[mrob]

It's very common for LCDs to buffer, and if you're strobing then buffering at least one frame is required to prevent artifacts (although one frame at 144Hz is much less serious than one frame at 60Hz). However, there's nothing inherent in the technology that requires frame buffering and I've seen many benchmarks of LCDs with less than one frame of latency. If you look at high speed camera footage of LCDs you usually see them update with a CRT style raster scan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCHgmCxGEzY

[pdkl95]

I should clarify - I am speaking about the 60Hz LCDs found ~everywhere. Unfortunately, I cannot afford one of the newer fancier >60Hz models, and so I have little experience with them.

Once of the sources of multiple-frames of latency was the scaling/resampling stage that was needed to be compatible with non-native resolutions. Some of those algorithms are very slow. A friend of mine that makes FPGAs used in some LCDs has suggested that this slowness may be because the company making the monitor is too cheap to buy parts that were fast enough. That was a few years ago, though, so maybe these newer 144Hz monitors improved the situation.