And why not ? At 600Hz, the latency would drop to 1.66ms. The race for refresh rate records continues.
Screen maker BOE (they supply screens for the Vivo X90 and X90 Pro, for example) has announced the first 600Hz laptop LCD screen. Until now, the 480Hz refresh rate was the maximum available, as seen on some Alienware PCs.
600Hz…that’s the ” refresh rate which is used to describe the number of times a screen updates in a single second. It is measured in hertz (Hz), most conventional screens have a refresh rate of 60 Hz. On smartphones, TV or PC, higher refresh rate models are increasingly common. Some manufacturers, like Apple, hide this number behind marketing terms likePromotionused to describe the 120Hz display of the iPad Pro or MacBook Pro 14 and 16.
In recent years, especially with the arrival of Nvidia RTX cards, the PS5 or the Xbox Series X, gaming at 120 Hz and 144 Hz has been in the spotlight. At the high end there are 240 Hz and 360 Hz monitors, but here we are talking about 600 Hz.
600 Hz, useful or not?
Is it useful? Not necessarily. As shown in the table below, the time between each frame decreases considerably when going from 60Hz to 144Hz, reducing it by 9.73ms. However, that number drops to 2.77ms if you go from 144Hz to 240Hz, 1.39ms from 240Hz to 360Hz, and so on. There are diminishing returns here as you go up the frame rate. At 600Hz, latency would drop to 1.66ms (logical, since latency is 16.67ms at 60Hz).
| Refresh rate | Time between frames |
|---|---|
| 60Hz | 16.67ms |
| 144Hz | 6.94ms |
| 240Hz | 4.17ms |
| 360Hz | 2.78ms |
| 480Hz | 2.08ms |
| 600Hz | 1.66ms |
Although everyone perceives motion and latency differently, the vast majority of people will probably struggle to see a difference above 240Hz. Going higher doesn’t hurt performance, but for people who aren’t gamers esports, your money will definitely be better spent on other features. This race for Hz mainly benefits marketing. Still, manufacturers would probably be better off really reserving that precious bandwidth for HDR and uncompressed data instead of pushing the hertz beyond 240Hz.
During the conference, BOE made further announcements. This is the case of the first foldable 17.3-inch f-OLED screen which will be intended for laptops, such as the Zenbook 17 Fold. Or a 34-inch mini LED screen with a refresh rate of 165 Hz and high brightness (HDR1000), it will compete with OLED in this niche.
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