The Importance of Refresh Rate and Response Time in Gaming Monitors

As humans, we take our visual experiences for granted. We don't always appreciate how amazing it is that we can look at something and see it clearly, without any distortion. However, this is precisely what makes technology like the human eye so incredible. In fact, the human eye is a very intricate piece of technology that does an amazing job of processing visual information. So, why is it that certain people hear certain tones more effectively than others? The answer lies in the way our brains process sensory information.

When it comes to audio and vision, there's one crucial difference: subjectivity. What we perceive as "good" or "bad" sound quality can vary greatly from person to person, just like how different people see colors differently due to their unique visual processing abilities. This means that even if someone with excellent hearing skills is exposed to a specific tone, they might not respond in the same way another person does. Similarly, when it comes to vision, there's also a subjective aspect to consider. A 60 FPS panel and a 144 FPS panel may look identical at first glance, but trust me, you won't see that unless you have an excellent eye for detail.

Let's talk about how we can use technology to visualize these differences. I'm going to show you what 60 FPS looks like on a high-speed camera (240 FPS). This is the same footage displayed on a standard monitor with a refresh rate of 60 FPS. Now, let's switch to a panel with an even higher refresh rate (144 FPS) and compare it to one with a slow response time. The difference is unmistakable – there's a noticeable speed difference between these two panels.

When we look at the impact of response time on our visual experience, it becomes clear why some gamers are so particular about this feature. A 1 millisecond response time might sound like an impressive feat of engineering, but the reality is that most "1 millisecond" gaming panels are actually closer to three or four milliseconds. This difference can be significant when you're trying to play fast-paced games like Battlefield 1 or Counter-Strike: GO.

Now that we've talked about the technical aspects of refresh rate and response time, let's get back to our visual experience. Motion blur is a natural phenomenon that affects everyone, but it can be particularly distracting in gaming environments where fast movement is common. When you watch TV or go to the movies, your image just blurs as you move around – this is motion blur in action. However, when we introduce hardware-level motion blur into the mix, like with slow response times, it becomes a serious problem.

The takeaway from all of this is that, when it comes to buying a gaming monitor, refresh rate and response time should be your top priorities. A 60 FPS panel may seem appealing at first glance, but if its response time is subpar, it can lead to motion blur and a frustrating gaming experience. On the other hand, a higher refresh rate paired with a fast response time can elevate your gaming experience to new heights.

Unfortunately, there are other aspects of gaming monitors that can impact their performance, such as panel type (IPS vs TN) or viewing angles. While these factors are important, they pale in comparison to the refresh rate and response time. The moral of the story is simple: get a monitor with a high enough refresh rate and response time to complement your system's capabilities.

Panel Overclocking – A Topic for Advanced Gamers

Before I wrap up this article, I want to address panel overclocking, which has become increasingly popular among advanced gamers. However, this topic was requested by viewers in my inbox, so I'll provide a brief overview of what it entails. Panel overclocking involves pushing the limits of a monitor's performance beyond its rated specifications. This can be done through various methods, including adjusting settings or using specialized software.

While I haven't spent extensive time exploring panel overclocking myself, I know that some enthusiasts enjoy tweaking their monitors to get the most out of them. However, this topic is complex and requires a good understanding of display technology. As someone who's not an expert in this area, I'll leave it for those more knowledgeable individuals.

Community Engagement – Share Your Thoughts

This concludes my exploration of refresh rate and response time in gaming monitors. If you have any questions or topics you'd like me to cover in future videos, please don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me on Twitter, Facebook, or by sending an email to my inbox. My goal is to create content that helps the community become smarter about technology, so feel free to share your thoughts and suggestions.

