It’s clear that with display technologies, we’ve hit a point of diminishing returns with packing pixels more densly. However, there is room for rendering frames faster and faster.
Having listened to Digital Foundry’s John Linneman talk so highlighy about playing games in 480hz on his Sony INZONE M10S, I was convinced that high frame rate gaming is truly where the future is headed to.
And so, I had to try it out. Here’s what I learned by playing at 480hz on a Asus ROG PG32UDCP over the last two months.
Note: This is not a review of my monitor. I’m just sharing my thoughts about high frame rate gaming which are applicable to any similar display.
#1 – Low Input Latency
Playing at 480hz mode sort of feels like you’re cheating. The mouse feels like an extension of your hand–Just zipping around, rotating, aiming. It’s fantastic.
Having only played PC games at 60 FPS (with a productivity-focused mouse), jumping to a 480hz monitor with a newer gaming mouse was an insane leap in experience.
I realized that I, in fact, didn’t suck at FPS’s as bad as I thought but rather, was playing on a sub-par system against players with better setups. I actually started to snipe in games, which I never used to do, because now, I could actually get kills pretty consistently!
It’s hard to describe what super-low latency feels like other than… just right.
#2 – Motion Clarity
When playing 3rd person action games, RTS’s, and side-scrollers, the motion clarity of 480hz was very obvious. It feels like an image is being pushed and pulled across the monitor, not rendered. It looks sort of, perfect, sometimes in a very mundane way.
Contrary to what I was expecting, FPS’s at 480hz mode are not noticeably smoother than 144/240hz! This was surprising.
I realized why this was once I did a bunch of frame rate testing on testufo.com. For every frame-rate, there is a limit as to how fast something can move across the screen before you see it it blink or stutter across rather than smoothly translate across the screen.
In 3rd person action games, the camera speed is typically much lower than FPS’s, so the speed of which you rotate the camera pairs well with the upper bounds of 480hz’s motion clarity. Same with RTS’s/MOBA’s.
However, in FPS’s, when you look around, you’re typically rotating the camera at quite a high speed, so the image doesn’t actually much smoother than 144hz or 240hz.
In Windows, everything rendering in high refresh rate is actually quite amazing. Minimizing a window is so fast, scrolling down the webpage and still be able to read the moving text, it feels like you’re using your PC in lightspeed.
One of my favorite things to do is to open up a high res image, zoom into it, and then grab and drag the image around. It looks SO damn smooth, it’s truly, truly impressive.
So, is 480hz the end-game?
For input latency, 480hz is likely on the higher end of diminishing returns. I imagine that there are more bottlenecks in the whole pipeline to optimize before you start to notice latency improvements with higher refresh rates.
However for visual clarity, I bet 480hz isn’t even close to the ceiling. With what I saw with FPS’s, I think we need to go even higher to be able to track completely smooth motion across the display (there’s already 1000hz prototype monitors being demoed).
Will we be able to render such high frame rates?
Frame-gen will likely need to play a big role here, but only if the base frame rate is high enough where the input latency still feels fast (so, 300-400hz). Or, we’ll be using black frame insertion to mimic the motion clarity of higher refresh rates, however, we’ll need much brighter displays to compensate.
TL:DR
- Latency – For FPS’s, the low latency of high refresh rates is incredibly beneficial for performing well.
- Motion Clarity – 480hz looks incredibly smooth for 3rd person games, RTS’s, side-scrollers, and general PC usage. However, it’s much less noticeable for FPS’s due to high fast the camera rotates.
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