Why buy a 500Hz+ Gaming Monitor?

This monitor, if you ask it nicely, will assault your eyeballs with 610 frames per second. Six hundred and ten. Why the absolute hell would you pay £1 per FPS for this thing when you can get a higher resolution, better looking and more feature-rich display for half that? Well I have some thoughts on that, so I hope you’ll join me in working out why you shouldn’t, and why you just might want to anyway. 

To me, it feels pretty evident that you don’t need this. This is pointless excess. If you’ve been gaming for more than five minutes, you’ll have experienced the amazing jump from a 60Hz display to something with a high refresh rate – 144Hz, 165Hz, maybe even 240Hz! That difference is night and day. It’s plainly visible that a high refresh rate display is orders of magnitude smoother and motion is clearer than a 60Hz panel. For gaming especially that is an absolute game changer. But, the difference between 144Hz and even 240Hz is already almost negligible – I’ve tested this a couple times now and with a blind test I struggle to tell which is which – so the difference between 240Hz and 610Hz? There’s nothing to see really. See, while 610Hz is between double and triple the frames you get at 240Hz, the frame time difference is actually smaller and smaller. See at 60Hz you get a new frame every 16.67 milliseconds – that’s an eternity in computing terms – whereas 144Hz is just 6.9 milliseconds. That is a significant and easily noticeable drop. 240Hz is 4.16 milliseconds, and 610Hz is just 1.6 milliseconds. See the difference? 60Hz to 144Hz is almost 10 milliseconds, but 240Hz to 610Hz is just 2.5 milliseconds. That is diminishing returns.

There is of course also the price – this AOC AG246FK6 is actually the cheapest 610Hz display you can get at £600, down from a grand from Asus’ one – which is significantly higher than even a 1440p high refresh rate panel. Hell, that’s more than my current favourite display, the AG276QZD2 which is just £450 and is a 1440p 240Hz QD-OLED! You’d be paying £150 more for less sharpness, slower response times, much, much worse viewing angles, and worse colours too. That sure sounds like a bad deal! Oh and then there’s the cost of the system that can keep up with this thing. I don’t know if you’ve ever monitored your FPS in games – even esports games – but I can tell you it’s actually really difficult to get games to run at that sort of framerate. Like, you need the highest end CPU and GPU, AND the absolute optimal settings to even get close. Rainbow Six Siege as an example, a high performance esports game, generally runs at 300 to 400 FPS with my test machine on medium settings, with an RX 6900 XT and 14600K. That’s no slouch of a system, and it isn’t exactly cheap either. You’re 60 class GPU and i5/Ryzen 5 isn’t gonna cut it here, so more expense there.

The other thing to consider, especially with these TN panel ones, is that TN panels are pretty awful to look at. If you are perfectly square to the panel – straight on – it’s fine, but at any other angle you get a pretty naff viewing experience. You get washed out or even inverted colours, and in general the colours here aren’t as nice as an IPS or OLED. Content consumption on this thing, or even a more chill gaming experience, just isn’t as nice as basically any other monitor. These things are laser-focused on being the ultimate esports displays, at the cost of general usability. That means these things are for a very small subset of gamers – I mean genuinely unless you are already an esports pro I can’t see why you’d get this over a much more usable 240Hz monitor instead. 

If you are an esports pro though, man this is incredible. There are actually a number of advantages, with the first being latency. With the frame time being just 1.6 milliseconds, you are only ever waiting that long for a new frame – although the average is half that. While it isn’t a massive difference – see the earlier point about diminishing returns – over a millisecond faster is a benefit, and it’s a consistent benefit. If you’re facing off against someone with a 240Hz display, you will consistently get an extra millisecond or two to react, which at the truly pro level can make all the difference. We strive for lower and lower latency for things like mice and keyboards, so why not displays? I mean this is pro athlete stuff, right?

The other major advantage is motion clarity. While it’s difficult for a layman to pick out of a lineup, the motion is undeniably smoother on these displays. There’s just something I can’t quite describe here, but man does it feel smooth and responsive. The joy of smoother motion is that it actually makes aiming easier. Much like a higher polling rate mouse, the smoother the motion you experience, the easier it is to aim. Since we’re talking about sample-and-hold displays, as in they display a rapid progression of still frames (rather than CRTs which draw line-by-line and only a small section is actually lit at any one time), the less time between the new frames, the smoother your eyes perceive it to be, and the easier it is to know where enemies are to aim at. 

Realistically we’re talking about pretty miniscule differences here, especially with the existing crop of high refresh rate displays, but since these are truly aimed at professional esports gamers, is it all that surprising that they’d be willing to pay a premium for even the slightest advantage? I mean we don’t complain about F1 teams paying millions for a couple millisecond advantage over the other teams – in fact we often applaud it – so why does this seem almost ridiculous? I mean there’s probably a discussion to be had around the sincerity of esports as a talent and skill based career, but that’s a topic for another channel. Suffice it to say these DO have a competitive advantage.

As for my thoughts specifically, unless you’re already an actual pro, or at best the team manager for a school team or something, I can’t recommend you buy these sorts of displays. The general usability is 2010’s levels of meh, and with such an amazing crop of displays on the market already – as I mentioned earlier you can get a stunning 240Hz QD-OLED for £150 less than this thing – I’d highly recommend a whole bunch of other options for the average gamer. If you are a pro, I actually think you’d prefer the OLED 500Hz versions anyway, like the AG276QKD2 which was just delivered this morning and I’ll have a review on in the next couple weeks. Make sure you’re subscribed for that. The fact that is an OLED panel means you get instant response times, and even more motion clarity, plus no viewing angle and colour tradeoffs. Sounds like profit to me!