Just got a new phone (OnePlus Nord 3), turned refresh rate HUD in developer settings and I see some parts of the system and some apps display 120 Hz but I have problem noticing any difference, same with my wife’s Redmi Note 12, i have to look very carefully and maaaybe I notice some different, not sure
I remember on crt’s there was a massive difference between 60hz and 85 hertz, but my laptop has a 120 hertz screen and I really don’t see much of a difference between it and 60 hertz and it at 120 hertz, there is some work out there by some people that suggest that it’s because the CRT is just structured in such a way that you’re going to notice improved frame rates better and it’s going to look less blurry to your eyes.
For me the biggest difference between 60 and 85 Hz on a CRT was that one gave me a massive headache and nausea within a few hours, and the other didn’t.
Modern displays work differently though, especially LCDs which only really flicker if the backlight flickers. CRTs only display a small sliver of the image at any given time, while the rest is black or fading away until the next frame is drawn.
(Though I do see a big difference between 60 and 85 fps these days; 85-95 is where I start to find FPS games to not feel downright choppy, but there’s still a big, big difference between 95 and 165.)
Higher refresh rates make a bigger difference when physically larger portions of the screen are changing at once, and when there’s fast movement on the screen. That’s why it has a more noticeable effect on FPS games, where the entire screen changes when you move the mouse, and when you want to quickly move your aim to specific points. It’s much more noticeable on a large display than it is on a phone screen, for example.
Yes, indeed. But I find it very, very noticeable when just moving the mouse pointer too. Looks horrible on a 60 Hz screen.
The most important thing I think is movement speed. Extremely slow movements would look the same at 10 fps as 1000 fps (think a movement of 10 pixels per second, for example), while large movements look choppy at lower framerates. That’s also (part of) why it’s more important to have a high framerate in Quake/Unreal Tournament-style games than it is in e.g. first person puzzle games, latency being the other big one.