[trafficante]

Is there a term for people who aren’t especially sensitive to refresh rates?

I notice a difference in frame times fairly easily due to the stuttering, but can barely tell the difference between even 30-60hz on a flatscreen game (I do notice a difference when my desktop is <60hz though).

I’m a bit more sensitive in VR, but still can’t readily notice a difference above ~80hz. Sometimes I’ll clock it up to 120hz, but only for games that kick on motion smoothing since I can easily notice the difference between frame doubled 60hz vs 45hz.

I feel like I’m a freak or something for not being able to instantly perceive high refresh rates.

[hombre_fatal]

I'd wager that you'd notice the difference when using higher refresh rates regularly and then downgrading. I think that's a cruel thing to do to yourself though.

I remember when I first saw a high-def Retina Macbook, I didn't appreciate it. I happily programmed on my low resolution Macbook Air, snug as a bug in a rug.

I eventually upgraded to a Retina Macbook. One day I opened up my old low-res Macbook to recover some old files and I was horrified at how bad it looked. You could see the damn pixels! Text on that screen was so blocky. I couldn't believe I happily used that laptop for so long.

Is a Retina screen useful? Sure. Did my happiness increase? I don't think so. Does my screen eat up much more battery lighting up many more pixels? Probably.

Sometimes it's nice to be happy with the minimum and not ruin by chasing upgrades.

[karmakaze]

It wasn't actually that bad at the time. Check what version of macOS that old MacBook has been updated to. Apple nerfed macOS when they introduced Retina displays so that it only does gray pixel anti-aliasing when earlier they did subpixel RGB anti-aliasing.

I just got Better Display[0] which works great for driving non-retina-density monitors with HiDPI resolutions that do anti-aliasing better.

[0] https://betterdisplay.pro/buy

[1] https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

[Guvante]

Retina everyone liked. Increased refresh rate is sketchier.

[kimixa]

I find I can't really tell the difference beyond ~90fps outside of artificial tests (like moving a hard edge and "counting" the edges visible, you can normally do this with a mouse cursor) in non-interactive content.

But beyond that the latency improvement is still noticeable - most games still tend to handle input and game update in terms of frames - so if you have 3-4 frames of input->visible result latency that's 30-40ms at 100fps, but 15-20ms at 200, and you can tell the difference in some situations. This is very dependent on the style of game though - many have sluggish movement and slow direction changes as part of the design, so is less noticeable than some super slide-y shooter like Doom.

But much of that is solvable by the app outside of higher FPS, with GPU submission timing and delaying input processing you can get pretty much the same latency at any FPS, just many games don't do that (yet?)

[trafficante]

Interesting point about gaming input latency: I haven’t been really interested in twitchy flatscreen FPS since the early days of Overwatch 1 and my VR stuff is mostly bottlenecked by network and decode latency.

[redox99]

It varies so much between people (and age?). My dad has a very hard time telling 60hz and 120hz apart. Meanwhile to me 144hz and 240hz are trivial to tell apart, let alone 60 to 120.

One time my drivers for some reason reset my old 144hz monitor to 120hz, and that's still enough difference that it immediately felt weird when I logged into Valorant (so I began diagnosing the issue).

[Guvante]

How was your system configured. If you frame capped your FPS at 144 and had a 120 Hz monitor without V-Sync that would be super noticable.

[redox99]

Back then I played vsync off, freesync monitor, unlocked fps (around 300).

[cyanydeez]

Noticing the difference vs valuing the difference

[ksec]

>Is there a term for people who aren’t especially sensitive to refresh rates?

Normal people.

>I feel like I’m a freak or something for not being able to instantly perceive high refresh rates.

I feel like I am the freak when I am the only one who constantly wants to push for higher refresh rate and lower latency. I mean the latency of 240Hz display is 4.2ms alone. So in the worst case scenario that could be up to 8ms delay between frame and input assuming zero latency in the system which we know will never be the case.

I think most people would perceive it if you use an Apple Pencil on iPad. The difference between old iPad and newer iPad. Just that most dont care enough about it.

[skirmish]

Me too. My guess is because I spend most time reading / coding and not in first-person view games. Then FPS only affects smooth scrolling.

Anything at 60 Hz or more looks all the same to me (well, I can spin my mouse in a circle and see jerkiness but who cares, I am not playing shooters). On the other hand, low DPI annoys me instantly. All my monitors need to have >130 DPI (e.g. 4k resolution with 31.5" diagonal, scaling at 100% works fine). I also set all fonts really small, around 6px.

[cyanydeez]

I haven't been sensitive to refresh rates or even resolution.

I'm watching my movies still in 720p.

My resolution doesn't go past 2000s.

I believe at some point it's just "number go up".

I'm probably on the low end but not by much.