FPSCalc › Refresh Rate & Motion Clarity Calculator
What a refresh rate really buys you: milliseconds per frame, how much of that reaches your eyes as quicker updates, and how many pixels your screen smears while you track a moving target.
The rate your desktop actually runs at — check Windows Advanced display, not the box.
Set both equal to see a single panel's numbers instead of a comparison.
Horizontal pixels decide how far a given angle reaches across the panel.
106.3° is CS2's 90 horizontal on a 16:9 screen. VALORANT's 103 is already horizontal.
What is moving on screen
Blur is driven by how fast the image moves across your pixels, whatever causes it.
5.5 m/s is a running player in most shooters.
Angular speed is highest when the target is dead ahead, which is the case computed here.
Two entries are measured values from RTINGS; the rest are typical figures, not a specific model.
0 ms is the ideal case; real panels never reach it.
Sample-and-hold shows every frame for its full frame time. Strobing flashes it for far less.
Use your 1% low, not the average, if you care about the worst case.
The frame rate you fall back to in the messy moments.
| Metric | Value | How it is worked out |
|---|
| Refresh rate | ms per frame | Saved vs your current Hz | Image jump at your px/s | Min input lag | GPU needs |
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Frame times and minimum input lag figures follow RTINGS: they measure input lag with a sensor at the centre of the screen, so the floor at any refresh rate is half a frame. Their published table gives 16.67 ms at 60 Hz down to 1.39 ms at 720 Hz.
| Blur target | Refresh rate needed | Closest real tier | Or strobe this long |
|---|
Because a sample-and-hold frame is held for exactly one frame time, the smear in pixels is simply your pixels-per-second divided by the refresh rate. Halving the blur needs double the Hz — which is why the tiers past 240 Hz buy you so little.
Yes, by a wide margin. Frame time is 1000 divided by the refresh rate, so 60 to 144 Hz removes 9.72 ms per frame while 144 to 240 Hz removes only 2.78 ms — less than a third as much, for usually more money. The first jump takes back 66% of everything even 500 Hz could give you over 60 Hz.
Because response time and persistence are different things. OLED pixels finish changing almost instantly, but the panel then holds that finished image for the whole frame — 16.7 ms at 60 Hz — while your eyes keep moving across it. Blur Busters calls this sample-and-hold, and it is unaffected by how fast the pixels switched.
Strobing attacks the same variable with far more leverage. Motion blur follows the length of time each frame is visible, and strobe modes like ULMB or DyAc cut that from a full frame to around 1 ms — roughly what a 1000 Hz sample-and-hold panel would give you. The cost is brightness, some flicker, and you still need the frame rate to keep up.
It lowers the floor rather than the measured lag. RTINGS measures input lag with a sensor at the centre of the screen, so the minimum possible is half a frame: 8.33 ms at 60 Hz, 3.47 ms at 144 Hz, 2.09 ms at 240 Hz. A slow monitor can waste that headroom entirely, so the refresh rate only sets what is achievable.
Only if your frame rate sits below the refresh rate, which it usually does in demanding titles. Above the maximum the panel rate caps what you see; below it, adaptive sync lets the screen wait for each frame instead of repeating or tearing the previous one. If your 1% low is comfortably under the monitor's rate, turn it on.
Because blur scales with image speed, and a flick moves the whole view several hundred degrees per second. At 500 degrees per second on a 1920-pixel-wide 106° screen the whole picture slides about 9000 pixels per second, which even at 2.78 ms persistence still smears 25 pixels. That is why high-Hz helps most during smooth tracking, not during the flick itself.