Linus Tech Tips
1 HN recommender · recommended in 9 months, 2020–2025
36:12 · 11M views · Nov 21, 2019
Linus Tech Tips tests whether higher frame rates and refresh rates improve gaming performance, using Shroud and other players on aim and reaction tests at 60, 144 and 240Hz. The video is sponsored by Nvidia.
HN commenters cite it as informal evidence that higher refresh rates measurably help both pro and casual players, even though it is more entertainment than rigorous science.
10 comments from Hacker News
This could work for casual FPS games, but for competitive FPS gaming like Counter-Strike or Valorant, 20ms is a deal breaker for players who want to perform at a high level. Pro FPS players consistently choose monitors with the highest refresh rates available. This informal experiment is quite convincing Does High FPS make you a better gamer?: this video A 60hz refresh rate corresponds to 16.67 milliseconds frame time, and a 240hz rate corresponds to 4.2 milliseconds. The issue here is not reaction time, but "feel". Even a moderately skilled player can test this for themselves by switching between refresh rates. Specifically the "feel" is the relationship between moving the mouse and the shift of perspective on the screen. Low refresh rates cause players to over correct their aim as the gaps between frames are larger, and the motion on the screen is less smooth.
Well the benefit is most obvious for a competitive video gamer. Lets say they're having a sniper battle in a video game, the first to click will kill the other player. Somebody with a 60hz monitor might have to wait 17ms for the enemies image to render on screen so they can react. Somebody with a 240hz monitor might only have to wait 4ms. When reaction times in a competitive game are around 150 to 200ms that's a pretty large swing. See this: this video This article is also interesting: [LINK] . Beyond that, I think latency has a significant performance impact on many human tasks, I know that humans in videoconferencing can detect extremely small differences in latency. Higher refresh rate I think outside of latency benefits does allow some things to be more easily perceived like text in motion which normally blurs.
> Most professional CS is played at 4:3 stretched so the PC is pulling in hundreds of FPS That's unlikely to be true anymore. Even a modestly modern GPU can produce 100's of FPS in CS:GO at 1920x1080 or higher resolutions. Benchmarks for the 3080 were showing 400-500 FPS in CS:GO at 1440p resolutions. After maybe double your screen refresh rate, all excess FPS don't matter and are effectively wasted. Pro's mostly use 144Hz monitors because 240Hz is indistinguishable[1] - making anything above 288FPS basically a waste (and it's debatable if anything above 144FPS with FreeSync enabled is a waste too). [1] this video
>Worst case we're talking about an additional input latency due to vsync of maybe 1/60s? 16ms? its generally closer to 2 frames with V-Sync [1][2] > I don't believe 16ms is significant for non pro level eSports players and even skeptical it's a big factor at that level. It actually is fairly significant. LTT did a series of tests with pro players in CS:GO focused on monitor refresh rate, but one test they did was 60hz/60fps vs 60hz/300fps and found that reducing the render latency drastically improved performance despite the display still being locked to 60hz. this video [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]
> you're moving around too fast to really appreciate (or even notice) the difference RT gives you over fake reflections. You're also at a disadvantage running the graphics on High. In any game that I want to play at a "competitive" level, I always put the settings to the absolute lowest settings so the computer always gets 100+ FPS. No reason to even try to optimize. The point is winning, not it looking good. In fact, in some games, the developers have had to go back and make it more fair for higher settings because of low settings hiding tall grass. this video