maximumpc.com MAR 2020 MAXIMUMPC 15
Jarred Walton
TECH TALK
Jarred Walton
TECH TALK
Jarred Walton has been a
PC and gaming enthusiast
for over 30 years.How Fast Can You See?
Perhaps not surprisingly, Nvidia and its display
partners fall into this latter category. This year,
Asus and Acer will release 360Hz 1080p gaming
displays targeted at esports professionals, using
Nvidia G-Sync tech. But Nvidia isn’t just pushing
ever-faster refresh rates without some scientific
backing, and at CE S, I was able to go hands-on with
these ultra-fast displays. Let me just say that any
so-called expert who suggests lower refresh rates
and frame rates don’t matter for games has never
actually played games. There is a huge difference
between 30Hz and 60Hz. More importantly, there’s
a noticeable difference between 60Hz, 144Hz,
240Hz, and even 360Hz—in the right scenarios.
If you think the 50 percent increase from 240 to
360 won’t matter much, I was right there with you.
A n d s e e i n g t h e m s i d e b y s i d e r u n n i n g a B l u r B u s t e r s
demo (http://tinyurl.com/wlb6eqw), the difference
wasn’t massive—but it was perceivable, and that’s
from a guy in his mid-40s without perfect eyesight.
Even more impressive to me was the game skill
testing between 60Hz and 360Hz. Nvidia had two
displays set up and running first-person shooter
tests. The first involved sniping a bot down a hallway
in a CS:GO map, where you only have a split second
between seeing the bot jump through a doorway
and shooting it. The problem is that input latency
from the 60Hz refresh rate and frame rate narrows
your reaction window to an absurd level. Out of 50
attempts, at 60Hz I was able to snipe the bot (which
appears at random intervals) once—and I wasn’t
HOW FAST CAN THE HUMAN eye—and brain—see? And more particularly,
do extremely high refresh rates help? These questions come up frequently
in online discussions, and it gets awfully muddy when you start talking to
experts on vision. Some note that the human nervous system works on
electro-chemical pulses running at around 13Hz, others suggest 20–24Hz
is sufficient, and still others push for as many hertz as possible.
alone. Even the top esports pros
were only connecting on about 20
percent of shots. Flip to the 360Hz
display, and I jumped to around 80
percent hit rates, with pros getting
closer to 100 percent.
I t felt contr i v e d , sur e, b u t ther e’s
no denying input lag can make a
difference in a competitive shooter.
The second test was more realistic,
using a custom Rainbow Six Siege
test where you had to spin around
and headshot a slowly moving foe
as many times as possible in 45
seconds. At 60Hz, everything felt
sluggish and I managed a score of
15, while at 360Hz, the difference
was immediately obvious, and I
scored 21 hits. I tried going back
and forth between the two, and the
scores were relatively consistent.
That’s not to say that everyone
should buy a 360Hz display as soon
as they go on sale. But for highlycompetitive players, Nvidia’s
research indicates most pros
improved in performance by 3–
percent when moving from 240Hz
to 360Hz in games like CS:GO. The
caveat being: Of course it would be
CS:GO, one of only a few shooters
where 360fps is achievable.
If you’re more into single-
player, 360Hz isn’t really a factor.
I’ve tested dozens of games using
the fastest hardware available,
and only a few can break 240fps
at minimum settings and 1080p
using an i9-9900K and RTX 2080
Ti. None hit 360fps. Even so, we’re
not done yet, as there was talk of
future displays targeting 1,000Hz.
Or maybe we just go full-on Star
Tr ek holodeck and call it a day.Flip to a 360Hz display, and I
jumped to 80 percent hit rates,
with pros getting closer to 100.
Asus will be one of the first to ship a 360Hz 1080p display.