I can barely tell the difference between 60 and 165 hz on my monitor

Blisterexe@lemmy.zip to Technology@lemmy.world – 108 points –

Title says it all (i have turned on 165hz on settings). Its a cheap monitor, do some 165hz monitors not truly give you that experience? Or are my eyes fucked

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Try the UFO test. https://www.testufo.com/

If you still can't see the difference there may be a setting on the monitor or PC preventing you from seeing it.

I've never seen any difference with the top two with that test. My monitor is 144hz and TBH I might as well have saved my money and got 60Hz ones.

We're not all hardcore gamers trained to see miniscule differences.

Humans can see a single solid color frame changing at 1000 fps. So if you don't notice a difference between 60 and 165 fps something isn't working. It's not your eyes.

Seeing a solid color frame change is completely different from the minor changes generally occurring per frame, especially in media such as movies and games which are continuous.

The Hobbit movies at 48 instead of 24 fps still looked much smoother and better.

Yup, while I do see the point some people make about it breaking the immersion of film for being too fluid (everybody has their preferences) it definitely WAS more fluid.

I will say though that when I first moved from 60-144hz I wasn't blown away by the change either. Things seemed a bit smoother maybe but not that big a deal. It wasn't until I accidentally went back to 60 that something felt horribly wrong. I can ABSOLUTELY see the difference now and for some reason I had to get acclimated.

The problem with the movie was that a lot of TV watching people see it as a "soap opera effect" because those are shot in 60 fps. So they don't like it and want a "cinematic" feel.

For me who doesn't usually watch TV it was glorious. Yes, you notice every tiny mistake on the screen at 48 fps, but it actually feels real. Like that's a real dwarf there talking with an elf for example. More lifelike if you get what I mean? It's a damn shame you can't buy the movies with HFR :-/

Well, 144hz has more than one benefit. You get a smoother image output of course, but also less input lag (seeing actions you take faster on the screen). But switching between the two is very obvious usually, even when just moving around a window on the desktop.

I vastly preferred them in 24 fps, they looked awful in 48 fps to me.

Your usecase may be different, but I am usually not required to catch solid color frames in my day to day computer use.

The difference shouldn't be miniscule, though. If you've never been able to see a difference, my money's on not setting the refresh rate in Windows. It's not automatic.

It's mostly marketing. Films are perfect at 24fps and gamer bros think they can see framerates ten times that.

Really? Movies at 24 fps are tolerable because we're used to it and there's a lot of motion blur, but any motion or panning shot still looks incredibly jerky. You have to get way up into the 100s of fps before you hit diminishing returns of smoothness, and even then it's still noticeable.

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You dont have to be a hardcore gamer to see the difference. A lot of people who use phones see the difference 90/120hz makes over 60.

Do you have it enabled in Windows under display settings tho? It sounds like you aren't actually having it enabled. Other possibility is that your monitor has very low response time and everything blurs.

I'm not sure it it's possible to not see a difference in refresh rate jump this big until about 160Hz.

You’re either trolling or you have a 60hz monitor lawl

Or it just doesn't work right in their browser. It says in big bold letters "VSYNC is not available on the Linux platform" and at 960 pixels per second I actually can't tell the difference between the 100hz and 50hz lines. If I slow it to 480 pixels per second it becomes apparent, but I still feel like that's browser funkiness rather than a true frame rate difference. I don't think it's actually running at 100fps.

It's not my eyes, btw. I can usually tell the difference very easily. I had a problem with my Nvidia drivers for a while that would often make it reset to 60hz on reboot, instead of my display's max of 100. It was always immediately obvious to me just from the mouse cursor, even without consciously looking for it.

LOL as I was writing this, I reloaded the page and now it's very very obvious at 960. Something's definitely inconsistent on my device. Go figure.

I have a 60 Hz monitor and it doesn't even try and display any UFOs above 60 Hz, just 15, 30, and 60. So if they see a row with 144 Hz, then they have a 144 Hz monitor.

I've really upset the gamer bros here..

I use 165hz for art and productivity lawl

Twice the refresh rate means twice the frames, so I'm twice as productive.

Or at any rate, that's what I'm telling my job to try to get them to buy me a high spec gaming monitor.

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It’s wildly obvious if you grab a window and drag it around. Try having the settings on 60 and dragging it around when you change it to 165; it’s very glaringly obvious.

I thought you were talking about physical windows for a sec. Made no sense. I'm an idiot.

Please stop carrying huge glass panels around for no reason, that's not a safe thing to do.

Lol. But I'm not done with my tests!

What works best for me is simply moving the cursor quickly in a circle. On a higher refresh display, you'll see much more "ghost" cursors at the same time.

I'd make sure you don't have any display boost stuff going on your monitor, ghosting isn't a feature it's a bug

For me the difference was immediately noticeable. Even back in the old days I had to have at least a 75 Hertz monitor because 60 Hertz was slow enough that I could see the flicker pulse of the screens.

