What is 600Hz? — CNET
Geoffrey Morrison/CNET
If you read my «What is refresh rate?» post, you’ll know that plasma TV manufacturers (Panasonic, Samsung, and LG) make a point in claiming a «600Hz» refresh rate on their TVs. As we discussed in that article, it’s not exactly comparable to LCD’s 120 and 240Hz refresh.
So what is 600Hz, and how does it work?
By its nature, this is a pretty complex subject, so bear with me, and forgive some over-simplifications.
Before we get to 600Hz, we have to discuss how plasma TVs create an image in the first place. Like all modern TVs, they have more than 2 million individual pixels: 1,920 x 1,080 = 2,073,600. (Some lower-priced models are 1,024×768, so they have 786,432 pixels).
Each of these pixels has three subpixels, one each for the primary colors of red, green, and blue. If you were to stick your face right up to the screen, the pixels would look something like this:
A closeup of the pixels from a modern HDTV. Each red, green, and blue subpixel is collectively referred to as a single pixel.
Geoffrey Morrison/CNET
There are a few variations, like certain Samsung plasmas having a PenTile layout, but the basic functionality works the same. For simplicity, we’ll just talk about traditional RGB subpixels.
If all three subpixels are lit, and your face isn’t right against the screen, the pixel will appear white. If just the red and blue subpixels are lit, you’ll get magenta. Just red and green, and you’ll get yellow. Mix and match these and you’ll get more colors than the paint aisle at Home Depot (well, maybe, but we’ll get to that).
It’s the mixing and matching that is actually the tricky part.
Each subpixel is actually a little bucket of air, a noble gas to be specific. If you send a jolt of electricity though this gas, it and the electronics within the bucket emit UV light. This UV light, all excited from its recent magical conjuring (note: it’s not magic), wants to get everything else in on the action.
In the case of the subpixel, the only «else» that’s there is a lining with a colored phosphor. When excited by the UV light, this phosphor emits its own light, either red, green, or blue, depending on the subpixel.
Got that? In short, each subpixel creates light by energizing a phosphor, which glows a single specific color.
Not only does it glow a specific color, though, it glows one specific brightness. Each subpixel has only two states: on or off. Like a light switch.
As you can imagine, this makes creating a normal-looking image rather tricky. After all, how do you get gray when all you can create is black or white? Or to be specific, how do you create «purple» when all you can create is blue, magenta, red, or black? The trick is called «pulse-width modulation,» which is a fancy way of saying, you turn it on and off a lot, and really fast.
Say you flip a light switch 10 times in a minute (kids, don’t try this at home). Evenly spaced, the light will be on for 6 seconds, then off for 6 seconds.
For the whole minute, it’s on for a total of 30 seconds, and off for 30 seconds, right? Something like this:
Cycle a light switch 10 times in a minute, and it will be on half the time and off half the time. If you want to make the room brighter, you can leave the switch on for additional cycles, instead of turning it off.
Geoffrey Morrison/CNET
On average, the total amount of light in the room is 50 percent of what’s possible. You have a maximum (light on) and a minimum (light off) each half the time. If you increase how often you switch the light, so fast that you no longer see the light turn on and off, instead of a flashing light bulb, the room will just appear dimly lit.
This is, in essence, how a plasma works. As a plasma TV engineer once told me (and I mentioned in the refresh article), plasmas create light with time. To create different shades of gray, the pixel is on (or off) for more often.
Because our TV system is 60Hz (or in some places, 50Hz), and each one of those cycles has to be a complete image — for example 60 images per second (or 50) — a plasma has to switch the subpixels on and off very rapidly. For many years, plasmas had eight of these potential on/off cycles for every frame of the image. You could call these, to steal the modern parlance, 480Hz. Most plasmas now have 10.
While not completely accurate, you can sort of think of it as the TV creates 10 dark images that your brain combines into one, full-brightness, image, 60 times a second. Something like this:
While a little over-simplistic, you can think of a plasma as creating 10 «dark» images that your brain combines into a single, correct brightness, frame.
Geoffrey Morrison
Bottom line
As we discussed in «What is refresh rate?,» LCDs use a higher-than-normal refresh rate to combat motion blur.
Plasmas, by how they work, don’t have an issue with motion blur. The 600Hz claim by all the current plasma TV manufacturers has to do with how the TVs create an image, but is not 600 images per second.
So yes, 600Hz is a marketing term. However, because plasmas don’t require faster refresh rates to produce a clear, sharp image, and this is technically how they work, it’s fair to give Panasonic, LG, and Samsung a pass…for this one.
Got a question for Geoff? Send him an e-mail! If it’s witty, amusing, and/or a good question, you may just see it in a post just like this one. No, he won’t tell you which TV to buy. Yes, he’ll probably truncate and/or clean up your e-mail. You can also send him a message on Twitter: @TechWriterGeoff.
