- 500 hertz, is this real?
When it comes to competition,
or even just the satisfaction of crushing bots,
we've demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt
that more is better when it comes to monitor refresh rates,
and we've got more than ever.
The AW2524 from Alienware is the first 500 hertz monitor
to hit our lab and it is absolutely incredible.
Sit up straight gamers 'cause it's ergonomic,
color accurate, and boasts--
- [Narrator] Speed that's at the edge
of human visual perception.
- Finally, I can go from 2.78 milliseconds of latency
to only , I'll be unstoppable.
No one will see me coming with 0.78 milliseconds of time
eliminated from my leg chain.
At last, I've reached my final form,
except for one small problem.
We have also demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt
that while 360 hertz is technically better than 240 hertz
the difference is kind of like going from a super car
to an even more super car.
And making matters worse,
ultra-high refresh rate monitors like this one
are expensive.
Do you even need one of these
when there are less costly contenders
that might actually even deliver a better gaming experience?
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- I wanna make this clear, pun intended.
The AW2524H is amazing.
It's 24 and a half inches, 1080P so the eSport special,
but it's IPS with accurate coverage
of 99% of the SRGB color gamut,
boasts 0.5 milliseconds greater gray pixel response times
and has an NVIDIA G-SYNC module on top of,
yes, you heard me right, a 500 freaking hertz panel.
I cannot believe the lab wouldn't let me
play with this ahead of time.
- [Brandon] We are testing it.
- This is smooth frog,
like the UFO test on Blur Busters,
it's a great way of evaluating the motion performance
of a monitor or a television.
But unlike the UFO test, it runs locally on the machine.
Meaning that we can run this thing at 500 frames per second,
which is exactly where we land
after the recommended 20 hertz factory overclock.
It's actually 480 hertz outta the box.
I never thought I would live to see an IPS panel
that performs like this.
I'm definitely seeing a little bit of blur
along the back of my white frog here.
But looking at these numbers,
I honestly I'm kind of blown away.
I've reviewed the script for this already
so I know that overall we're not hyper bullish
on this display
but I guess I'm gonna have to see the competition
'cause this looks really good to me.
Even more remarkable is that there's no compromise
with respect to vibrancy or viewing angles.
I mean it's IPS, it looks fantastic.
I don't know what to tell you man.
I am damn impressed by this.
I haven't even moved a mouse yet.
- Oh, oh, wow. (chuckles)
- Hold on one second-- - [Plouffe] Oh, no.
- One second. - Oh, no.
Oh my God.
- [Andrew] Great, good stuff.
- [Plouffe] Okay, sure.
- Oh yeah.
Look, if you're spending money on your chair
when you don't already have the best computer,
you're doing it wrong.
- [Andrew] Until you lean back and turn it off.
- But feel free to spend money on lttstore.com, okay?
FPS is max 1000 like I don't know.
Hey, there we go boys.
Woo, 600 FPS let's go.
This game is running at up to 900 frames per second.
This feels like looking through a window
into the real world, it's so smooth.
Look at that clarity as I'm panning around though.
You know, normally, particularly on things
like these power lines, I usually look to darks
or high contrast objects against the skyline.
You'll see that blur or ghosting,
but man that is clear.
You can read the text Graham here.
You see Bob Graham there, like what?
Hold on, hold on, let's get right in here.
(chuckles) - What?
Even if we can't run at the same FPS,
I wanna play something that has a bit of a longer time
to kill because that's what we found
where the biggest benefit of high refresh rate
and high FPS for that matter comes in
when you are tracking a moving target
that is changing direction.
It's not just about the smoothness of the animation
and the clarity, though those things don't hurt.
Something to note is you do need to use display port
in order to hit that 500 hertz.
Even though it's 1080P,
that's still a fricking lot of bandwidth
and the HDMI port on this thing is only HDMI 2.0
so you're gonna be locked at 240 hertz
if you stick with HDMI.
