I’m a little unsure what refresh rates are haha. I don’t want to invest more money into something I’m not informed on what it is/if it’s worth it.
So if I have a refresh rate of 60, and my computer says it’s running a game at >60 fps, does that mean the actual image output will cap at 60 fps?
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Refresh rate determines how quickly the image on the monitor changes. Higher refresh rates will lead to the perception of smoother movement.
Yes, your refresh rate is measured in hz, but that’s the maximum amount of frames your monitor can display in 1 second. Even if your system could produce 240 frames per second, your monitor will only be able to display 60 of them in a second because that’s how frequently it refreshes the images.
Your graphics card is a webcomic artist and your monitor is the website publisher.
Because the artist is poor, the website refreshes once a day. If the artist draws one frame per day, the timing is matched so that the new comic gets published the next day.
However, sometimes the artist has issues and takes two or more days to draw a frame. When the website doesn’t get any new uploads, it just displays the same comic as before. This can lead to timing issues as the daily comic erratically updates every 2 days, then 1, then 3, etc.
Sometimes, the artist draws rapidly, making more than one frame a day! But only one frame can be uploaded a day and only the latest frame gets uploaded. You can get into a situation where you skip displaying a frame, making the story feel like it’s jumping ahead!
Your monitor refreshes at a rate in Hertz which is a measure of “per second” much like frames per second. If your FPS goes below the refresh rate, your monitor will display the same frame more than once, sometimes leading to detectable stuttering. This effect is reduced if your monitor refreshes faster. If your FPS goes above the refresh rate, the monitor can’t refresh fast enough and you lose displayed frames.
New adaptive sync methods (Freesync, Gsync) tell the monitor to refresh exactly when a new frame is ready, eliminating these timing issues.
60 hertz means the screen refreshes 60 times per second. If your game is capped at 30 fps you see every frame 2 times in a row. This is the reason 60fps looks more smooth than 30 fps.
If, on the other hand, your graphics card renders 120 fps you would still only see 60 pictures per second, because that is the max of a 60 hertz display
refresh rate is how often your monitor checks what is to be displayed on the screen (computer by CPU/GPU) and displays it on the screen.
If your game computes, say 90 images per second, a 60Hz monitor will still only fetch 60 times per second whatever image the game has computed, and display it on the screen. So not all of these computed image will actually be displayed. Only 60 of them each second for a 60Hz monitor (and 144 of them per second for a 144Hz monitor, etc)
TLDR: if you have a 60Hz monitor, every fps about 60 is useless and you should just cap it at 60 in your game to avoid unnecessary energy consumption/heating from GPU (if game doesn’t offer that option you can also cap it at 60 fps in graphics card parameters)
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