How Fast Can You See?
HOW FAST CAN THE HUMAN eye—and brain—see? And more particularly, do extremely high refresh rates help? These questions come up frequently in online discussions, and it gets awfully muddy when you start talking to experts on vision. Some note that the human nervous system works on electro-chemical pulses running at around 13Hz, others suggest 20–24Hz is sufficient, and still others push for as many hertz as possible.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Nvidia and its display partners fall into this latter category. This year, Asus and Acer will release 360Hz 1080p gaming displays targeted at esports professionals, using Nvidia G-Sync tech. But Nvidia isn’t just pushing ever-faster refresh rates without some scientific backing, and at CES, I was able to go hands-on with these ultra-fast displays. Let me just say that any so-called expert who suggests lower refresh rates and frame rates don’t matter for games has never actually played games. There is a huge difference between 30Hz and 60Hz. More importantly, there’s a noticeable difference between 60Hz, 144Hz, 240Hz, and even 360Hz—in the right scenarios.
If you think the 50 percent increase from 240 to 360 won’t matter much, I was right there with you. And seeing them side by side running a BlurBusters demo ( http://tinyurl.com/wlb6eqw), the difference wasn’t massive—but it was perceivable, and that’s from a guy in his mid-40s without perfect eyesight.
Even more impressive to me was the game skill testing between 60Hz and 360Hz. Nvidia had two displays set up and running first-person shooter tests. The first involved sniping a bot down a hallway in a CS:GO map, where you only have a split second between seeing the bot jump through a doorway and shooting it. The problem is that input latency from the 60Hz refresh rate and frame rate narrows your reaction window to an absurd level. Out of 50 attempts, at 60Hz I was able to snipe the bot (which appears at random intervals) once—and I wasn’t alone. Even the top esports pros were only connecting on about 20 percent of shots. Flip to the 360Hz display, and I jumped to around 80 percent hit rates, with pros getting closer to 100 percent.
It felt contrived, sure, but there’s no denying input lag can make a difference in a competitive shooter. The second test was more realistic, using a custom RainbowSix Siege test where you had to spin around and headshot a slowly moving foe as many times as possible in 45 seconds. At 60Hz, everything felt sluggish and I managed a score of 15, while at 360Hz, the difference was immediately obvious, and I scored 21 hits. I tried going back and forth between the two, and the scores were relatively consistent.
That’s not to say that everyone should buy a 360Hz display as soon as they go on sale. But for highly competitive players, Nvidia’s research indicates most pros improved in performance by 3–4 percent when moving from 240Hz to 360Hz in games like CS:GO. The caveat being: Of course it would be
CS:GO, one of only a few shooters where 360fps is achievable.
If you’re more into singleplayer, 360Hz isn’t really a factor. I’ve tested dozens of games using the fastest hardware available, and only a few can break 240fps at minimum settings and 1080p using an i9-9900K and RTX 2080 Ti. None hit 360fps. Even so, we’re not done yet, as there was talk of future displays targeting 1,000Hz. Or maybe we just go full-on Star
Trek holodeck and call it a day.
Flip to a 360Hz display, and I jumped to 80 percent hit rates, with pros getting closer to 100.