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What gamers have intuitively felt for years has finally received official, scientific confirmation. LG Display published a study at an international academic conference titled "Analysis of the Impact of Refresh Rate on First-Person Shooter (FPS) Game Performance". The findings of those tests are unequivocal. A higher refresh rate, in real and measurable terms, translates into better performance in games.
Blind test
31 adult players took part in the experiment. Their task was to test gameplay in a first-person shooter (FPS) on monitors with four different refresh rates: 60Hz, 240Hz, 360Hz and 480Hz. The whole experiment was conducted as a blind test. Participants did not know which settings they were using at any given time. The results were analysed rigorously, measuring, among other things, overall accuracy and reaction time from an enemy's appearance to their elimination.
Higher Hz = higher win rate
The collected data show that the technological leap has a dramatic effect on how we perform on the virtual battlefield:
A 38% increase: That's how much players' accuracy improved when using a 480Hz panel compared with the standard 60Hz.
An additional 10% at 480Hz: Most interestingly, although a huge performance jump was already observed when moving to 240Hz, raising the refresh rate to 480Hz delivered a further 10% accuracy advantage. This demonstrates that the benefits of extremely high refresh rates continue to grow as they are increased.
Where does sense end and marketing begin?
The results published by LG Display align perfectly with the findings from our tests. In theory, the benefits of blur reduction inherent to Sample-and-Hold displays increase indefinitely, but the human eye has perceptual limits and the curve of benefits eventually flattens out.
Moving from 60Hz to 120Hz+ is a significant and noticeable leap for every user. Above those values we enter the realm of diminishing returns. For example, the reduction in the duration of a single frame between 360Hz and 500Hz is only a 0.8 millisecond difference. For most people that will be merely cosmetic.
Based on our analyses, we know that, for the vast majority, even very demanding players, the threshold for full satisfaction with smoothness and sharpness ends at around 300 Hz. Of course, the key condition is having a sufficiently powerful PC. If the graphics card does not produce as many frames per second (FPS) as the monitor has hertz, you are paying extra for a specification you simply do not use. However, test data from LG Display show that hardcore esports players, professionals and people highly sensitive to motion can extract a real advantage from 480Hz panels. The perception limit in extreme conditions, such as very fast pans or texture details close to the face, can shift towards 600 Hz. Anything above that is increasingly a technical arms race between manufacturers, which seldom changes anything in real gameplay.
