I’ve found convincing evidence that your reflexes in game can be majorly determined
by a monitor’s refresh-rate.
Normal screens are 60.
But you can get special gaming ones that run at 120, 144… or even more!
In theory, the more frames a second, the sooner you get to see information.
You wouldn’t think that beyond a certain amount that it would make much of a difference.
I mean, 60 Hz is already a frame every 17 ms.
The pales in comparison to an average human’s response time which is around… 200 ms.
Plus, human response times are unreliable!
I felt under HUGE pressure for this video since I know that my response time can vary
a lot, so there’s definitely a margin of error with these results.
But I did my best to focus 100% on the task at hand.
To free my mind and to overcome any emotion or distraction that could have marred the
results.
In other words I used site and clicked when the screen turned green.
Each of the results shown here is an average of 5 tests, and I then repeated each of these
5 times and in this order to try and be fair, so it’s not like I did all the 60 hz ones
when warming up and 180 hz ones when tired or whatever.
It’s as fair as I could have managed.
And wow.
What a result!
At 60 Hz I was almost always getting reaction times of greater than 200 ms.
At 120 Hz and above, it was almost always below.
Even with variances between results, it was a large enough improvement for me to see it
with almost every result despite (obviously) not feeling that I was performing any better.
There was a staggering 22 ms improvement from moving from 60 Hz to 120.
I don’t even know how this can be when the math says the average improvement should be
9 ms, max.
But I was very consistently better and by a clear margin.
144 and 180 showed marginally faster response times again, which in a way I’m disappointed
with because it’s too good to be true.
I’m going to say now that I’m using a monitor that Asus GAVE me to do a review of
over on 2kliksphilip, but all of this research is my own and unrigged- I really did just
see having a 180 Hz monitor as a great opportunity to test this subject, honest!
But still, I’m going to err on the side of caution here and say that these improvements
could just be down to lucky runs pushing down the average.
The only noticeable jump that I’ll stand by is the one from 60 to 120.
But refresh rate isn’t the only thing that determines how quickly things update.
There’s also response time, which is how long it takes for the pixels to change from
old information to new- if this is too slow then it can cause issues like GHOSTING to
occur.
You’ll see monitors claiming 5, 2 or even 1 ms for this.
These are all incredible results!
They are also LIES.
Don’t EVER believe what manufacturers claim, since they all do these tests in different
ways.
From black to white, from colour to colour… or from grey to grey.
It makes their claims incomparable with others and thus, pointless.
Instead, look up reviews for monitors you want to buy to make sure that response time
isn’t a problem.
There’s a trick that monitors can use called ‘overdrive’, which runs more voltage through
the pixels to try and get them to change more quickly.
Too much can cause horrible colour inversions.
I used to have a monitor that would display pink rings around the sun on Dust2 whenever
I looked around quickly, for example.
I covered this in my Asus monitor review- when set to Extreme it would lead to noticeable
inverted colours when scrolling through web pages.
But does having it enabled reduce response times?
From my results, no.
In fact, my worst results were when overdrive was set to the maximum setting.
But all of the results were so similar it’s probably just my reflexes playing up.
You’ll notice that, although tested at 180 Hz, all of the times I recorded were worse
than the ones I got earlier for that setting.
I think that once again this was my doing- as much as I LOVE analysing stuff, I was getting
bored of these tests by now.
You can see me pushing through to the end with a few good final results!
In short: I can’t say that the overdrive setting made a difference to my reflex rate.
There’s also input lag, which is how long it takes for information to go from your computer
to being displayed on the screen.
There’s a site called DisplayLag which documents the input lag of different screens.
An excellent result, according to this site, is anywhere between 9 and 20 ms.
Some, particularly 4K TVs, can be as bad as 100 ms!
That’s a tenth of a second!
Larger screens- even computer ones- perform more poorly.
Once again, consult independent reviews before buying if you’re concerned about these things.
Okay, so moving from 60 to 120 Hz seems to improve my reflexes by a disproportionately
large amount.
Just for LOLs, what about going from 60 down to 30?!
Once again I alternated between the two settings and once again got a very definite and consistent
result.
Just under 200 ms average at 60 and 260 ms for 30- a very noticeable jump!
My reflex time has gone from very good down to just being standard when compared with
all of the results on this site.
Incredible!
But let’s push it further.
Lastly, I switched to my cheap Polaroid TV.
Hey, I only use it for Netflix and Chill, it doesn’t have to be cutting edge.
This TV has 60 Hz, but can go down as low as 23 Hz!
Yeah that’s right Philip, it’s disgusting.
Truly Going Low material.
And with this setting my response time increased to 290 ms.
That’s over 100 ms worse than the gaming monitor results.
Disgustingly, noticeably laggy and only good enough for console gamers.
Even the 60 Hz results were 30 ms worse than with my computer monitors.
TV screens- or this one at least- aren’t suited for high-speed action.
So in conclusion, refresh rate has a larger impact on response times than it has any right
to, but if you feel you’re slow to respond in-game, also be sure that you’re not using
a horrible monitor with obscene amounts of input lag and ghosting.
After initial concerns, my reflexes seemed more consistent than I expected them to be,
but I am still only human and will have had variations in my own performance throughout
this test.
For example, I don’t see why my 60 hz times should have been better on my 4k screen than
on my 180 hz gaming monitor.
So please, don’t just take my word for these results.
Try this out for yourselves and see if you get similar.
It really has opened my eyes to the benefits of 120 Hz screens and above.