I will say I can't notice much of an improvement from 144 Hertz to 165 and I haven't had the chance to see a 240 yet, but anything under 75 is essentially unusable for me

I did that, I cant tell, iv had this problem on Linux and windows so its not an is issue either

What cable and interface are you using?

DP 1.4 i think, anyways i had checked it can handle 1080p 165hz

Haven't read the entire thread so apologies if you've already provided this information but could you show us a picture of your monitor's osd with the input source information? That should tell you right there that your input device isn't sending out what you desire.

Also if you don't have a >144hz option in your os's display options, try disconnecting any other monitors you have plugged in.

Yeah I checked, it works, did a lil test with the cursor and there's visibly more images on my 165hz one, I think it just has bad eno7gh smearing that it doesn't work properly

Have you configured your OS to use a higher refresh rate in monitor settings? The difference is night and day...

You're only going to notice if the thing playing goes up to 165fps. If you're, say, watching a movie or video you won't notice anything because there's nothing to notice.

Play a game that you can get really high FPS in (maybe Half Life 1 which a modern machine should have no trouble getting 300+). Limit it to 60. Check it out. Then go up to 144. Then 165.

Also if you have an nVidia GPU, it may not be setting the refresh rate properly. I constantly have this issue with driver updates resetting it back to 30hz on my machine. You gotta go into the Nvidia control panel, find the display settings and scroll down somewhere toward the bottom is a refresh rate setting. Change that to the highest your display can use.

An addendum to this, the jump between 60 and 120 is not as noticeable outside of dynamic movement so even though you may see a slight difference when looking, unless you use M+K it won't feel that big. With mouse and keyboard quick mouse adjustments should feel smoother. And this isn't a knock on FPS over 60, just that the difference between 30 and 60 can feel very big when you snap between them

Let's not forget that the industry always likes to exxagerate with the goal to sell.. IMO refresh rate is the latest victim of "bigger number is BETTER!" marketing.

It should be wildly obvious just moving your mouse across the screen. Maybe your graphics adapter has an issue and isn't properly setting the mode?

Ah I have the same problem with my laptop. It is set to 144hz but I don't see any difference with the external 60hz monitor. I guess I'm genetically not built for eSports.

If you do quick circles with the cursor do you not see more frames of the mouse on the high refresh rate monitor?

If you have to do that sort of thing just to see the difference, I don't think the difference is going to matter to you.

How else would you test the difference? By looking at a still picture?

The difference matters very much in high speed video games and this is the most basic of ways to test it.

I'm talking about whether or not they would care about a distance that you couldn't just see while using it and had to do something specific to test for.

... I dunno about you, but I move my mouse quite regularly. I also scroll webpages.

You may have to set the refresh rate manually to go higher than 60hz. Things should look much smoother.

Run 'xrandr -q' and see if it gives you multiple refresh rates for your displays.

Also, what GPU are you using?

RX 6600 on fedora 38 (a extension I like isn't on 39 yet)

Is your monitor plugged into your GPU, as opposed to the plug on your motherboard (which would go to your integrated graphics on your CPU, if it's supported)?

How are you testing? You can run the UFO test for a quick and dirty comparison: https://www.testufo.com/

More subjectively, you could load up a game you know well and start it at 30FPS. Wave your mouse around a bit looking for blurring or artefacting, then step it up to test 60, 90, 120, etc to see if you can tell the difference.

When you say "settings", did you check the settings on the monitor menus too? And in your graphics card settings, outside the game?

What cable is connecting your monitor to your PC?

I've done UFO, and the top one looks a bit nicer IG? Might be placebo. Fanes are much the smae, I think theres a difference but I'm not sure

I’ll never forget when I went from 60hz to 165hz, everything seemed so fluid and smooth. I couldn’t imagine going back.

Getting a higher refresh rate monitor was massive for me. It makes such a big difference and actually helped reduce the intensity and frequency of my headaches.

Is it possible that there are ghosting issues with the panel? I had a 120hz monitor at work at one point that had ghosting issues so bad it made it look barely any better than a 60hz panel. Going from 60hz to 120hz+ should definitely be noticeable to most people

That's my current theory, BC that monitor is a super cheap acer monitor

If its a cheap VA panel and not an IPS one, the chances of smear is fairly high

I can't remember the model, but it was the cheapest monitor (hrr) I could find at the time

I am totally with you. I have had a 144Hz monitor for 2 years now. I am 100% sure that everything was configured correctly and I could spot some small differences in the UFO test. But other than that I do not feel any differences in day-to-day activities or games. Windows reset my frequency settings occasionally, but I never noticed it.

If you have a phone that does high rate slo-mo you can video record the screen when you switch modes and see if the rate is actually changing or not. Have an object moving around the screen while you're recording the switch. Note that I've not tried this myself, I'm just working off of theory.

I have used https://github.com/Nixola/VRRTest before to check the refresh frequency. I use X11 and wanted to check if my 144Hz monitors work with my older 60Hz one. Set the test mode to squares and the frame rate to twice your monitor's refresh rate. You should see every second square light up. If this is not the case, play around with the frame rate in the program until every second square lights up.

