i don't think i can remember the last time i had a wish granted this quickly
so in our recent video collab with gav from the slow-mo guys we investigated
the real-world benefits of high refresh rate monitors for gamers and we found
ourselves at the time wishing that we had even higher refresh rate displays to
further improve the accuracy of our results
and asus must have been watching or something because they reached out to
sponsor a video about their prototype
rog zephyrus laptop with the world's
first 300 hertz display
300 refreshes per second
all right look at him run around this is only running at like 100 150 frames per
second right now it's pretty good i guess but basically peasant stuff as far
as this laptop is concerned anyway
asus has long been a believer when it comes to the benefit of high refresh
rate gaming laptops they were first to 120 hertz in 2016 first to 144hz the
following year they showed 240 hertz earlier this year and now they're
ratcheting it up again but as soos sponsor talking points aside
this product raised a lot of questions for me that
need to be answered how did they do it are there any trade-offs who can benefit
from this how much is this going to cost me and where did linus get that super
cool hard drive shirt that he's wearing ltdstore.com
anyway let's start with how they did it thanks to the existing embedded
displayport 1.4 interface between the gpu and the panel in the gx701 there was
already enough bandwidth available to make a 300hz display basically a drop-in
replacement from asus's side but the engineering on the display itself wasn't
quite as simple now unfortunately auo the makers of this
particular unit right here wouldn't share the exact details of the jump to
300 hertz something something proprietary blah
blah trade secrets etc but to give you
some idea of what they've probably been up to i can tell you about some of the
technological challenges that had to be solved to go from 120 to 144 hertz a
couple of years back so it was a collaborative effort that
went outside of the tech industry as you'd think of it and included not only
asus and auo but even chemical giant
merck here's the thing you can drive any
crappy lcd panel at whatever refresh rate you want but unless the true
gray-to-gray response times of the pixels themselves are fast enough to
display a clear image that many times per second you're just going to end up
with a smeary mess like we did when we were playing around with our diy monitor
at 480 hertz so then at a microscopic
level the old structure of the crystals themselves had branches that were broad
kind of like a tree while the new structure brought them in much closer
that made the crystals more difficult to grow then in order to let them switch faster
the viscosity or the the gooeyness of the liquid that they were immersed in
had to be lowered for less resistance to their switching but then you can't go
too low because then you lose the control that you need to achieve optimal
uniformity and brightness on the panel so a ton of tuning went on there the
structure of the gaps that they leave for the crystals needed tuning too so
more room is good for their mobility but if you leave too much that ends up
affecting your color gamut and your contrast so you don't want to let too
much light through they even used a new anode and cathode material so that's the
part of the display that actually changes the liquid crystal structure and
that was to reduce resistance and crosstalk and all of that work was for a
similar 20 increase
woof let's talk trade-offs now my biggest
concern here was that we'd be giving up something in terms of visual fidelity
like it used to be that you had to choose between a fast tn type panel for
gaming or a slow ips type panel for
creative work but asus says that both in
terms of color fidelity and brightness we can expect the new 300hz three
milliseconds displays to be just as good as their outgoing 240hz ones with the
same pantone validation great news indeed
now it's time to talk about who this benefits now it's no secret that running
games at 300 frames per second consistently
is no easy feat and to do it in a laptop
is even more difficult not only are nvidia's top model gpus not available
for laptops due to thermal constraints mobile cpus also can't reach quite the
same clock speeds as their desktop counterparts now
asus was quick to point out that their
rog boost closes the gap a little bit
but little is quite honestly the key word
here in a game like doom the complex shading
and detailed character models mean that you can
rog boost all you want but you're not going from the 200 or so fps that we're
running right now all the way to 300 fps
and this game doesn't even support demanding features like nvidia's
real-time ray tracing so
anyone shopping for a high refresh rate display actually i kind of want to
rephrase that i'm going to define anything beyond 1080p 240hz the limit of
displayport 1.2 as an extreme refresh
rate display anyone shopping for one of these
