Why we need 1000 Hz Gaming Monitors…
We need 1000 Hz monitors. Ok need is a strong word, what I mean is, you should want a 1000 Hz monitor – at least for gaming anyway. Now you are probably quite rightfully confused, I mean Asus has a 500 Hz monitor, is that not good enough? Games don’t run at more than like 300 FPS with titles like CSGO… So why should you want a 1000 Hz monitor? Let me explain.
When most people think about high refresh rate displays, for the last decade or so the general discussion has been in moving from 60 Hz to 144 Hz. We’ve talked a bit about going from 144 Hz to 240 Hz, but as even I have said, you really can’t see a difference between 144 Hz and 240 Hz. It’s hard to feel much of a difference at all, so for most people it’s not worth spending the money on and has been generally relegated to “esports pros” and the aspiring pros. It’s for pro players who want every last advantage they can get their hands on, regardless of the cost.
But there are actually advantages, and while it’s still true that the average gamer doesn’t NEED an ultra-high refresh rate monitor, that doesn’t mean it isn’t better. The easier of the two benefits to explain is the latency advantage. Forgetting the end to end latency involved in gaming, like how long it takes your mouse to register your click, how long it takes your PC to then draw a frame with that action in it, and how long it takes the monitor to process that digital data and turn it into analogue voltages to make the liquid crystals in your LCD panel change colours, the frame time is a pretty big deal on it’s own. At 60 Hz, you see a new frame every 16.7ms, which means if say an enemy pops out from behind cover, it takes 16.7ms for your monitor to be ready to show you a new frame with the enemy in it. If your enemy happened to be gaming on a 1000 Hz display, running at 1000 FPS, they’d be able to see you for 15.7ms before you even started to see them. It’d then take another 16.7ms before you can start moving your mouse to aim at them, whereas they can start targeting you instantly. At 240 Hz that delay drops to just 4.2ms which is already the vast majority of the way to 1ms, but the smaller that time is, the lower latency you’ll get, and the better an experience you’ll have.
The harder to explain benefit that comes from, say, a 1000 Hz display is a quirk of how our eyes perceive motion, and how modern LCD and even OLED panels draw frames. Old CRTs were actually better in a lot of ways, with one of the biggest advantages being how little light is actually being emitted at any one time. CRT displays draw frames line by line and scan across those lines so only a tiny trail of the image is actually being shown at any given moment. The majority of the display is actually black, and that means your brain is receiving new parts of the image constantly – which is a good thing.
Compare that to modern displays which are called “Sample and Hold” displays, where they draw the entire frame almost instantly, then hold it still until the next frame is ready to draw. This basically means instead of a steady stream of new information like a CRT, LCDs hold frames still, then show you a new one a few milliseconds later. The problem with this is how our brains perceive motion. If you take a picture of the UFO test with a really fast shutter speed, like this 1000 FPS footage, you’ll see that the UFOs get drawn almost instantly. But look at the same thing with your eyes and you’ll notice at 60 Hz it’ll look like this. A blurry, smeared mess. So what gives? In short, it’s a quirk of our monkey brains which means stuttery motion gets perceived as blurry. The less stuttery, the smoother and crisper it’ll look. If you have a high refresh rate display already – 144Hz or higher really – you can try this out yourself. Set your monitor to 60 Hz and load up testufo.com. Follow one UFO with your eyes and notice how blurry it looks. Now set it back to the highest refresh rate it’ll do and look again. See how much more crisp it looks?
Now you might have heard people like me talking about this before when talking about the “Moving picture response time”. That’s basically just how long the image is stationary for. On a 60 Hz display, the image would be static for 16.7ms. At 240 Hz it’s 4.2ms, and at 1000 Hz it’s 1ms. But why then do almost all monitor manufacturers claim a “1ms MPRT” time, with their decidedly not 1000 Hz monitors? Well, they cheat. Instead of actually drawing new frames every 1ms, they just turn the backlight off for all but 1ms, so they flash the image at you, then turn the panel off, and repeat. That does mean that the persistence of motion issues are reduced – with backlight strobing enabled you can expect a much more visually smooth and crisp image, at the cost of your eyes and not actually getting new information when the display is just… off. I can’t stand backlight strobing modes personally as I get headaches almost instantly looking at a strobing display, but technically it is there if you want to use it.
If I’m being honest though, the argument for 1000 Hz monitors seems pretty academic – that is to say pointless. At 500 Hz you see a new frame every 2ms, which while not perfect, is realistically plenty, even for esports pros. Sure, if we can get 1000 Hz monitors working and GPUs to drive that sort of framerate, that’s cool, but I can’t say I’m anxiously awaiting their arrival. There are benefits to faster refresh rates, namely latency and persistence of motion, but there are a whole load of technical challenges in the way we’ll have to overcome, and if I’m being honest the benefits aren’t exactly game changing.
