[eertami]

There's definitely diminishing returns the higher we go with refresh rates. 60hz to 240hz for example is like playing a completely different game. But going from 240hz to 360hz, even in CSGO it's a lot harder to notice a difference.

Personally I believe the newly announced 300hz 27" 1440p monitors[0] are going to be the perfect sweet spot for the foreseeable future. I imagine it will be a long time before technology emerges that is a noticeable improvement to this.

[0]: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/new-g-sync-monitor...

[mrob]

There are diminishing returns, but 360Hz is still too low to display sharp-looking motion without strobing. 360Hz strobing is visible as phantom array effect whenever you move your eyes. If you are sensitive to this artifact and instead want motion that looks like real life, you need more like 1000fps/1000Hz. There is no hardware capable of this, but at high enough frame rate you could probably get away with interpolating the frames along motion vectors, e.g from 500fps to 1000fps, with very minor latency/artifacting.

See: https://blurbusters.com/faq/oled-motion-blur/

[Melatonic]

I am not convinced we need to go nearly that high - 300hz puts a crapload more stress on your system performance wise for not much gain. 90hz is in my opinion already such a massive improvement over 60 that I do not see mind blowing results even going to 120 or 144. And many pro gamers were using 120hz monitors over 144hz at one point.

Realistically I think the two sweet spots are 120hz and 240hz - not necessarily because they are the best of the best but because they are each divisible by both 24 and 30 (the most common FPS of films and television) AND they offer two tiers of increased performance for different hardware requirements. You can run a much more taxing game at 120 and then if you want to spend the big bucks on the latest hardware move up to 240.

As for resolution I completely agree with you - 1440P is really a sweet spot for 27" monitors. If display / DPI scaling improves across multiple OS then I think eventually we will likely have 4K become the norm for 27" sized monitors and it will show some improvement but again be diminishing returns like the difference between 120-240. That being said as more film content moves to 4k I think we will also start to see 1440P become less popular as people will want to view content in something that doesnt scale.

All of this however is nothing compared to the improvement that a true HDR display brings - a high end monitor that can show a large increase in dynamic range is such a game changer and I do not think most people realize it yet - it brings us so much closer to how the human eye really sees that I really think it is equivalent to the difference of going from laserdisc resolution to something 4k. And on top of that now that cameras are also shooting in such massive dynamic ranges it is going to make older content just look plain in comparison.

[formerly_proven]

> And many pro gamers were using 120hz monitors over 144hz at one point.

This was done solely in order to enable strobing as 144 Hz panels at the time were too slow to support strobing which requires scanout speeds equivalent to ~200 or so Hz at 144 Hz.

And strobing is solely used because S&H displays have too much transition and motion blur at 1xx and 2xx Hz.

> Realistically I think the two sweet spots are 120hz and 240hz - not necessarily because they are the best of the best but because they are each divisible by both 24 and 30 (the most common FPS of films and television)

Principally I agree that 120/240 Hz are more suited to general purpose use for this reason [1], but on the other hand this really has nothing to do with the hardware and is purely so because of software limitations. Really what one would like to see is that video playback causes the variable-display refresh to adjust to a multiple of the exact video frame rate instead of janky ad-hoc frame-rate conversions.

This is a common theme; hardware is generally much more capable than what the software/drivers allow everywhere you look.

> All of this however is nothing compared to the improvement that a true HDR display brings

Many people would probably already be quite happy with something that doesn't turn shadows into a foggy, cloudy mess like all IPS panels do, and VA panels as well (but less so).

[1] though 120 Hz does not solve the 50p problem, as content produced by broadcasters in 50 Hz countries, which is basically all of the world that isn't the US, cannot easily be converted at playback time. 25p can just be handled like 24p with 1:1 playback, basically nobody notices the slight speed-up / slow-down and that's how films have been shown in television in 50 Hz countries since always.

[terafo]

There are definitely diminishing returns with increase of refresh rates. But nonetheless your comparison is unfair, since you are comparing quadrupling of refresh rate with a mere 50% increase, which is similar to comparing 60 to 90, not 60 to 240. And with advent of VR demand for refresh rate increase of display panels will only grow, since it's much more noticeable while using headset.

[Melatonic]

Not sure I understand exactly what you are saying

As for VR I think that's an excellent illustration of my point - we know that many people don't do well at 60FPS per eye in VR due to motion sickness. Move up to 90FPS per eye though and there is a massive improvement that I have seen first hand others. By the time you get to 120FPS the experience feels pretty damn smooth and while I would of course like to see more frames I am not convinced going a ton beyond 120 is really worth it performance wise considering you have to render that twice and the extra compute could be instead spent on the new shiny like ray tracing.

Luckily when I was working at a VR startup I was one of the few people that never seemed to get motion sickness so I became the test dummy for everyone's work - they would throw me in something they hadn't optimized at all yet that was only getting 40fps on a system with dual Xeons and quad Nvidia top of the line workstations cards and while it felt a little weird it for some reason never bothered me :-D

[VRay]

It doesn't make any sense to invest much in displays over ~90hz vs just working on adaptive refresh rates

Your eyes really do work at a pretty low speed. At some point it makes more sense to just track the eyeballs and put updated scenery in front of them at the exact instant the game engine produces it, rather than try to run at some insanely high speed generating frames that aren't actually having any effect on the player's brain

90, 144, 240hz, etc all look better than 60hz because there's less random lag between when the game generates a frame and when it appears on the screen. You can't see an 8ms delay, but you CAN see a variable 0-10ms delay that's happening as the game engine and computer monitor drift in and out of sync again and again.