My friend recently got a 144hz monitor for his desktop, and it was impressive. Despite what some people say, it does make a big difference. It had me thinking though- you find those rates on desktop LCDs, but never on laptop displays. Is there a specific reason why?
My problem with it is that you have to have an extremely high end setup to get those kinds of framerates on Ultra settings. You can turn the settings way down, but to me that defeats the purpose of having a nice setup. 60fps is good enough, I think. I also think you'll notice a lot bigger difference playing on a QHD or 4K display. That's a better investment, I think. I'm talking about graphically-taxing modern games.
I understand about gaming, but the overall windows experience is better with 144hz enabled. If you get a chance, see a 60hz and a 144hz monitor next to each other, and do simple things like move the mouse and windows around. 144hz is beautiful, and easier on the eyes than 60hz. A 4K monitor sure would be nice, but for the time being it is much cheaper to buy a 144hz monitor than it is a 4K display.
I've actually never seen one, except for HDTVs that use that "motion enhancement" crap to simulate 120Hz, which doesn't really count. I have seen an 85Hz display, and I could definitely see a difference, but it wasn't huge. 4K monitors are still pretty expensive, but QHD displays have gone down quite a bit in price. A QHD display also makes a pretty big difference for everyday computing, not just gaming. I think it's inevitable that eventually all displays will be super high resolution. I'm not sure if the same can be said of 120/144Hz.
Being the owner of a 120Hz monitor, I can assure you that gaming as well as using Windows just feels better than with a 60Hz monitor. The only problem with that is that to achieve 120Hz or 144Hz, you have to use a TN LCD panel, which is considered by many as a "bad" display technology because it doesn't has viewing angle as wide as other technologies like IPS or oven OLED, and the colour reproduction is also not as good as with an IPS/OLED monitor. The problem with laptops is that as far as I know, only low-cost ones have TN panels and I guess manufacturers don't want to include a "bad" display in a high end laptop (but that's only my guess), and since 3D isn't really popular, there is no real point for them in making high refresh rate laptops. As for me, I think the narrower viewing angles is fine for a desktop monitor because you don't usually move it arround, but since laptops are portable, you are not always looking at it from the same angle and as such a 60Hz IPS panel makes perfect sense. Also, if you're interested in high refresh rate monitors, I highly recommend you to consult this website: http://www.blurbusters.com/ as they give a lot of info on high refresh rate panels, low-persistence, Light Boost, G-Sync, etc. Pretty much everything that is related to the idea of having "smoother looking" monitors. If your friend's monitor is compatible with Light Boost, I highly recommend him to follow blur busters' instructions to enable this technology in order to get an even more responsive monitor (as can be seen in this picture from the website).
I think one company offers 120Hz IPS panels, but as far as I know they just overclock the panel, I don't think anyone actually build 120Hz IPS panels (not 100% sure though).
What's the technical limitation of IPS panels? pixel fill rate or response rate? It sounds like total BS, but according to Google that's absolutely true. What a strange quirk that hasn't been worked out.
Honestly I don't know why, the only reason I can imagine is that 120Hz IPS, at least the overclocked ones, may die very quickly because of the overclock. As for a "native" 120Hz IPS, maybe they also die quickly? Another reason I can think of is that, since IPS is slower than TN, 120Hz could look bad on an IPS because since there are twice as many frames at 120Hz, you would also see twice as many "ghost" frames. I can already see this effect on my 120Hz, but only slightly thanks to TN's fast response time.
Uhh, what? It's easier on the eye to have a picture refresh itself 144 times a second rather than 60? That's like saying a disco strobe light going full pelt is easier on the eye than flip-flops in time with the crotchet notes.
Well, it's right when we talking about CRTs. 1980x1440@185Hz looks fantastic. For LCD panels it only means smoother motion due to ability to run with higher frame rates with vsync on. Actually most eye strain comes not from panel's refresh rate but it's backlight - excessive brightness, low viewing angles, for LED backlight - PWM modulation which cause whole screen to flicker (unlike CRT, where it's one line at the time as the actual ray scans the screen). The only solution for PWM flicker problem is max brightness on display and software adjustments of video signal (which isn't good for picture quality). Back to 120+ Hz laptops. Well main problem is just to find a laptop with a decent panel, at least with same picture quality as cheap (about 3 hundreds) IPS display. Most, well just suck compared to decent desktop ones, even if laptop is 5 times more expensive than your desktop. Well less than 30% of laptops got IPS/xVA, whatever-that-is-not-TN displays. For me it's better to get a decent IPS than TN with 9999999Hz refresh rate.
I felt it to be less harsh, but I guess it was a bad assumption given that that monitor is a good 3 years newer than the other ones that were hooked up. Thanks for the answers everyone. I had no clue that TN panels were the only available option for rates beyond 120Hz.
My MacBook Pro has a 13" display with a resolution of 2560x1600. It's interesting because, at that resolution at that size of the display, everything has to be resized to be legible. It's actually possible to view it as if it were a regular display, and when you do that, everything is miniscule. It makes a big difference in everyday use, especially for text. It's less like looking at a computer screen and more like reading printed words, except that it's very bright. Of course that technology has been available for quite a while, but it's only just starting to be put into laptop displays. I think in the future it will become the norm.
Certainly so. Many more laptop manufacturers are moving towards 3K displays (2880x1620, for 16:9) The next laptop I'd like to get is a Lenovo W540, which has that 3K display as an option. And there are plenty of other manufacturers doing the same; I'm fairly surprised Samsung hasn't done that with their laptops, with their phones having such high resolution. The S5 is supposed to be 5" with 2560x1600!