As always, I want to thank you for watching this video. Don't be a jerk to each other, and let's work together to un-jerky the world. And remember, there are still plenty of jerks out there – it's okay.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enif you have a fast computer like Skunk Works it is possible to bottleneck this whole computer the entire thing most people get caught up on graphics cards being bottlenecked by the CPU but they never stop to think they can bottleneck their entire computer by hooking up to a panel that sucks I don't think these panels actually suck I'm just pointing to the panel visual aid expensive visual aid but one nonetheless water cooling parts for Skunk Works were provided by performance PCS for the largest online selection of PC modding and water cooling parts s head to Performance pcs.com there's a lot of information to cover here today and I don't want to bore you with some information that I think is irrelevant to the high Lev understanding of how monitors work but I'm going to do the best I can the problem is I've really started nerding out over panels over the last couple of years and I get very passionate and into this and I can talk about things that are just not important like I'm kind of doing right now today I'm talking to the gamer there are panels out there designed specifically for Content creators and professionals with IPS panels and srgb gamut stuff like that but that's not the point of today's video I'm talking to the guy who's built himself his first gaming computer and he's like well crap there's other things I need like a monitor and keyboard and all that stuff but I don't know which monitor to get this is way more confusing than building out the parts for my computer cuz how do I know that this panel I'm getting isn't going to suck hopefully by the end of today's video you'll you be able to tell which ones are going to be good and which ones are not going to be good just by reading some of the basic specs now there's two major specs we're going to talk about today and one of them gets kind of confusing cuz it has several names that ass are associ for the same thing the first one being refresh rate refresh rate that is the number of times the panel can draw an image per second and keep it stitched together now a panel can actually draw more FPS than what's actually rated but what happens is you take that image and you divide it more than America currently is and you get what's called screen tearing that's where the image cannot be refreshed fast enough and since the image is drawn in layers it's drawn in layers like that ladies what happens is the image goes it gets all messed up and it doesn't stay in sync anymore which lead which has led to the development of the technology called vsync if you ever wondered that stands for vertical sync it means make sure all those images are aligned down the vertical so that they don't do that so you can actually spend send more FPS to your panel but you get a very unpleasant gaming experience depending on how far beyond that refresh rate is so taking something like skunk work here with two tight X pascals on water and putting on a 60fps panel and turning off vsync would be a virtually unplayable gaming experience now the reason why I say that figure can sometimes get confusing to people who are not used to looking up this kind of stuff or for the first time are starting to research panels and what all this means is you'll hear it referred to as several things refresh rate you will hear it referred to as the Herz rate and you will hear it referred to as the frames per second it just basically says the number of times per second that a image can be drawn on the screen so if it's a 60 HZ panel it means it can draw the image 60 times per second without tearing apart now never since the introduction of TN panels you pretty much have seen 60fps panels be what is the minimum standard for gamers these days 30 FPS doesn't cut it for most PC Gamers and you know that so you want to strive for a panel that's at least 60 FPS now the other number that plays into this is called response time okay so you've got you've got your frames per second that can be drawn and you've got your response time what does that mean well refresh rate as I said is the number of times the image can actually be drawn by the processing board inside the panel to display the image over and over and over and over and over again as the image is changing when you're doing games or moving even just moving your mouse that Mouse has to be drawn wherever it's being told to go but response time refers to the actual pixels in the display and how long it takes that pixel to go from off to on or white and off again it's actually referred to gray to gray or G2G that's the number you'll tend to see in the spec chart now the lower that number the better because what that means is that light is turning on and off super fast a quick analogy can give you here that you might understand is the difference of an LED flashlight versus one with a standard filament or a h hallogen flashlight where you turn on the LED flashlight and it's instantaneous it is instantaneous light there is no heating of the filament where it takes time to turn on and kind of like pop in there sort of like just fade in and when you turn it off the filament cools so it fades out think of like a blinker on a car when it's like blink blink blink blink but then there's newer cars with LEDs and it's just blink