Today, gaming laptops are often advertised with high-refresh-rate displays, and these panels are now one of the key features that separate them from everyday non-gaming notebooks. It’s implied that they improve the gaming experience, but the technicalities are often left unexplained.
Let's deep-dive into the details on high-refresh displays: how they work, how they relate to other factors and specifications (such as screen resolution), and most important, how many hertz you really need on your next gaming laptop.
The Basics: Refresh Rates Explained
The screen on your laptop or computer monitor must redraw its picture many times per second to make fluid motion possible. How often the screen can redraw itself is determined by its refresh rate, which is measured in hertz (Hz). A screen with a higher refresh rate can redraw itself more frequently.
For a refresh-rate baseline, consider that most Hollywood movies are presented at 24 frames (or pictures) per second, just enough for smooth motion. For a screen to show the movie properly, it must redraw itself at least 24 times per second, or operate at 24Hz in refresh-rate terms. One hertz translates to one frame per second (fps) - GamingView
The number of frames (or the frame rate) needed to experience the "illusion" of smooth motion depends on the scenario. Movies can get away with 24fps; PCs can’t. If computer screens refreshed that slowly, your mouse would look like it was skipping rather than gliding across the screen. It would ruin the computing experience.
For that reason
- The standard refresh rate for most laptop and desktop monitors is 60Hz, allowing them to show up to 60fps.
- Content played at that rate will appear truly smooth with no stuttering or jerking.
- That might make you wonder: Why should I pay for anything higher?
High-refresh screens are broadly defined as those operating above 60Hz. High-refresh screens in gaming laptops start at 120Hz and top out, at this writing, at a blistering 300Hz, with in-between increments of 144Hz and 240Hz.
The primary benefit of a high refresh rate is that motion can appear more fluid. In a one-second scene where a car drives by, a 60Hz display would be limited to showing 60 frames, where a 120Hz screen could show 120 frames. (The assumption is that the content was produced at 120fps.)
The scene will look smoother at 120Hz/120fps because there is a smaller time gap between frame changes. A frame endures just 1/120th of a second, versus 1/60th of a second on the 60Hz screen.
Before getting too far into refresh rates, let’s visit another common screen specification that is often advertised alongside refresh rate.
Refresh Rate Versus Response Time
Computer screens are made of millions of pinprick-size elements called pixels that can independently change their color. It’s easy to imagine how a picture, a game, or a movie requires pixels to act like a puzzle, each displaying the appropriate color to represent the image.
Response time, measured in milliseconds, is how quickly pixels react to change in color.
Examples
- Lower times are always better, but response time isn’t always comparable
- Standalone monitor makes, for that matter.
- Unlike refresh rate, there is no industry standard for measuring response time.
Screen makers commonly measure response time as the time it takes for pixels to change from gray to white to gray again, a transition that takes less time than the classic transition from black to white to black. But even if the measurement scenario were the same between two screens, there can still be variances in measurement method, due to the lack of an industry standard.
In short, don’t count out a laptop just because its screen’s response time is higher than another’s. As a guideline, response times of less than 5 milliseconds (5ms) are considered low for gaming laptops. Lower numbers are better, all else being equal.
