3M PC Monitors

Refresh Rates

Refresh rates is something every gamer should consider for their monitor. How fast your gaming monitor refreshes the screen per second is a crucial part of gaming, from a common side-scroller to an intense FPS dual. Measured in Hertz (Hz), you’ll find that the majority of 4K LCD monitors have a refresh rate of 60Hz, meaning the screen is refreshed 60 times per second. Try blinking that! (Authors note: I hope this article at least creates a gallery of readers trying to blink sixty times in a second.)

By today’s standards, 60Hz isn’t that advanced. If a game plays at 120 frames per second, on a 60HZ monitor you will only – you guessed it – see 60 frames a second. These 60Hz monitors experience problematic blur of fast moving images, risking the player a defeat or loss while gaming. Adaptive refresh rate technology, Nvidia’s G-Sync or AMD’s FreeSync, tackles this issue by smoothing up frames per second and slowing potential input lag. If you’re playing a fast-paced shooter like Counter-Strike, every frame per second counts for reaction time with tackling oncoming waves of enemies.

Developed gaming displays evolved from this complication. A crucial part of their popularity came from the fact they had the capability to run at 144Hz. Gamers wanted a PC monitor that could match their increasingly powerful graphic cards: if the GPU could run at 120 frames per second, they wanted a monitor that could as well. Now, it’s universally the norm to have games that run at the common 144Hz. Some monitors have even increased to 200Hz to pace with this.