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by cespare 1088 days ago
I don't think I'm in any of those groups.

I own a variety of monitors and can easily tell the difference between 60hz and 120hz. All things being equal, I of course prefer 120hz (or 165hz as some of my gaming monitors support).

I also own monitors at resolutions from 1440p to 4k.

For doing work (programming, where I'm mostly looking at text), resolution makes a huge difference. I only do coding on high DPI screens and I would upgrade to 5k or 6k or 8k displays if I were confident that my hardware and OS would support them well. (TFA was very helpful in that respect.) In these settings, high refresh rate makes only a marginal difference to my experience.

For gaming, refresh rate makes a much bigger difference, and resolution makes a somewhat smaller difference -- my hardware can't reasonably drive many of the games I play at 4k or higher anyway. So I just use cheaper, lower-resolution monitors that operate at high refresh rates for gaming.

Someday I guess I'll just be able to spend $300 for an 8k monitor at 240hz and then I won't have to make this kind of choice. (In fact, in the several years since I last bought gaming hardware I think the options for high-refresh-rate 4k monitors have gotten much better; I might use 4k for gaming if I were buying today.)

But for now, I'll always pick resolution over refresh rate for doing work, and it's not because I can't tell the difference.

1 comments

I want the best of both worlds. There exist 144 Hz 4K 27" monitors, such as the LG 27GP950/27GP95R. They're still LCD panels rather than OLED, but I am confident that OLED panels with these dimensions will arrive fairly soon.
I've been using two 27" 4k 144hz monitors for over a year on my personal machine. I'm doubtful if my work setup would be able to drive them to full capability.