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Comment by scblock | Hacker News Reader

A typical 60 Hz screen refresh is 16.7 ms

If you haven't tried a 144hz or even a 240hz gaming PC, you should. You can really feel the difference dragging things around the screen.

(I'm not sure I would notice typing, but for dragging windows around I could never go back to 60fps.)

I can certainly tell difference between 60 and 120 Hz in fast paced games, but I would not notice it in UI.

I thought so too, but for a while I had 2 144Hz monitors on my Mac Pro[1] and very much noticed it in the UI, window dragging was smoother, browser scrolling too, absolutely noticeable.

[1] Then Apple released the Pro Display and Big Sur and people wondered "how does the math work for a 6K display and bandwidth?" The answer, they completely fucking broke DP 1.4. Hundreds of complaints, different monitors, different GPUs, all broke by Big Sur to this day just so Apple could make their 6K display work.

My screens could do 4K HDR10 @ 144 Hz. After Big Sur? SDR @ 95 Hz, HDR @ 60Hz. Ironically I got better results telling my monitors to only advertise DP 1.2 support, then it was SDR@120, HDR@95Hz.

Studiously ignored by Apple because they broke the standard to eke out more bandwidth.

You can notice higher frame rates if you're in a competitive FPS, not a code editor. Unless you are playing CS2 in Emacs.

Properly levereged GUI editors have the potential to use the extra refresh rate for smother animations/smooth scrolling, though that's pretty far away from Emacs territory.

Choppy scrolling adds to the feeling of walking through swamp.

I do not notice any difference between my 120Hz work MacBook Pro and my 60Hz home MacBook Air. I might notice if I did a side-by-side comparison and looked closely. But why would I?

60hz gives me a headache after a few hours, been like that since I was a kid.

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