Old monitor and simracing

[Santiago Garcia]

I have a Dell U2211H monitor since ten years now. It's a 1080p, 60hz 8ms IPS monitor. I've been playing racing games for the past five years with a Logitech G27 wheel, not competitively but in the most serious way possible.

In the last couple of years I've thought about buying a new one but for different reasons I never made the change. One of the reasons (apart from the economic instability in my country) are my doubts about if I will feel the difference between my 60hz monitor and, let's say, a 120 or 144hz monitor with less response time. Or put another way: is it possible that my current monitor, in some way, limits the way I play racing games? I mean maybe with a new modern monitor I'll get a better racing experience, better lap times, etc. Unfortunately I don't have a friend who plays racing games or has a "gaming" monitor to compare or see the differences myself. So, I need your advices on the subject.

If you need to know, the components of my PC are: Intel 4690K, 8Gb of ram, Nvidia GTX 1070 ans a Samsung SSD.

 

[dud]

/sub

I am wondering about this, too. I play 4k @ 60 Hz and have no way of knowing what I might be missing. I always thought that I am just not sensitive to refresh rates.

I guess one way would be to go down to 45 Hz or so and see whether that makes a difference for me.

 

[Case_]

Not really. We're talking a few miliseconds of lag that can be gained. The average human response to a visual stimulus is around 250 ms. It won't really matter much if the overall response time of your rig is 30 ms or 40 ms, you are still the weakest link there by far. The difference between 60 fps image and 120 fps image is just 8.3 ms. And it's pretty much never the main contributor to any input lag you may experience with a game.

That of course assumes you have done everything to lower the input lag of your setup as much as possible. If your current setup has a lot of input lag, then of course you might gain by lowering it, which might happen indirectly as a result of your upgrade. But that's a different thing entirely and not really related to high-refresh monitors specifically, just to the general tweaking of your setup.

High refresh just looks nicer - more lifelike and ideally also more fluid. But remember your PC should also be able to deliver those 120 or 144 Hz consistently, and that can be a challenge in sims.