Why super high refresh rates are still important
High refresh rate gaming has been the focus of much of the display industry in recent years, from 4K 120Hz TVs becoming the norm, to companies pushing even to 500Hz to really stretch the limits of what high refresh rate actually means.
Contents
- Diminishing returns for refresh rate
- We need more OLED
But what’s the point in all of those added refreshes, if in general gamers can’t tell much difference between 120Hz and 240Hz, let alone up to 600Hz, which panel makers say is now coming in 2023? What’s the point of these ridiculous refresh rates?
The same as always: It can make you a better gamer — albeit slightly.
Diminishing returns for refresh rate
The traditional wisdom for a high refresh rate display of any kind is that it improves your gaming experience through more fluid animations. It also reduces screen tearing (without the need for frame-synching technologies like G-Sync and FreeSync). The big reason typically touted for these kinds of monitors, though, is that they improve your competitive gaming ability. Although they have some effect on their own, combining a high refresh rate with a high frame rate contributes to a reduction in input lag, making you several, or even 10s of milliseconds faster than your opponents on lower refresh rate displays.
There are diminishing returns, however. A 60Hz display will have a minimum input lag of just under 17ms, but a 120Hz display cuts that in half to around 8 milliseconds. A 240Hz gaming monitor slashes it again to 4.16ms, so 360Hz, 500Hz, and even 600Hz are only really shaving a millisecond or two off of your minimum input lag — other factors notwithstanding. That might matter in a high-stakes game between some of the world’s best players, but even then it’s not going to make a huge difference.
Higher refresh rates bring measurably improved accuracy, even if gamers can’t notice the difference visually.
But that very measurable metric isn’t the only thing that higher refresh rate displays help with. Greater refresh rates also give you more up-to-date information than your opponent. That provides both a measurable few-milliseconds advantage that compounds your improved input lag, but it also makes you more accurate. If your display refreshes that bit faster than your opponents’, showing you where they are in a more granular fashion.
That gives you a better chance of firing at where they are right then and there, rather than where the display is telling you they were a few milliseconds ago.
That has a local effect too. The smoothing of animations through more frequent refreshes might be great for added immersion, but it’s also super important for accurate mouse movements. As LTT and other testers have shown, gamers can have a measurable improvement in their accuracy from higher refresh rate displays, even if they don’t notice it themselves. While that effect will likely diminish as we reach higher refresh rates, the fact that the extra, more accurate, more recent visual information can affect your play without you even knowing it, suggests that there’s still some gold to be mined in ultra-high refresh rates.
Age-old gaming wisdom suggests that if you can, having a frame rate that’s double that of your refresh rate is the ideal scenario. It ensures that there’s a frame ready to serve on your display as soon as it’s ready to refresh, and that gives you a big buffer zone so that even in busier parts of a map, or when something visually spectacular happens on screen, your frame rate remains above refresh rate.
This also means you don’t need to use frame synching technologies (which would negate your super-high-fps advantage) like FreeSync and G-Sync, as screen tearing at such high frame rates would be almost unnoticeable.
Dan Baker/Digital Trends
This is a generalization that won’t apply to every game — some work best at specific frame rates — but just because refresh rates are getting higher, shouldn’t mean we stop chasing higher frame rates too.
That might seem like a lofty goal with a 600Hz monitor but think again. Slap together a top gaming PC with an RTX 3090, or even a new-gen 4090, and you’ll easily see 700-800+ frames per second (fps) in games like CS: GO, or Rainbow Six: Siege — high paced games that have often been the vanguard of this kind of high-Hz gaming. You don’t even need to sacrifice resolution. The Tech Chaps made an RTX 4090 gaming PC and managed over 500 fps in Overwatch 2 at 8K!
That might not quite be the 1,200 fps you’d need to truly double the refresh rate of that almost-unbelievably laptop refresh rate, but it’s not far off.
With next-generation hardware in 2023, 1,000 + fps might become the norm in top-tier machines playing some of the older esports that scale well with higher-performing hardware.
We need more OLED
None of this is to evangelize the newly announced 600Hz gaming laptop from BoE. It’s probably redundant because most gaming laptop displays, even if high refresh rate, have a relatively high response time too. That results in ghosting, effectively eliminating the advantage of such a high refresh rate display. But breaking the back of that 500Hz barrier means it will be done again, and potentially on larger, more-capable desktop displays. Maybe even from some of the more established display manufacturers who won’t make the same image quality sacrifices to get there.
What we really need is OLED technology to reach these kinds of heady refresh rates. The pixel response time of OLED is so much faster than that of LCD, just gaming on OLED alone can improve your input lag more than switching to some higher refresh rate displays.
If we combined the two? Who knows how good it could get.
