Why are 144Hz monitors important for gaming

If you’ve been living under a rock, 60Hz refresh rate monitors are outdated. Monitors equipped with a 144Hz refresh rate screen are now the golden standard of gaming. Here at Viotek, we offer a variety of 144Hz monitors choose from, but why are they important for gaming and how are they better than 60Hz monitors?

First, we need to talk about our eyes. Movies and TV shows we watch are usually within 20-30 fps (frames per second). As long as the content is displayed on or above 30 fps, our eyes will think it is smooth. It is usually believed that

• 20-30 fps is somewhat smooth;
• 30-60 fps is smooth;
• 60+ fps is perfectly smooth;

Base on this common belief, a lot of people think a 60Hz monitor is good enough for them, because a 60Hz monitor can ensure content frame rate to reach 60 fps, and they think they cannot tell the difference between a 60Hz one and a 144Hz one. This is why the discussion or argument of 144Hz being useless has existed for a long time online.

However, 144Hz is quite the opposite of being useless. Games are different from movies and TV shows. Unlike those media contents, game frames are rendered in real time by computers. In most games’ settings, there is an option called “Vertical Sync” or “V-Sync”. If you turn it on, it will restrict the output frame rate to 60 fps. On paper it sounds good, but it can cause two serious problems.

First, if your gaming rig is not powerful enough and its outputting lower fps rate than the refresh rate of the monitor, the moving content or your movement will not be displayed in real time. This causes lag, which makes your eyes uncomfortable and harder to focus.

Second, in theory the output frame rate can be infinitely high, depending on your rig, but the frames you see are limited by your monitor. For example, 200 fps content’s smoothness is exactly the same as 60 fps content on a 60Hz monitor. This is because the 140 more fps do not get output to the monitor by your graphics card with V-Sync on.

Now that we explained the cons of V-Sync, it makes sense to turn it off to reduce lag or to prevent frame losing. Then why does it exist? Because it solves another huge problem, tearing. If you turn it off, your rig will output all the rendered content to your monitor. As a result, it’s very likely that a new frame is being rendered to cover the previous frame which is not completely rendered, which causes a tearing of content on the screen.

So, what do we do? Do we have to decide between less tearing or less lag and frame losing? This is where 144Hz monitors come in. Do they completely eliminate tearing, lag, and frame losing? To be honest, they do not, but they are a huge improvement over 60Hz ones.

By their names, 144Hz monitors refresh 144 times in 1 second instead of 60 times, which enables them to display 144 frames of content, significantly reduces frame losing.

As for lag, it’s pretty much the same story as frame losing. When refresh rate increases from 60Hz to 144Hz, the gap between frames significantly shortens, so that in the same time interval, more frames will be displayed. Therefore, their connection is faster and harder for our eyes to notice, which makes lag ignorable and our eyes to think the content becomes smoother.

Finally, the tearing. On a 144Hz monitor with V-Sync turned off, threshold for tearing to happen is very high. In some extreme conditions, you might still encounter tearing, but it should be unnoticeable because it’s simply hard for you nerves to detect.

Now that you know all the advantages of 144Hz monitors, you probably want one but think they might cost a lot. Great news for you is that we at Viotek are here to bring the glory of 144Hz to everyone by offering both entry level models and enthusiast models. No matter what your budget is, there is a match for you at viotek.com!

Game better with 144Hz on a Viotek monitor!