It used to be that if you wanted to make a laptop display that stands out from the crowd, you’d focus on pixel density or color gamut. But 2023 appears to be the year of high screen refresh rates.
In May Razer announced the first laptop with a 240 Hz OLED display. A few months later Dell announced it was bringing 480 Hz display options to its 17 inch gaming laptops. And now display maker BOE has introduced the first 600 Hz display for gaming laptops.
According to Chinese new site ITHome, BOE’s new 16 inch LCD display uses oxide backplane technology and supports refresh rates up to 600 Hz. That means the screen would draw a new frame every 1.66 milliseconds.
It’s unclear what kind of GPU you’d need to actually keep up with that… but it’s also unclear how many pixels your GPU will have to crank out, as I haven’t seen anything about the new display’s resolution yet.
It’s also unclear if most people will ever notice much difference between 600 Hz and 480 Hz (or 240 Hz for that matter), but all of these new displays are certainly a step up from the 60 Hz screens that have dominated the laptop space for years. And there are certainly some folks who have at least expressed interest in screens that go up to 600 Hz in recent years.
The new 600 Hz laptop display is just one of several new displays BOE is showing off at a the World Display Industry conference in China this week. Others include a 17.3 inch foldable OLED display with multiple fold points, allowing it to fold in a Z-shape, and larger-screen mini LED displays including a 34 inch, 165 Hz mini LED gaming monitor and an 86 inch 4K mini LED-backlit TV.
You can find more details at ITHome.
via VideoCardz
600hz isn’t about gaming. It’s about immersive smooth motion. If something crosses the screen in 1 second then at 240hz your 1080p image will jump by 4.5px per refresh. If you track a smoothly moving object, your eye will still pick up the difference between something moving across the screen vs something moving in reality – it doesn’t look real. So now that we have displays hitting HDR colour gamuts, the last thing to achieve true immersion is a frame rate that allows for true smooth motion. 1080hz isn’t required since an image’s edge is likely split across 2 pixels (anti-aliasing.)
4K is still pointless for a laptop. 4K streams only look better because they’re higher bitrate. It’s possible to discern a difference between 2k and 4k within the portion of the screen falling in the Fovea, but that’s a very small portion of the screen, and natural images don’t have the contrast to expose that difference… only text and test patterns.
I think you could play the immersion argument when talking about VR headsets, but no amount of smoothness is going to make you totally forget you’re staring at a rectangular, glowing laptop screen, watching a video or playing a game. At least, I want to believe that’s the case; people can get overly immersed in fiction too much as it is.
However, there does appear to be this phenomenon where whenever someone uses a high framerate display on a regular basis, everything slower just looks wrong. So I’ve been avoiding them for fear that if I replaced one I’d feel a need to replace all of them. But I wouldn’t call that immersion.
I own a 200hz monitor, and for general computer usage (non-gaming) I can’t tell the difference between 100hz and 200hz.
And when it comes to gaming, I feel the benefits a bit higher. I can notice the difference between 100hz and 144hz. But anything above 144hz, I can’t tell the difference.
You still need a source. If you’re talking about an immersive experience then the OS is hardly likely to be your goal.
48fps has generally been the cap for commercial video so there’s no video which can take advantage of this screen (and MEMS is far from perfect and would need to be quite powerful to hit those frame rates).
That leaves gaming and no current card is able to render that many frames per second at any reasonable resolution.
It’s good that the resolution is there, but we won’t really be able to use it properly for a while