blink blink blink blink blink yeah yeah someone meme that do me a favor meme it go so the same can be said for the pixel technology inside of your panel where the faster it turns on and off the less motion blur you're going to get of the panel there is natural motion blur that happens on panels and that's referred to as response time now the slower the response time or the higher that number is the more fading there is between the movement of the panel and the redrawn of images because it's taking the lights time to turn on and off and change color and for the pixel gates to do their thing so we're going to go back to the Hertz rating here for a second 60 FPS versus 144 the most common argument you're going to hear a million times regardless of where you go the forums or steam or the internet or YouTube is the argument of the human eye can only see blah blah blah FPS now why do I say blah blah blah FPS it's because there's no standard number that anyone's able to actually been able to confirm the human eye can see now that just triggered someone cuz I'm sure someone out there is like no so and so said that the human eyee can only see K blah blah blah and he's an optometrist or whatever it doesn't matter because this is one of those subjective things just like audio certain people hear certain tones and they may be respons responsive and reactive to certain tones than others the same can be said for the human eye it's a very intrical piece of technology in your face that does amazing things that I think as humans we still don't fully understand take a 60 FPS panel and take a 144 FPS panel put them next to each other displaying the same thing and tell me you don't see a difference and I'll call you crazy okay so fair warning this next section here if you have epilep epilepsy is that I believe it's called epilepsy where flashing lights can trigger a epileptic seizure you might want to turn away because what I'm going to show right now is probably going to look like a flickering image and I really don't want to cause you any undue stress so with that warning out of the way here is what 60 FPS looks like on a high-speed camera we're talking 240 FPS on the camera which is much higher than the refresh rate of the panel but this is what 60fps looks like now if we switch this over to 144 FPS this is what it looks like so there is a draw difference and a very noticeable speed difference of the panel so now that we' got that visual laid out of the way here is what 60fps looks like on a quote unquote 1 millisecond response time the reason why I say quote unquote is because most people who measure gaming monitors with the actual true calibration tools and measurement tools to see the true response times I found that a lot of times 1 millisecond gaming panels are really more like three or four not a true 1 millisecond so that's why I say quote unquote but anyway here is what 60fps looks like on a 60 FPS panel with a 1 millisecond response time as you can see there's not a lot of fading of the pixel but what happens when you take a 60fps panel and couple it with a slow response time or a light that takes a while to turn on and turn off well you get what you see right here which is quite a bit of motion blur motion blur is very cinematic motion blur is all around us turn your head right now I guarantee your image just blurred every time you watch TV the image is blurring you go to the movies the image is blurring but it's natural unfortunately when you have motion blur introduced in terms of Hardware level like this it is very distracting and in some games that require fast movement the faster you move that Mouse the more the pixels are going to blur unfortunately it makes some games like Battlefield 1 or twitch Shooters Counter-Strike GO completely unplayable so that's what 60 FPS on a a slow response time looks like but those two numbers are really the only thing that Gamers should concern thems with when it comes to buying a panel sure there's other things like IPS versus TN off viewing angles there's curved monitors 21 by9 Ultra wide like you see here with the x34 Predator behind me 16x9 24 in 34 in those things are all secondary to the two specs I just told you about which are going to have the biggest impact on your gaming experience so there you go guys that's how you can un bottleneck your computer by coupling it with a terrible monitor that would not be complimenting your system so moral of the story here get a panel that has a refresh rate that's at least 60 but hopefully higher than the one that uh or higher than the FPS that your system is able to send to it now there's other things you talk about like panel overclocking and whatnot I don't want to talk about that today I haven't spent a lot of time doing panel overclocking I'll be honest i' I know how it's done but I don't I don't do it so that's not something I'm going to talk about today anyway this is another one of those topics that came strictly strictly that came strictly from my inbox I'm asked all the time about this topic I finally made this video and uh I want to do some more like this so let me know what you guys want me to do hit me up Twitter my inbox Facebook all that sort of stuff and as always guys share this video with someone you think it'll help we make the community smart as a whole as always guys stay together be nice to each other don't uh don't be jerks to each other so many jerks in the world we don't need that we don't need that anymore let's un