Is 480Hz a Waste? - ASUS PG27AQDP OLED Monitor
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Is 480Hz a Waste? - ASUS PG27AQDP OLED Monitor
A while ago I got to have some hands on time with ASUSs new PG27AQDP, a monitor sporting an insane 480Hz refresh rate at 1440p, and as you can image it’s fast.
Really fast.
In fact this new monitor will without a doubt have the best motion clarity of any display money can buy today, and I would say that includes the dual mode 4K 240/1080p 480Hz monitor thanks to the higher resolution, but many may be asking the question, is 480Hz worth it, specifically will this monitor be worth $999 a very, very steep price for a 1440p monitor in 2024, and in order to answer that question first we need to establish the main advantages a higher refresh rate can bring.
Latency. A typical console game is 60FPS which comes in at a total latency of roughly 16.7ms of latency.
A typical PC monitor is capable of 144Hz or roughly half the latency at just 6.9ms at the cost of over double the performance. And for many this reduction in latency is such a great experience and competitive advantage they opt for a 240Hz monitor which has just 4.16ms of latency meaning a further 2.7ms reduction in latency.
And as you can see this is where diminishing returns begin to set in.
Beyond this there have been 360Hz options available for some time reducing latency by roughly 1.4ms to a total of 2.8ms, but now this tiny improvement comes at the cost of an additional 50% performance.
And finally we have the new ASUS PG27AQDP at 480Hz bringing an insanely low roughly 2.1ms of latency. However this comes at the cost of another 33% performance over 360Hz, and is less than 1ms faster. In fact I don’t think most games could tell the latency difference of less than 1ms as that is an unbelievably small difference.
However
We do need to talk about motion performance, as this definitely is substantial and noticeable.
As you can see 120Hz is overall fairly blurry in motion still even on an OLED, but at 240Hz that blur greatly disappears allowing you to make out details on characters in motion and make better split second decisions on where to aim.
This advantage is further improved at 360Hz, but the blur is still noticeable. Only at 480Hz does it seem like motion blur is almost entirely eliminated leading to insanely good motion clarity. In fact it now almost resembles the example screenshot, and all text in motion is clearly visible. This level of performance that will be afforded by the PG27AQDP is unmatched and may be the reason for some to part with a thousand big ones on this new monitor.
Now that being said overall is 480Hz a waste? Yes and no.
In terms of latency, yes many would consider it a waste over 360 and maybe even 240, but in term of motion performance it’s more complicated.
Some may still consider it a waste, but many others would see this as a worthwhile advantage and large quality of life improvement worth buying for competitive games, just be aware that unlike 4K 240Hz, not only will this be GPU demanding, but you will need a monster CPU, and even the fastest ones on the market may be unable to power most of your games over 360Hz, so be sure to checkout benchmarks in your hardware before pulling the trigger, but if you are interested in picking one up I’ll have an affiliate link in the description below as well as a link to my full review when it becomes available.
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