I can't see the difference either though. Yes, the mouse moves a bit quicker if I pay attention to it. But I do not care or notice, to be honest.

I'm also unable to see the difference directly, but everything just feels more snappy. If you can't feel it, maybe you have some extra latency from somewhere else

Check your mouse cursor by moving fastly left to right and back and again. With 60 Hz you'll see 5-6 cursor renders (depending on your distance obviously) and with 100 Hz it should be double that. 144hz a lot more cursor renders appear. White cursor, black background or inverted for better visibility. Thats my fast check to see if the settings are correctly set.

My experience of 144hz is that in terms of seeing a difference, it's not much. I mostly see it when looking around a scene and the movement is more fluid. However, what you can notice isn't as much as what makes a difference in games.

I tried the dust2 awp test map on 60hz and 144hz. The difference with how many I could hit with 144hz was not down to chance and was quite repeatable. I think (and it's just a layman theorizing here) that unconsciously our muscle memory, or hand/eye co-ordination are working on cues beyond what we consciously see. And this is why it helps for split second game decisions like this.

My opinion is, if you cannot see the difference consciously and you don't play FPS then maybe you should de-prioritize refresh rates over other monitor features. There's nothing wrong with that.

Yeah, back when I played valorant I thought I played better, my theory is that I just got a really shitty panel and that's why i can barely tell

Me being super jealous of everyone here going to 144 or 165 when I just upgraded my pc a few months ago to finally use 120 on my current ultrawide monitor.

All I can say is even 120 from 60 was amazing and very obvious. As someone else said the biggest wow moment was just moving desktop items around and it being super smooth.

I do know there are a bunch of settings you may need to change to make sure your using the correct settings above 60. Check the advanced display settings which should list out all resolutions with refresh rate to pick. Sometimes monitors need to be set. Sometimes the driver software for the GPU has options for it listed. I know on mine I had to have freesync enabled as well. Lots of variables that may keep it from being set correctly to check. I remember setting up my audio equipment and you think your using everything correctly then realize your advanced settings had an option set to like 44 bit rate instead of at least something more reasonable like 192.

Tbh I've used >100fps on monitors for so long I've subconsciously made it so when I see windows running at 60fps it feels sluggish

Me being super jealous of everyone here going to 144 or 165 when I just upgraded my pc a few months ago to finally use 120 on my current ultrawide monitor.

No need to be jealous, the gain from 120 to 144/165 is significantly less than from 60 to 120.

60 to 120 is like a night and day difference, even for desktop usage.

I use Linux so its just the one toggle in is settings, but you're right, I might have to double check my monitor settings

If you're using x11 and have another 60hz monitor it may be an issue with vsync. Wayland shouldn't have this issue.

Personally I don't notice 75 vs 144 unless I'm playing a first person game with a lot of quick movement.

I'm 100% sure if the majority of people in here claiming they see the difference were actually tested, they'd fail it. Something like

  • 60Hz, 120Hz, 144Hz, 165Hz, 200Hz
  • multiple game scenes and clips:
    • varying FPS ranging from 29 to 320fps
    • quiet and busy (not much stuff happening vs a lot of stuff happening)
    • slow and fast camera or background movements

Take the Cartesian product of that for all the different possibilities and play them a random set thereof. Maybe 20 or so.

It's just like screen resolution. If you sit at arms length or further away from your screen (which you should) and increase the resolution of your screen, everything becomes smaller (icons, text, images). That means you'll have to scale them up to be at the same size as when they were at a lower resolution.
Also, at a certain distance, you become unable to spot details of a certain size --> you physically will not be able to see the different between 1080p, 2k, and 4k from that distance. It's called visual acuity. I bet you, if you put did a similar test as above with video resolution, screen resolution, screen size, and distance from screen, the majority would start do much worse than they think they can.

It's mostly marketing and "bigger number = better" think.

And I'm 100% you're either testing incorrectly or have some issue that makes it so you can't see high FPS or something. I could definitely tell the difference between 20, 60 and 165fps, maybe not small increments like going from 140 to 160, but it's definitely noticeable when things are suddenly smoother. Sure you can fake some of it with motion blur and good frame pacing, but high FPS is definitely noticeable, at least in my case up to 160, but I haven't got a monitor that goes higher to compare.

You might not notice anything at first, but after some days of gaming and then going back, you'll probably notice the difference then.

Surprised I haven't seen this, but have you tried a different cable? Display port? Could be worth a shot.

Depends on the game as to whether it will be noticeable. If you aren't looking quickly in multiple directions like in a first person shooter then it is not nearly as noticeable as a slow scan at 60 generally looks pretty good.

It also matters how well your video card matches up to the monitor refresh rate because otherwise you might end up with a frame being displayed twice.

I usually can't even tell the difference between 30 and 60; anything more is a waste.