has to understand that only certain types of games are going to fully
benefit from it so uh yeah i was gonna fire up rocket league sorry i got
distracted playing video games it's really smooth
now this is more like it so rocket league is running at depending on who
you believe the in-game or the nvidia control panel anywhere from around 240
to 320 frames per second and
men is that ever smooth that looks freaking fantastic
here's the trick this
is a 240hz display
and also looks pretty darn fine and really smooth and
basically freaking fantastic like i've got to go all the way down to
a 120 hertz model over here before i
start to really go oh yeah i can easily and noticeably feel the
difference here it's also quite a bit more smeary especially you know when
we're panning around from the crowd and stuff 300 there it is
boom man that is incredibly smooth
if i die here i have no one to blame but myself
okay i don't know how to kill okay so in overwatch it's not bad although we did
see some dips below 300 fps in spite of the fact that this is a game that we
were able to run fairly well on the upgraded 69 gaming pc
so that makes matters even more complicated for extreme frame rate
gamers because it's not uncommon for games that are
pretty easy to run and look great on entry-level hardware to have engine or
api bottlenecks or even built-in frame rate limiters that make them impossible
to run at extreme frame rates even if you're willing to crank down your
details and your view distance or even upgrade to faster hardware it's just
part of the nature of how game development works you target a given
performance and or visual fidelity level and then you fine tune until you're
satisfied that playstation 4 gamers are gonna have a great experience on their
hardware and everyone else can just live with exactly the same thing even if they
have way more horses under the hood sorry that's sort of a separate
conversation the point is that no one is looking at their game and
going well on modern hardware it looks amazing and
runs at 200 frames per second you know we should do
we should delay this puppy another six months so we can spend another couple
million dollars tuning the code to get it to 300 frames per second for all
those future space age displays that may
or may not ever even go mainstream
there is some good news though while the average player realistically doesn't
need 300 hertz there is a point of diminishing returns and
it was actually a little ways back
in the rear view mirror but
asus works with professional gamers who obviously want any competitive edge that
they can get which means the highest refresh rates possible so because of
this pressure from both sides developers
are starting to pay attention to this demand so then in the games that do
support it today is it worth it then
well like i said i had a hard time making out
the difference between 240 and 300 hertz
in fact if i'm being completely honest i couldn't tell the difference
but the thing is asus seems to have a pretty realistic view
of what 300hz displays mean to the market so if you just ran out and bought
a 240hz laptop from them they're not going to send jeff over here to your
door to no no go ahead rip it out of your hands
and you know expect you to run out and buy a 300hz panel
but that's fine because the best thing about 300hz is that it is not expected
to be a significant cost adder compared to existing 240hz models so if you had a
120 or a 144hz machine and were looking
for an upgrade there'd be no reason to go out in search of a 240hz display if
you can get a 300 hertz one for the same price and something to keep in mind is that if
you're upgrading from an older laptop you're getting more than just a higher refresh rate back in the 120 and 144
hertz for fresh rate days it was typical to see anywhere from 7 milliseconds on
asus's older 144s all the way up to 25
milliseconds on some of the worst 120
hertz panels in terms of pixel response time
by comparison we're looking at three milliseconds here which means that even
at lower frame rates you can expect better clarity on objects that are
moving around on the screen and there's even some other small upsides so here's a cool thing even if
you can't run a given game at 300 frames per second
technologies like v-sync which eliminate tearing in game animations have a lag
period that's measured in display frames so the shorter those frames are the less
floatiness or lag you're going to feel while you're using features like vsync
now the final units of this particular model
will have g-sync anyway but the strix ones that asus will be showing at the
same time with this tech won't have g-sync so you could see a benefit there
so thanks for watching guys if you're interested in learning more about high refresh rate gaming check out the collab
video we did with gav and make sure you're subscribed because we've
partnered up with nvidia to do a follow up to that piece with some pro gamers
and some other cool stuff don't miss it