I mean, realistically,
you're not spending this kind of money on a monitor
and then not hooking up a display port cable
to a top tier graphics card like it.
That would be gross misallocation of funds.
But just making sure you know.
Why do I have a bazooka?
What game mode is this?
- [Andrew] Probably like Fiesta or something.
- What the hell is Fiesta?
- [Andrew] Fiesta's where you get random weapons.
You're playing on medium,
how many frames are you getting?
- I don't know.
- [Brandon] Sorry. Getting like 350 FPS.
No. Okay, hold on a second.
No, I need to leave this game and just play a different one
because the whole point of this
was I wanted to get in gunfights with people.
- [Brandon I get it.
- Brandon, our expert tells us that
while it is definitely not as much of a benefit
as outputting a higher, this is the same stupid thing.
Why is this?
Oh shoot, I just sat on the power button.
- [Andrew] I knew it. - Oh my god.
- [Andrew] ] told you.
- Damn it.
Well, it doesn't make you a better player.
- [Brandon] But the monitor though, right?
- But the monitor, yes, yes, yes, yes.
- It's so good. - We'll get to that. Hold on.
- [Brandon] It's so fast.
- Got him.
Look at this guy, he's hanging from the door.
- This is how you know it's a really good display
when all he does is just end up playing Halo the whole time.
- Okay, this thing is pretty amazing.
Just like tracking moving objects like this.
Again, I don't compensate for spread so I suck
but if you look back that crosshair was on him.
Ah, I love this thing. Okay
Whoops. Sorry.
Now seems like as good a time
as any need to point out that this display supports G-SYNC.
What's cool about that is
if we're running variable refresh rate
there is technically a latency benefit
to having this 500 hertz display,
even if our game is not managing
to hit 500 frames per second and Halo Infinite did not.
We did that best around 350.
That benefit is very small though, so small.
There's just one problem,
this 240 hertz OLED from LG is running
at less than half the refresh rate
but looks clearer to just about everyone we showed it to.
- The vibes from this one feel a little better.
- I'm gonna say this one,
this I think has the best motion tracking.
- It's a different kind of clarity.
There is far, far less blur behind our frogs here
but what I'm actually noticing is that relatively speaking
the text is less visible.
So these finer objects are still very legible
but not quite the same.
I can definitely see why people like this image more though.
But if you look at readability of text, it's not even close.
Part of it is probably the resolution.
This is a 1440P display, so these elements are smaller
but I should be able to compensate by just getting closer
and I can, that could just as easily be 255 or 256,
whereas here I can clearly see that is 255.
- You can see ghosting on the back
of basically every leg of the frog.
It's just much more noticeable on the white guy,
whereas that ghosting is just gone on the OLED.
- However, you can also almost see the judder on the OLED.
- Yeah, OLED judder is a problem.
- So there's a doubling of the image
even if it's not blurry.
whatever our subjective opinions might be,
there's no doubt that when captured in a still frame
the clarity of the LG OLED is higher,
and this is where things get a little technical.
While the Alienware display might refresh at lightning speed
processing the data needed to output a new frame
once every two milliseconds
the individual pixels that make up the panel here
they still need a moment to catch up, right?
I mean, don't get me wrong, it looks incredible
and in most cases, it's almost imperceptible
as we saw when I was playing actual games.
But when we compare that to the microsecond response times
of an OLED I mean take a look at this frog capture.
It might be hard to see through our camera
but in person the white frog has clear ghosting
as it slides across our IPS panel,
whereas on the OLED it is simply not there.
Kind of like how you can see our
behind the scenes content on floatplane.com,
but on Utah--
- [Brandon] Utah.
- But on YouTube, it's simply not there.
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and check out how we shoot our merch photos.
You can see a great example of why image clarity matters
in addition to having a high refresh rate
when you look at this video we did
on a DIY 480 hertz monitor like five years ago.