jerky the world but I'm people still call me a dick hole that's okay though it's all right all right guys see you in the next oneif you have a fast computer like Skunk Works it is possible to bottleneck this whole computer the entire thing most people get caught up on graphics cards being bottlenecked by the CPU but they never stop to think they can bottleneck their entire computer by hooking up to a panel that sucks I don't think these panels actually suck I'm just pointing to the panel visual aid expensive visual aid but one nonetheless water cooling parts for Skunk Works were provided by performance PCS for the largest online selection of PC modding and water cooling parts s head to Performance pcs.com there's a lot of information to cover here today and I don't want to bore you with some information that I think is irrelevant to the high Lev understanding of how monitors work but I'm going to do the best I can the problem is I've really started nerding out over panels over the last couple of years and I get very passionate and into this and I can talk about things that are just not important like I'm kind of doing right now today I'm talking to the gamer there are panels out there designed specifically for Content creators and professionals with IPS panels and srgb gamut stuff like that but that's not the point of today's video I'm talking to the guy who's built himself his first gaming computer and he's like well crap there's other things I need like a monitor and keyboard and all that stuff but I don't know which monitor to get this is way more confusing than building out the parts for my computer cuz how do I know that this panel I'm getting isn't going to suck hopefully by the end of today's video you'll you be able to tell which ones are going to be good and which ones are not going to be good just by reading some of the basic specs now there's two major specs we're going to talk about today and one of them gets kind of confusing cuz it has several names that ass are associ for the same thing the first one being refresh rate refresh rate that is the number of times the panel can draw an image per second and keep it stitched together now a panel can actually draw more FPS than what's actually rated but what happens is you take that image and you divide it more than America currently is and you get what's called screen tearing that's where the image cannot be refreshed fast enough and since the image is drawn in layers it's drawn in layers like that ladies what happens is the image goes it gets all messed up and it doesn't stay in sync anymore which lead which has led to the development of the technology called vsync if you ever wondered that stands for vertical sync it means make sure all those images are aligned down the vertical so that they don't do that so you can actually spend send more FPS to your panel but you get a very unpleasant gaming experience depending on how far beyond that refresh rate is so taking something like skunk work here with two tight X pascals on water and putting on a 60fps panel and turning off vsync would be a virtually unplayable gaming experience now the reason why I say that figure can sometimes get confusing to people who are not used to looking up this kind of stuff or for the first time are starting to research panels and what all this means is you'll hear it referred to as several things refresh rate you will hear it referred to as the Herz rate and you will hear it referred to as the frames per second it just basically says the number of times per second that a image can be drawn on the screen so if it's a 60 HZ panel it means it can draw the image 60 times per second without tearing apart now never since the introduction of TN panels you pretty much have seen 60fps panels be what is the minimum standard for gamers these days 30 FPS doesn't cut it for most PC Gamers and you know that so you want to strive for a panel that's at least 60 FPS now the other number that plays into this is called response time okay so you've got you've got your frames per second that can be drawn and you've got your response time what does that mean well refresh rate as I said is the number of times the image can actually be drawn by the processing board inside the panel to display the image over and over and over and over and over again as the image is changing when you're doing games or moving even just moving your mouse that Mouse has to be drawn wherever it's being told to go but response time refers to the actual pixels in the display and how long it takes that pixel to go from off to on or white and off again it's actually referred to gray to gray or G2G that's the number you'll tend to see in the spec chart now the lower that number the better because what that means is that light is turning on and off super fast a quick analogy can give you here that you might understand is the difference of an LED flashlight versus one with a standard filament or a h hallogen flashlight where you turn on the LED flashlight and it's instantaneous it is instantaneous light there is no heating of the filament where it takes time to turn on and kind of like pop in there sort of like just fade in and when you turn it off the filament cools so it fades out think of like a blinker on a car when it's like blink blink blink blink but then there's newer cars with LEDs and it's just blink blink blink blink blink blink yeah yeah someone meme that do me a favor meme it go so the same can be said for the pixel technology