While 360 Hz screens have recently made a breakthrough in a segment aimed at competitive gamers, manufacturers are already considering moving up a gear with the arrival of 480 Hz panels.
The race for responsiveness continues in the display market, where manufacturers have been offering monitors with a refresh rate of 360 Hz for some time. The value of having such fast panels is debated, but that will not prevent them not to try to go even further. Indeed, we learn that AU Optronics is currently working on 480 Hz models, capable of refreshing the image displayed 480 times every second.
The first prototype of its kind, visible in a video posted on YouTube by AU Optronics, is a 24-inch diagonal panel displaying in Full HD (1920 x 1080 pixels) with a response time of less than 1 ms, specially addressed to competitive gamers. . A second screen of its kind, designed for laptops, is also mentioned. With a diagonal of 16 inches and still in Full HD, it would display a slightly higher response time, slightly over 1 ms. In both cases, AU Optronics relies on a TN type panel, a less expensive technology that allows faster screens to be designed, but which imposes contrasts, color rendering and viewing angles lower than IPS or VA type models. .
AU Optronics’ communication was made just before the 2022 edition of SID Week in San José (California), a show dedicated to the display market, opens. The manufacturer has promised to demonstrate next-generation use cases there, which we hope will include 480 Hz.
In addition to the marketing promise and the lure of the big figure, it is necessary to temper the interest for these new ultra-fast slabs. On the one hand, the real contribution in responsiveness remains to be proven, both in terms of comfort and performance, even for cyberathletes who play on the fastest games. On the other hand, you have to be aware that calculating 480 fps, even in Full HD, and even on aging 3D engines, is not given to all graphics cards.
This is for example roughly the framerate obtained on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive in Full HD with high graphics settings on a configuration armed with a Core i9-10900K and a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. On Apex Legendsby testing the MSI GE76 Raider equipped with an RTX 3080 Ti and a 360 Hz panel, we did not manage to exceed 210 fps.