Sure, we've got the most up to date frame
being streamed to us through the scaler
but the actual image was a blurry mess
anytime it was in motion.
For the sake of thoroughness,
we tried all the different response time settings
that are available on the Alienware monitor.
It has four; fast, super fast, extreme and eSports extreme.
And while eSports extreme is 0.2 milliseconds faster
than fast based on our testing,
the amount of overshoot and therefore visual anomalies
that are introduced just is not worth it at all,
especially for such a tiny improvement.
Can you tell the difference
between 2.4 and 2.2 milliseconds?
I know I can't, but back to our original question,
what about 2.78 versus 2 milliseconds?
That's the difference between a 360 hertz monitor
and a 500 hertz one.
Okay, here's the thing.
As we make our displays refresh faster and faster,
we get these shorter frame times
meaning more frames displayed over the same period of time.
I mean, I was an early advocate
for the benefits of high refresh rate gaming.
The jump from 60 hertz at 16.67 milliseconds per frame
up to 120 hertz at only 8.33 milliseconds per frame,
that was huge and just about everyone
and their grand papi can feel the difference,
even when you're simply browsing the web
or chilling on the desktop.
But as we've shown in the past,
the faster you go the lesser of a difference
you are bound to notice.
And the math for why that is is pretty simple.
Even if we were to take that 120 hertz
and double our refresh rate again, look at that,
we cut our benefit in half and by the time we land at 360
each frame is on the display
for at most 2.78 milliseconds.
Back then to Del Alienware's own marketing
where they say that 500 hertz is reaching
speed that's at the edge of human visual perception.
Well, I think they kind of hit the nail
on their own head here.
Can anyone tell even now?
We brought in ZOWIE'S new flagship,
the 360 hertz TN gaming display, the XL 2566K to find out.
Hell, look at that. It appeared.
- [Brandon] I can't really feel a difference,
I can't recognize a difference.
- I don't think I could really tell
which one's a 500 hertz monitor and which one's a 360.
- I helped set up this test. I know this one's 500,
I literally cannot see any difference at all
in terms of frame times between these two.
- I'm surprised how bright this is
with black frame insertion.
I'm impressed actually.
It looks really good for a TN.
- Ooh, well-- - As soon as you go off angle.
- Until you're anywhere other than right in front of it.
Okay, okay, okay. Andrew, yeah, yeah, shoot it straight on.
Okay. Yeah, shoot it's good side,
which is dot from the side.
While you get the crispness
that's associated with black frame insertion
or backlight st strobing,
and you can really see that on some of these bolder lines
because these pixels are simply not switching as fast
as on the DELL Alienware as far as I can tell,
you're also getting a nice crisp ghost of an image
on every fine line, every single color.
While I don't see a blur behind the object,
I see a clear shadow of the object behind it.
And that's on every color transition,
not just on the super high contrast ones.
Like I'm really noticing,
especially on these color circles here.
- Yeah, we literally were just talking about this.
- [Plouffe] Were just talking about it.
There's a name for this artifact that you see.
I forget the name of it though.
- Anyway, the point is,
See on this red one, I'm actually seeing an overshoot
and I'm seeing an after image.
- Yeah, so that's inherent with LCD BFI
because the backlight can't turn in in sync
with this scanner at every line
so you're always gonna have that issue.
- And people are saying they prefer this?
- Well, this test is meant for it
to find these things basically,
but maybe it looks really good in T-score or something.
- And what's really important in all of this
is that all of us, other reviewers,
Brandon, me, Plouffe, we are splitting hairs at this point.
So yeah, it might be faster, it might be clearer
but to my eye, imperceptibly so.
And to put things into perspective,
the average gaming mouse
is gonna have anywhere from 1 1/2 to three milliseconds
of processing latency on its own.
I mean, your keyboard,
if it has 1000 hertz pulling rate
might manage one millisecond.
