FPS way lower than refresh rate - noob question.
FPS way lower than refresh rate - noob question.
Hi everyone,
I just picked up a 240Hz Asus VG279QM monitor – it’s a little more powerful than what my current setup can really handle. I snagged it on sale at a local store and took advantage of the one-day return policy, saving me about $150 off the regular price.
I'm running a Ryzen 5 3600 with an RTX 2060, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, and so on. My question is this: since I’m not consistently hitting anywhere near 240 frames per second, does it actually matter what refresh rate I set my monitor to? For example, if I'm getting around 90fps in a game, should I lower the monitor’s refresh rate? Or does it simply not make a difference as long as my frame rate stays below that number? I’m really trying to understand how refresh rates work and am feeling a bit lost.
Thanks for your help!
I’m no expert – my knowledge comes from home theater setups, not gaming – but I’ll do my best to explain things. If anything I say isn’t quite right, please jump in and correct me!
Essentially, FPS stands for Frames Per Second: that’s how many times an image changes each second, which is what your monitor displays to create movement. Refresh rate, measured in Hertz (Hz), tells you how often the monitor scans for a new picture.
So, if you're sending out a signal at 24fps with a 30Hz refresh rate, everything should look correct. But if you’re outputting 60fps with a 30Hz refresh rate, you’ll still see motion, even though it could be much smoother – the monitor is only updating the image every two frames you send it.
I'm not an expert here and what I know I know from Home Theatre not from gaming, but will try to explain what I can. If something is wrong and someone knows better, please correct me.
FPS is basically Frames per second, the output you are feeding to a monitor, namely, how many times each second the frame changes (to create motion).
Refresh rate, measured in Hz, is the amount of times a monitor checks for a new image.
Thus, if you have 24fps and a refresh rate of 30Hz, your monitor is correctly showing everything you are feeding.
If you output 60fps with a 30Hz, assuming you see anything, you still get motion, but it could be twice as smooth, as the monitor refreshes the image you see every TWO frames you feed to it.
So yes, it's kinda usless to get a 500Hz monitor or something like that. As long as your refresh rate is above the FPS, you are fine. If the opposite happens, you might still be fine although not exploiting the full potential of your graphics.
Our human eye would be able to tell a difference up to around 150fps, so it wouldn't really matter being able to have a 200fps... Of course, I am talking about average here.