Consoles with support for 120Hz and higher frame rates? Bugger that, we’re already moving onto 360Hz.
The insane figure was announced by Nvidia on Monday afternoon, with ASUS releasing the first monitor with the panel under their ROG Swift line. It’ll be available some time later this year, with demo units on display at CES in Las Vegas.
It’s worth noting that the 360Hz part is made possible by the panels from AU Optronics, so while ASUS will be first cabs off the rank, expect companies like Acer, Alienware, HP, Lenovo, MSI, Samsung and more to follow soon. The ASUS ROG Swift will be a G-Sync capable screen, but we’ll eventually see 360Hz models supporting (the much cheaper) FreeSync before long.
The news is actually something that Nvidia announced in Australia last year, when they presented a paper at SIGGRAPH Asia in Brisbane. Funnily enough, the abstract of that paper argued that reduced latency was more important than higher refresh rates, but higher refresh rates were important “largely because of the latency reduction it provides”.
The importance of high refresh rate visualisation cannot be understated. In essence, what our study shows is not that high refresh rate is unimportant, but that high refresh rate is important largely because of the latency reduction it provides. We present the first study to carefully examines these variables independently at higher modern refresh rates (>60 Hz). We show that a lower latency system can provide a higher level of player performance in FPS targeting tasks. We also show small but statistically significant improvement in performance of some tasks at higher refresh rates. We believe our study is a good step towards replacing conventional wisdom in esports with objective knowledge.
So in short, you’ll still need a beast PC capable of powering games at absurd frame rates, which you can’t even really do with a GTX 2080 Ti today. But who knows? There’s an awful lot of chatter about new video cards from AMD and Nvidia on the way, and it’s about time Nvidia’s cards had a process shrink.
Leave a Reply