Drawing only happens (at most) once every 4ms. I’m not aware of any modern display technology that allows you to manipulate a frame buffer during the display interval (unlike CRTs which could be manipulated during a scan).
The retro gaming community is obsessive about input and display latency and even there anywhere between 5-16ms (16ms being one frame of 240p content) is considered acceptable for even the most hardcore twitch response games.
That’s not saying that other processes aren’t happening faster than that, just that human input and subsequent visual feedback maxes out somewhere between 200-300 times per second and for the vast majority of humans, it is far, far lower.
If you measure the response of individual photoreceptors, it takes 25-50 ms to peak after a flash of appropriately-colored light; the precise number depends on the color and intensity of the light. After that, the signal still needs to propagate through a bunch of visual brain areas, and then even more needs to happen to somehow influence behavior. With everything tuned just so, you can complete that whole process in 100 ms or so, but the conditions have to be perfect; otherwise, 300+ ms between (simple) stimulus and (simple) response is more typical.
Obviously, a lot of this is happening asynchronously, and high refresh rates can help in other ways (e.g., by smoothing out movement), but it astonishing how laggy our visual system is.
The retro gaming community is obsessive about input and display latency and even there anywhere between 5-16ms (16ms being one frame of 240p content) is considered acceptable for even the most hardcore twitch response games.
That’s not saying that other processes aren’t happening faster than that, just that human input and subsequent visual feedback maxes out somewhere between 200-300 times per second and for the vast majority of humans, it is far, far lower.