inside of your panel where the faster it turns on and off the less motion blur you're going to get of the panel there is natural motion blur that happens on panels and that's referred to as response time now the slower the response time or the higher that number is the more fading there is between the movement of the panel and the redrawn of images because it's taking the lights time to turn on and off and change color and for the pixel gates to do their thing so we're going to go back to the Hertz rating here for a second 60 FPS versus 144 the most common argument you're going to hear a million times regardless of where you go the forums or steam or the internet or YouTube is the argument of the human eye can only see blah blah blah FPS now why do I say blah blah blah FPS it's because there's no standard number that anyone's able to actually been able to confirm the human eye can see now that just triggered someone cuz I'm sure someone out there is like no so and so said that the human eyee can only see K blah blah blah and he's an optometrist or whatever it doesn't matter because this is one of those subjective things just like audio certain people hear certain tones and they may be respons responsive and reactive to certain tones than others the same can be said for the human eye it's a very intrical piece of technology in your face that does amazing things that I think as humans we still don't fully understand take a 60 FPS panel and take a 144 FPS panel put them next to each other displaying the same thing and tell me you don't see a difference and I'll call you crazy okay so fair warning this next section here if you have epilep epilepsy is that I believe it's called epilepsy where flashing lights can trigger a epileptic seizure you might want to turn away because what I'm going to show right now is probably going to look like a flickering image and I really don't want to cause you any undue stress so with that warning out of the way here is what 60 FPS looks like on a high-speed camera we're talking 240 FPS on the camera which is much higher than the refresh rate of the panel but this is what 60fps looks like now if we switch this over to 144 FPS this is what it looks like so there is a draw difference and a very noticeable speed difference of the panel so now that we' got that visual laid out of the way here is what 60fps looks like on a quote unquote 1 millisecond response time the reason why I say quote unquote is because most people who measure gaming monitors with the actual true calibration tools and measurement tools to see the true response times I found that a lot of times 1 millisecond gaming panels are really more like three or four not a true 1 millisecond so that's why I say quote unquote but anyway here is what 60fps looks like on a 60 FPS panel with a 1 millisecond response time as you can see there's not a lot of fading of the pixel but what happens when you take a 60fps panel and couple it with a slow response time or a light that takes a while to turn on and turn off well you get what you see right here which is quite a bit of motion blur motion blur is very cinematic motion blur is all around us turn your head right now I guarantee your image just blurred every time you watch TV the image is blurring you go to the movies the image is blurring but it's natural unfortunately when you have motion blur introduced in terms of Hardware level like this it is very distracting and in some games that require fast movement the faster you move that Mouse the more the pixels are going to blur unfortunately it makes some games like Battlefield 1 or twitch Shooters Counter-Strike GO completely unplayable so that's what 60 FPS on a a slow response time looks like but those two numbers are really the only thing that Gamers should concern thems with when it comes to buying a panel sure there's other things like IPS versus TN off viewing angles there's curved monitors 21 by9 Ultra wide like you see here with the x34 Predator behind me 16x9 24 in 34 in those things are all secondary to the two specs I just told you about which are going to have the biggest impact on your gaming experience so there you go guys that's how you can un bottleneck your computer by coupling it with a terrible monitor that would not be complimenting your system so moral of the story here get a panel that has a refresh rate that's at least 60 but hopefully higher than the one that uh or higher than the FPS that your system is able to send to it now there's other things you talk about like panel overclocking and whatnot I don't want to talk about that today I haven't spent a lot of time doing panel overclocking I'll be honest i' I know how it's done but I don't I don't do it so that's not something I'm going to talk about today anyway this is another one of those topics that came strictly strictly that came strictly from my inbox I'm asked all the time about this topic I finally made this video and uh I want to do some more like this so let me know what you guys want me to do hit me up Twitter my inbox Facebook all that sort of stuff and as always guys share this video with someone you think it'll help we make the community smart as a whole as always guys stay together be nice to each other don't uh don't be jerks to each other so many jerks in the world we don't need that we don't need that anymore let's un jerky the world but I'm people still call me a dick hole that's okay though it's all right all right guys see you in the next one\n"