But we are getting to the point
where these numbers are so low and so fast
that we're realistically gated by our weak human flesh,
not by the gear that we're using.
Regardless of which of these three monitors it is.
when we're talking about an extra four
or five milliseconds for your peripherals
and the average person's reaction time is about 250,
outside of the most extreme instances of eSports gaming,
the bottom line is it just doesn't matter.
which doesn't mean that gaming displays
don't have any redeeming features.
The ZOWIE model, for example,
we've talked a lot about BFI or black frame insertion,
that dramatically improves motion clarity.
It's not for everyone.
I personally don't like the generally reduced brightness
or perceived flicker, but for some folks it's a must have.
And I've gotta say, to their credit
this one actually has very little perceptible flicker
and is really bright so kudos to ZOWIE.
This is my first time seeing this one,
and compared to our OLED,
it manages to refresh 120 hertz faster.
I mean, this is an incredibly crisp LCD display,
even for a TN one.
And that feature, black frame insertion,
is notably absent from the AW2524H,
meaning that Alienware is counting on the lightning fast
500 hertz refresh rate in order to sell this thing.
Can they then?
Well, at $830, this is a very premium 1080P monitor,
even compared to the $600 ZOWIE.
But it's not entirely unjustified.
It's the first, it looks much better,
thanks to its IPS panel,
and in its default standard picture mode
we measured an average LTE of just 1.5,
with a maximum of six on red in particular.
It also seems to cover more of the advertised
99% of the SRGB color space, particularly red and purple.
So those might look a touch more saturated
but not of normally so.
This thing looks great.
It's also bright enough, hitting about 390 nits
with local dimming disabled,
400 nits with it on
and about 450 nets at all window sizes with HDR on.
With that being said, there aren't many dimming zones on it,
and the HDR color accuracy wasn't great
so don't expect an amazing cinematic experience
with movies or games with it enabled.
As for the IO, it's all right.
We get two HDMI 2.0 ports so that you can have
I don't know, nice fast pixel response times
on your Xbox or your PlayStation or whatever.
A display port 1.4 with display stream compression
which you will need in order to get to 500 hertz,
though any GPU that could possibly drive a game
at 500 frames per second is gonna have DSC.
You get four USB A ports, one of which is
for an NVIDIA reflex latency analyzer,
a headphone jack, an audio line out,
and this super secret port for NVIDIA
to update the firmware.
Ah, yes, if that sounds exciting to you
you must have missed the memo.
It has a G-SYNC module,
so if you like updating your own firmware
in the event that fixes or new features rollout,
this model might not be for you,
only NVIDIA can use that.
It has height adjustment, swivel and tilt.
And this is kind of cool.
The stand itself takes up very little space on your desk,
meaning that you can get as close
as you could reasonably want to to your monitor
when you're trying to get a free headshot in Counterstrike.
Speaking of which, will it help you do that?
Technically speaking, sure.
I bet if you give this thing to a pro
it could marginally improve their game
because once you're at the top, that's all you're chasing.
But if you are literally anyone else
you're probably better off with just about anything else.
I mean, on the premium side that LG OLED
that we showed you earlier is almost $200 more
but it's also a few inches larger,
higher resolution and will give you a great HDR experience.
And it's not even the only option,
a 240 hertz monitor will get you almost the same real world
experience as these and there is ample competition
in that space, meaning that those can be had
for about $200 these days.
Literally a quarter of the cost of this,
and a third the cost of this.
Whichever route you go, we're gonna have links down below.
I mean, who knows, maybe once we double up again
and hit a thousand thousand hertz
for one millisecond frame times
I'll have a different outlook.
With everything at a thousand hertz,
the thousand hertz gaming pc.
But for now, the only difference to my outlook is this,
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- If you guys enjoyed this video,
you might enjoy the last time we tried to see
if bigger number better
when 360 hertz was all the rage,
spoiler, it wasn't then either.