240Hz is the new 120Hz: It's time to buy a high refresh rate monitor

I'd wager that you'd notice the difference when using higher refresh rates regularly and then downgrading. I think that's a cruel thing to do to yourself though.

I remember when I first saw a high-def Retina Macbook, I didn't appreciate it. I happily programmed on my low resolution Macbook Air, snug as a bug in a rug.

I eventually upgraded to a Retina Macbook. One day I opened up my old low-res Macbook to recover some old files and I was horrified at how bad it looked. You could see the damn pixels! Text on that screen was so blocky. I couldn't believe I happily used that laptop for so long.

Is a Retina screen useful? Sure. Did my happiness increase? I don't think so. Does my screen eat up much more battery lighting up many more pixels? Probably.

Sometimes it's nice to be happy with the minimum and not ruin by chasing upgrades.

I find I can't really tell the difference beyond ~90fps outside of artificial tests (like moving a hard edge and "counting" the edges visible, you can normally do this with a mouse cursor) in non-interactive content.

But beyond that the latency improvement is still noticeable - most games still tend to handle input and game update in terms of frames - so if you have 3-4 frames of input->visible result latency that's 30-40ms at 100fps, but 15-20ms at 200, and you can tell the difference in some situations. This is very dependent on the style of game though - many have sluggish movement and slow direction changes as part of the design, so is less noticeable than some super slide-y shooter like Doom.

But much of that is solvable by the app outside of higher FPS, with GPU submission timing and delaying input processing you can get pretty much the same latency at any FPS, just many games don't do that (yet?)

It varies so much between people (and age?). My dad has a very hard time telling 60hz and 120hz apart. Meanwhile to me 144hz and 240hz are trivial to tell apart, let alone 60 to 120.

One time my drivers for some reason reset my old 144hz monitor to 120hz, and that's still enough difference that it immediately felt weird when I logged into Valorant (so I began diagnosing the issue).

>Is there a term for people who aren’t especially sensitive to refresh rates?

Normal people.

>I feel like I’m a freak or something for not being able to instantly perceive high refresh rates.

I feel like I am the freak when I am the only one who constantly wants to push for higher refresh rate and lower latency. I mean the latency of 240Hz display is 4.2ms alone. So in the worst case scenario that could be up to 8ms delay between frame and input assuming zero latency in the system which we know will never be the case.

I think most people would perceive it if you use an Apple Pencil on iPad. The difference between old iPad and newer iPad. Just that most dont care enough about it.

Me too. My guess is because I spend most time reading / coding and not in first-person view games. Then FPS only affects smooth scrolling.

Anything at 60 Hz or more looks all the same to me (well, I can spin my mouse in a circle and see jerkiness but who cares, I am not playing shooters). On the other hand, low DPI annoys me instantly. All my monitors need to have >130 DPI (e.g. 4k resolution with 31.5" diagonal, scaling at 100% works fine). I also set all fonts really small, around 6px.

I haven't been sensitive to refresh rates or even resolution.

I'm watching my movies still in 720p.

My resolution doesn't go past 2000s.

I believe at some point it's just "number go up".

I'm probably on the low end but not by much.

3:2 has been getting some love and is a not-bad compromise between 16:10 and 4:3.

Yup. I do love my ProDisplay XDR from a photography perspective, but I miss my dual LG monitors - and there's a little Stockholm syndrome, as Apple broke DSC 1.4 in order to make the ProDisplay work - previously, in Catalina, I could drive the 2 27GN950-Bs in 4K HDR @ 144Hz, and after, could not (this was reported hundreds of times, across many users, monitors, and GPUs). After Catalina, and at least through Monterey, I could only get HDR@60, SDR@95 with DSC 1.4. Ironically, telling the monitors to only advertise DSC 1.2 support got me better results.

At the time, people were wondering how Apple was able to drive the ProDisplay given bandwidth constraints. The answer was "by breaking DSC 1.4 for everybody else".

But to your point, agreed. Whether coding, or otherwise, 144Hz was just buttery smooth and made 60Hz very noticeable.

Yeah my multimonitor setup includes both 60hz and 240hz monitors, and it's so much easier to use the cursor with the 240hz monitor.

Gsync basically doesn't matter if you're fine with disabling vsync, and at high FPS the tearing is almost invisible.

"able to distinguish" is a very ambiguous description. Imagine the following scenario: you play a video game, where you are a cowboy in a standoff, as soon as your opponent grabs his gun, you need to click to shoot yours. You are punished for a false start, and rewarded based on your reflexes (maybe statistically: the sooner you shoot the more likely you're to win the duel).

There is no lower bound to latency, and therefore upper bound to FPS, that helps you statistically. Eventually the resolution of the study (e.g. sample size and therefore the statistical error) will say that "the population are able to distinguish" up to some Hz refresh rate. But when you then increase the resolution of the test (sample size), you will again start to see a difference.

Of course I'm not saying a research like that wouldn't be interesting, all I'm arguing is that there's no definitive answer about maximum FPS that makes sense.

Think about the human brain's ability to distinguish 2 nearly-identical sound frequencies. Our neural nets are masters of time domain signal analysis. Even the slightest shift in phase or frequency is usually perceptible.

I think saccade plays a big role in how we perceive smoothness of motion and could also explain why some people don't really mind 60hz whereas others find it to be an affront to civilization. Just a little bit of difference between human visual systems could explain a large difference in final perception.

this heavily depends on whether or not there is any interpolation, the complication is that you can detect a strobe at essentially arbitrary frequency, provided it is illuminating a moving object, as you will see the rate of the strobe as a spacing between images. Similarly, if you are rendering pong with no interpolation, and the ball is moving fast enough you'll just see copies of the ball. This makes the test somewhat ill posed. Interpolation is also somewhat ill posed, computationally, but if you were to do it very intelligently, or to only a first approximation, I suspect we have more trouble detecting it.

I share your sentiment, which is why I am thrilled with the progress on right to repair laws across the globe.

Also companies like Framework are letting us have our cake and eat it too. They’ve made CPU upgrades possible on laptops, and there’s a way to re-use old parts.

I don’t know if the same can ever be done for monitors - perhaps if someone came up with a clever tech to combine 4 displays into one big frame TV?

60hz 1080 on my desktop, I still see no reason to upgrade since 2018. Everything run smooth, games run in high/very high at 60+ fps

Upgrading my screen would need spending 1.5k+ in hardware to be able to drive it properly, I'm sure 120hz is cool but I feel like as for my pixel 3, upgrades are very expensive for what they bring to the table

Does it make all the slow-downs more noticeable?