We have an early idea, though, with the Alienware AW3423DW giving us a 175Hz QD-OLED design and many reviewers have noted it feels like a far higher refresh rate display because of how responsive it is. Corsair is promising to hit 240Hz on an OLED with its Xeneon Flex, but we’ll have to see how that turns out.
1440p monitors up to 900Hz? Yup, it’s possible.
It should be said that with any of these absolutely cutting-edge, flagship gaming displays, the actual measurable impact for most gamers over much more affordable, reasonable designs is minimal. Their price tags alone should make it clear that these are not designed for mass adoption.
But for those who can afford them? They’re going to be worth considering. If you can legitimately say you might have a shot at becoming a professional gamer, every advantage helps. It won’t make you better, but making it so that your brain doesn’t have to account for additional input lag, letting it accurately lead an enemy before firing without having to anticipate where they might be between frames, is a real advantage, and will give you a better approximation of the LAN gaming you’ll do at competitions without the added latency of online gaming.
AMD’s new graphics cards have DisplayPort 2.1 tech too, enabling monitors at even 1440p to hit up to 900Hz, so this may not be the last we hear of record-breaking refresh rates. Watch this space.
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Smooth flight: what’s special about 90, 120, 144 and 240 Hz screens
Smartphones with a higher display frequency may be the new trend of 2020. However, they have already become a trend, because there are not so few such devices on the market. We can say that the trend has already begun.
And this fashion came from the segment of gaming monitors, where players definitely choose 144 Hz and do not want to return to the past. The question is, is it really worth buying a gadget with a high screen frequency today, or is it just another marketing ploy like megapixels or quantum dots? You will find answers to these questions in this material.
What is the refresh rate?
The information that the display displays is by no means static, as it might seem. On the contrary, it is in constant dynamics, the pixels receive information from the processor every second and are updated. Due to the fact that the update is very fast, it seems that the image is static. The number of such updates per second is called the sweep rate and is measured in Hertz.
For example, a picture on a display with a refresh rate of 60 Hz changes 60 times per second, 90 Hz means the image changes 90 times per second, and 120 Hz means 120 iterations over the same period of time.
That is, a modern smartphone type Samsung Galaxy S20 Plus 128 GB Price from 20,400 to 29,999 UAH. with a 120Hz screen refreshes the screen at a rate 4 times faster than older tube TVs.
First of all, such matrices are used in gaming monitors. In the second — in TV panels. Recently in smartphones and laptops.
60, 90 and 120 Hz on smartphones: pros and cons
Despite the fact that the trend is only gaining momentum, it has already been in The Simpsons. The Japanese company Sharp was ahead of its time in many ways and could become a trendsetter in the smartphone market if it had Apple marketers. It was these guys who, back in 2014, released the world’s first frameless smartphone Aquos Crystal. They also released the world’s first smartphone with a 120Hz display. We are talking about the Sharp Aquos Zeta Docomo smartphone, which quietly came out in 2015, did not attract attention and disappeared into oblivion.
Back then, many experts were twiddling their thumbs and asking why reinvent the wheel? As the OnePlus 8, Galaxy S 20 and a bunch of 2020 flagships have shown, it made sense. Smartphones that use screens with a refresh rate of 90Hz or 120Hz show any moving content more smoothly, animations look nicer, and fast objects stay fluid. Flipping through a newsfeed at 60Hz can be heartbreaking after using a 120Hz screen for a long time.
In mobile games, despite the increased fluidity, the difference is not so great. There are simply no such dynamic games on Google Play or the AppStore that require 120 Hz. And for watching videos, this is a useless feature. Big cinema has long come to the standard of 24 frames per second (consider 24 Hz), so a regular 60 Hz display is enough for us.
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Now about the cons. Actually there are two of them. The first is increased battery consumption. When an increased hertz is activated, a warning window appears in the smartphone menu for a reason. It was this factor that for a long time stopped many manufacturers from integrating such displays into their flagship devices. Now the batteries for the most part have increased to 4000 — 5000 mAh, so it seems like you can not save. But the difference is still noticeable. For example, the OnePlus 7 Pro with Full HD + 60Hz display settings lasted about 700 hours of web surfing. With Full HD + 9 settings0 Hz battery life dropped by almost a third, to 500 hours. Therefore, using a similar display in a conditional Google Pixel 4 with a 2800 mAh battery is shooting yourself in the foot.
Smartphones with a high refresh rate
The second point: the higher the frequency of the screen, the more load falls on the processor. If we are talking about a modern solution like Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 or something similarly powerful, then there are no questions. The same situation with the powerful 2018 Apple iPad Pro, whose screen runs at a refresh rate of 120 Hz. But less productive solutions may suffer from an increase in frequency.
60, 75, 120 and 144 Hz in gaming monitors and laptops
E-sports is called so for a reason: as in any sport, success here depends not only on the skills of the player, but also on technical advantages. Transplant Schumacher from a sports Ferrari into a Reno car and Wikipedia would have entered the name of another champion. Reducing any delay between the transmission of a command to the computer and the result is one of the most effective and noticeable ways to improve the results in games.
