What does 144hz mean?
What does 144hz actually mean? And is there a very noticeable difference when you play video games or watch videos compared to a 60hz rate.
Is it technical mumbo jumbo used for marketing for do 144hz monitors truly provide a more responsive gaming experience?
We’re going to bring all the facts to life.
The Short Answer To What Does 144hz Mean?
Before we dive into what 144hz means we first have to cover the basics, and that is the refresh rate. As 144hz monitors use a specific type of refresh rate it is best we start here.
What is refresh rate?
The refresh rate is the number of times per second that a screen refreshes itself to show a new image.
Its unit of measurement is the hertz (hz) which is where the 144hz number comes from.
As you can imagine a higher refresh rate is super helpful if you are playing competitive games and allows a smoother gameplay plus better image quality.
Less needed if you aren’t running games and just using your monitor for excel and word at work.
So back to 144hz and what it means
Now we know that the hertz of a monitor is the number of times per second a display will refresh itself to show a new image it becomes clear what 144hz means.
A 144hz monitor will refresh its display 144 times per second. That means the frame rate is 100ms/ 144 which means a frame rate of 0.69ms.
This impacts the image quality and how smooth the gaming experience is. A higher refresh rate means less delay between transitions leading to a smoother transition to the human eye.
What is the maximum refresh rate possible?
There are some monitors that go up to 240hz, significantly higher and will eliminate screen tearing in nearly all pc gaming choices you could make.
An upgrade from the most common refresh rates 60hz vs 144hz monitors makes a big difference in a video game experience. Which makes sense given how large the increase is, similar to this upgrading from 144hz to 240hz would also be a big difference to the human eye and give an extra competitive edge to any fps games.
It is worth mentioning that the label on the box e.g. 60hz vs 144hz vs 240hz is the maximum refresh rate modern monitors will show, the monitor with a variable refresh rate still needs to check with the graphics card used or gaming to figure out what to adjust the refresh rate to.
Is a 144hz a good refresh rate?
On a monitor, Yes.
Plasma tvs often have refresh rates closer to the 240hz range but in terms of computer hardware when a display refreshes itself and provides a new image 144 times per second this is fantastic for nearly all games you will play.
As mentioned before the most common pc gaming monitors are the 60hz monitor and the 144hz monitor and the difference between the two especially when playing a competitive video game on a good graphics card is night and day.
Go with the 144hz monitor and you won’t regret the higher refresh rate.
What fps do you need for 144hz?
fps or frames per second/ frame rate is how many frames will be available in a gaming experience.
As such frame rate and refresh rate and closely linked, for a 144hz refresh rate we recommend the corresponding frame rate of144fps to run games the way they were meant to run.
If the fps is lower than 144 and you are using a 144hz refresh rate a fast paced game would appear blurry, not ideal for any gamer or video streamer.
Gaming Refresh rate
A few common scenarios for using a high refresh rate are gaming, streaming and animation. Of course the most common are gaming and streaming so we’ll focus on these.
The best game experience needs a powerful system that doesn’t have a low frame rate. Most games are designed to have a low response time to as frames are generated by the game they are sent to the monitor to display.
After all this is what will produce the best image quality and smoother gaming experience. A lot of games want it to be as close to a life like experience as possible and a constraint historically has been the frames per second vs what the eye processes. To get this as close as possible a higher refresh rate is used to generate a faster game.
A big issue worth noting here is screen tearing, if you have a 60hz monitor and a game that rendered faster than that a at a higher frame rate of 100 fps then this will lead to screen tearing as the monitor can’t keep up with the game.
The easiest way to solve this is to get a monitor with higher refresh rates. As the refresh rate increases to does the monitors ability to process a better image and graphics.
The higher price of the 144hz over a 60hz monitor will solve this and allow you to play games that generate frames much faster.
A 144hz monitor should handle all modern games as modern games were designed to run on modern monitors.
Watching Videos
Videos are a different ball game as it comes down to how the content is produced.
At the higher end youtube shows frames at a rate of 60fps while movies are generally produced in the 30-60fps range.
As this is what they are produced in this is all they output to the monitor which is vastly different to a game which produces an individual frame in real time.
Even blu ray discs, a relatively modern video technology don’t require a higher refresh rate than a 60hz monitor will provide.
So while a 144hz monitor is great for gaming the higher refresh rate isn’t needed for streaming netflix, youtube or movies.
Wrapping Up – A 144hz refresh rate
The refresh rate mentioned on your monitor of plasma tvs indicates how often a display refreshes the image on the screen.
A 144hz rate means that this display refreshes at 144 times per second, which is a fast rate for a single monitor. Until such a time where other technologies come along and increase the ability of a screen to process and display a quicker rate this is nearly as good as it gets.
An important factor to consider when choosing the refresh rate of a pc platform is how you want to use it.
If you want to play video games then a higher frame rate and refresh rate for a monitor is very helpful as it helps to reduce the response time and provides a better in game experience.
For anything else a lower 60hz monitor will do just fine.