How much added value does 500 Hertz really bring? Source: BOE
A new technology for monitors is said to allow refresh rates of up to 500 frames per second. This is made possible by gaming monitors with 500 Hertz and the so-called oxide semiconductor display technology. This comes from the Chinese technology group BOE. The Chinese news portal Sina introduces the technology (Article in Chinese, via Toms Hardware).
So far, the upper limit for Hertz numbers for gaming monitors was 360 Hz. That is enormous and in many cases rather impractical. We will explain later why this is so. The first 360 Hertz monitor was presented at CES 2020. According to Nvidia, the higher refresh rate should even bring better performance in games:
Fastest monitor in the world
Player TFT presented with 360 Hertz
Monitors with more Hertz bring advantages. The higher refresh rate allows you to see what’s happening in the game faster. At 60 hertz, for example, you get a new image every 16.6 milliseconds, at 240 hertz it’s around 4.2 milliseconds. With the 500 Hertz that the BOE monitor creates, a new image is calculated every 2 milliseconds.
However, it is difficult to say how much this will affect your performance in a shooter, for example. Here perception is subjective and differs from person to person. From previous tests, however, we can say that the difference from 60 to 144 Hertz is usually the most noticeable.
We therefore assume that the jump from 240 to 500 hertz will be noticeable, but will hardly make a significant difference for many, even though the number of hearts has more than doubled. Should we get our hands on such a monitor, we would be happy to test it out for you.
Your hardware must be able to handle the FPS
However, before you can even reap the benefits of high frames per second, you need hardware that can do it. Because each image must of course also be calculated, which puts a greater load on the hardware with more FPS.
FPS numbers that are too high can also often be unnecessary. You can find out why this is the case and how we limit the FPS in games in the following article:
Protect your hardware!
How and why everyone should limit FPS
Even with the most powerful graphics cards (if you can get them at all), you can often only manage a little more than 100 FPS in triple-A games like Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, and that in Full HD resolution, as our benchmarks show. Few triple-A games even allow 200 FPS and 500 frames per second is mostly not possible.
The situation is different with e-sports titles such as Counter-Strike or Rocket League, that require less computing power and use game engines optimized for high frame rates. There are likely to be measurable differences between 240 and 500 Hertz, but how big they are in practice is an issue that still needs more extensive testing.
The conclusion is clear: In our opinion, the 500 Hertz monitor from BOE is little more than a technical gimmick in many cases. If anything, it makes sense in the professional gaming environment. It is still completely open whether it will ever come onto the market in this form, at least at the moment it is only available as a prototype.
how do you see it? Do you think you could noticeably benefit from 500 Hertz? Or is that just completely overkill? Write it to us in the comments!