That is why the market for esports mice and keyboards with instant response is actively developing. The monitor direction follows the same path.
144 Hz gaming monitors
The conventional refresh rate of a typical monitor is 60 Hz, so it is simply not technically capable of displaying more than 60 frames per second. This is where 144Hz monitors come into play. They are arranged in such a way that they can show up to 144 frames, «revitalizing» the picture even more. In terms of subjective gaming experience, the difference between a 60Hz monitor and a 144Hz monitor is huge. It is difficult to describe it in specific words, it must be seen: the image is much smoother, more natural and “alive”. The difference is so noticeable that it makes you look at your favorite games from a different angle. The already dynamic Doom Eternal is akin to an adrenaline shot in the heart: you rush through the corridors and shoot demons with such speed and vivacity that it takes your breath away.
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The point is that such pleasure costs money: in addition to the monitor itself, the processor and video card must be powerful enough to give out more than 60 FPS in games (note: the number of frames per second). Ideally, if the FPS in the game is approximately equal to the hertz of the monitor, this will reduce the number of frame breaks and artifacts in especially dynamic scenes. The same applies to laptops: matrices with a frequency of 144 Hz are simply not found in budget models.
Wait, how are Hz and FPS related?
Many people intentionally or accidentally confuse the screen refresh rate, which is measured in Hertz, with FPS in games.
The first indicator indicates the number of frames per second that the screen can show. FPS also shows how many frames per second the computer is ready to output. That is, a display with a frequency of 60 Hz will not physically be able to output more than 60 FPS. At the same time, the game itself can give out at least 60, at least 120, at least 300 FPS and it will still look the same due to the 60 Hz limit. But the inferiority of 20 — 30 FPS will be clearly visible both at 60 Hz and at 120 Hz.
Laptops with a 144Hz screen
The trick is that the refresh rate of the monitor is a constant value while FPS is an average so 100 FPS can mean that one complex frame can be generated for half a second and the rest 99 will «arrive» in the remaining half a second. Therefore, extra Hertz in the characteristics of the monitor is unlikely to be superfluous.
And what about unusual hertz like 120, 165 and 240 Hz?
But this is already a debatable issue, in tests, most gamers do not see the difference between 144, 165 and 240 Hz.
And considering that monitors at 240 Hz are usually more expensive and use TN + film matrices, we can say that the format has not really taken root yet. Taking this is beneficial only if you have a powerful computer and dynamic shooters are your specialty, where every millisecond can cost a life. But if you find a profitable option with 120 Hz, then take it safely.
Conclusion: is it cool or again megapixels?
Definitely cool. But within reason. The trick is that at first the eyes need time to get used to. Because of this, many participants in blind tests cannot tell at first what the difference is between the two screens. But it’s worth a day to walk around with a conditional OnePlus 8 256 GB or run Doom Eternal on a computer with a good graphics card and a 9 caliber monitor0021 MSI Optix MAG272CQR 27 « Price from UAH 22,291 to UAH 23,130 and there will be no desire to return to regular displays.
Everything will seem slow and slow. So be careful with your desires — they tend to come true.
What determines display refresh rate?
They may seem pointless, but in reality, displays with such a refresh rate can be useful for gamers.
You might be wondering if there is any point in all these updates if in general gamers can’t tell the difference between 120Hz and 240Hz, let alone up to 600Hz, which display manufacturers say will arrive in 2023 year? What is the point of these ridiculous refresh rates?
Traditionally, any display with a high refresh rate is expected to improve gameplay through smoother animations. It also reduces screen tearing (no need for frame sync technologies such as G-Sync and FreeSync). The main reason these types of monitors are usually advertised is because they enhance your competitive gaming experience.
Although they have some impact on their own, the combination of a high refresh rate with a high frame rate reduces input lag, making you a few milliseconds or even 10 milliseconds faster than your opponents with lower refresh rate displays.
But that’s not all: high refresh rate displays also reduce latency. A 60Hz display will have a minimum input lag of just under 17ms, but a 120Hz display cuts that in half to about 8ms. A 240Hz gaming monitor cuts it down to 4.16ms again, so 360Hz, 500Hz, and even 600Hz actually cut the minimum input lag by just a millisecond or two, despite other factors. This may make a difference in a high stakes game between some of the best players in the world, but even then it won’t matter much.
But this is not the only thing that displays with a higher refresh rate can help with. A higher refresh rate also gives you more up-to-date information than your opponent. This provides not only a measurable advantage of a few milliseconds, but also improves accuracy. If your display refreshes a little faster than your opponents, it shows you where they are in a more detailed way. This allows you to get to where your opponents are now, rather than where, according to the display, they were a few milliseconds ago.