are very noticeable. Around 5ms you stop noticing the latency itself, but down around 2-3ms a new perceptual effect appears: It feels physically real. It’s perceived as a kind of heft or tautness. It’s quite clear when you’re playing a software synthesizer and turning knobs and try different buffer settings.

The brain is capable of sensing the timing difference between touch and vision and sound if you change the delay of the stream of sound.

I’m fairly sure the vision system would also allow for a difference in feel if we change the delay on the video stream.

Of course, more frames per second isn’t the only way to do it. You can theoretically run at a lower framerate while simply always guaranteeing that the frames you do show are very very new.

A fully analog amp 10 feet away is 10ms latency, so I doubt that difference between 5 and 2 can be anything but placebo effect

We do integrate the delay between us and a speaker some distance away in the sensory experience, yes, but this does not mean that the sensation of a shorter delay is imperceptible. It can be tested: Room simulator, playing the instrument as if it were 10 feet away, change the latency around.

I have a 240hz monitor and I wouldn't say it's that important but it seems to be something that's simply possible now at not much cost. The price point that used to get you a 1440p 144hz monitor a few years ago now gets you the same thing at 240hz. So why not have it. We used to have CRT monitors running much faster than 240hz and no one ever complained they were too fast.

The only CRTs I saw were 60Hz, I think.

How common was it for CRTs to go faster than that?

Diminishing returns, but your average person may still be able to notice a difference. 60-120 is the much bigger jump.

I've heard it argued that stereoscopic 3D works best with ultra high refresh rates. The reason it can cause headaches is low refresh rates, but the closer to 1000hz you get, the lower the likelihood of headaches.

It could be my sliding into middle ages eyes are weak but I limit most of my games to 144 Hz because I can't tell the difference between that and 240 Hz and it's a big increase in power and heat.

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