Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Melatonic 1625 days ago
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.

1 comments

> 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.