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i don't think i can remember the last time i had a wish granted this quickly

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so in our recent video collab with gav from the slow-mo guys we investigated

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the real-world benefits of high refresh rate monitors for gamers and we found

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ourselves at the time wishing that we had even higher refresh rate displays to

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further improve the accuracy of our results

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and asus must have been watching or something because they reached out to

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sponsor a video about their prototype

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rog zephyrus laptop with the world's

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first 300 hertz display

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300 refreshes per second

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all right look at him run around this is only running at like 100 150 frames per

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second right now it's pretty good i guess but basically peasant stuff as far

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as this laptop is concerned anyway

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asus has long been a believer when it comes to the benefit of high refresh

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rate gaming laptops they were first to 120 hertz in 2016 first to 144hz the

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following year they showed 240 hertz earlier this year and now they're

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ratcheting it up again but as soos sponsor talking points aside

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this product raised a lot of questions for me that

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need to be answered how did they do it are there any trade-offs who can benefit

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from this how much is this going to cost me and where did linus get that super

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cool hard drive shirt that he's wearing ltdstore.com

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anyway let's start with how they did it thanks to the existing embedded

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displayport 1.4 interface between the gpu and the panel in the gx701 there was

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already enough bandwidth available to make a 300hz display basically a drop-in

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replacement from asus's side but the engineering on the display itself wasn't

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quite as simple now unfortunately auo the makers of this

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particular unit right here wouldn't share the exact details of the jump to

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300 hertz something something proprietary blah

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blah trade secrets etc but to give you

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some idea of what they've probably been up to i can tell you about some of the

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technological challenges that had to be solved to go from 120 to 144 hertz a

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couple of years back so it was a collaborative effort that

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went outside of the tech industry as you'd think of it and included not only

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asus and auo but even chemical giant

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merck here's the thing you can drive any

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crappy lcd panel at whatever refresh rate you want but unless the true

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gray-to-gray response times of the pixels themselves are fast enough to

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display a clear image that many times per second you're just going to end up

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with a smeary mess like we did when we were playing around with our diy monitor

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at 480 hertz so then at a microscopic

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level the old structure of the crystals themselves had branches that were broad

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kind of like a tree while the new structure brought them in much closer

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that made the crystals more difficult to grow then in order to let them switch faster

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the viscosity or the the gooeyness of the liquid that they were immersed in

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had to be lowered for less resistance to their switching but then you can't go

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too low because then you lose the control that you need to achieve optimal

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uniformity and brightness on the panel so a ton of tuning went on there the

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structure of the gaps that they leave for the crystals needed tuning too so

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more room is good for their mobility but if you leave too much that ends up

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affecting your color gamut and your contrast so you don't want to let too

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much light through they even used a new anode and cathode material so that's the

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part of the display that actually changes the liquid crystal structure and

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that was to reduce resistance and crosstalk and all of that work was for a

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similar 20 increase

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woof let's talk trade-offs now my biggest

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concern here was that we'd be giving up something in terms of visual fidelity

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like it used to be that you had to choose between a fast tn type panel for

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gaming or a slow ips type panel for

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creative work but asus says that both in

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terms of color fidelity and brightness we can expect the new 300hz three

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milliseconds displays to be just as good as their outgoing 240hz ones with the

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same pantone validation great news indeed

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now it's time to talk about who this benefits now it's no secret that running

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games at 300 frames per second consistently

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is no easy feat and to do it in a laptop

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is even more difficult not only are nvidia's top model gpus not available

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for laptops due to thermal constraints mobile cpus also can't reach quite the

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same clock speeds as their desktop counterparts now

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asus was quick to point out that their

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rog boost closes the gap a little bit

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but little is quite honestly the key word

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here in a game like doom the complex shading

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and detailed character models mean that you can

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rog boost all you want but you're not going from the 200 or so fps that we're

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running right now all the way to 300 fps

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and this game doesn't even support demanding features like nvidia's

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real-time ray tracing so

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anyone shopping for a high refresh rate display actually i kind of want to

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rephrase that i'm going to define anything beyond 1080p 240hz the limit of

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displayport 1.2 as an extreme refresh

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rate display anyone shopping for one of these

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has to understand that only certain types of games are going to fully

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benefit from it so uh yeah i was gonna fire up rocket league sorry i got

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distracted playing video games it's really smooth

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now this is more like it so rocket league is running at depending on who

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you believe the in-game or the nvidia control panel anywhere from around 240

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to 320 frames per second and

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men is that ever smooth that looks freaking fantastic

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here's the trick this

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is a 240hz display

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and also looks pretty darn fine and really smooth and

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basically freaking fantastic like i've got to go all the way down to

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a 120 hertz model over here before i

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start to really go oh yeah i can easily and noticeably feel the

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difference here it's also quite a bit more smeary especially you know when

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we're panning around from the crowd and stuff 300 there it is

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boom man that is incredibly smooth

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if i die here i have no one to blame but myself

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okay i don't know how to kill okay so in overwatch it's not bad although we did

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see some dips below 300 fps in spite of the fact that this is a game that we

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were able to run fairly well on the upgraded 69 gaming pc

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so that makes matters even more complicated for extreme frame rate

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gamers because it's not uncommon for games that are

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pretty easy to run and look great on entry-level hardware to have engine or

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api bottlenecks or even built-in frame rate limiters that make them impossible

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to run at extreme frame rates even if you're willing to crank down your

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details and your view distance or even upgrade to faster hardware it's just

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part of the nature of how game development works you target a given

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performance and or visual fidelity level and then you fine tune until you're

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satisfied that playstation 4 gamers are gonna have a great experience on their

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hardware and everyone else can just live with exactly the same thing even if they

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have way more horses under the hood sorry that's sort of a separate

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conversation the point is that no one is looking at their game and

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going well on modern hardware it looks amazing and

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runs at 200 frames per second you know we should do

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we should delay this puppy another six months so we can spend another couple

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million dollars tuning the code to get it to 300 frames per second for all

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those future space age displays that may

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or may not ever even go mainstream

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there is some good news though while the average player realistically doesn't

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need 300 hertz there is a point of diminishing returns and

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it was actually a little ways back

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in the rear view mirror but

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asus works with professional gamers who obviously want any competitive edge that

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they can get which means the highest refresh rates possible so because of

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this pressure from both sides developers

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are starting to pay attention to this demand so then in the games that do

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support it today is it worth it then

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well like i said i had a hard time making out

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the difference between 240 and 300 hertz

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in fact if i'm being completely honest i couldn't tell the difference

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but the thing is asus seems to have a pretty realistic view

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of what 300hz displays mean to the market so if you just ran out and bought

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a 240hz laptop from them they're not going to send jeff over here to your

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door to no no go ahead rip it out of your hands

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and you know expect you to run out and buy a 300hz panel

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but that's fine because the best thing about 300hz is that it is not expected

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to be a significant cost adder compared to existing 240hz models so if you had a

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120 or a 144hz machine and were looking

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for an upgrade there'd be no reason to go out in search of a 240hz display if

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you can get a 300 hertz one for the same price and something to keep in mind is that if

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you're upgrading from an older laptop you're getting more than just a higher refresh rate back in the 120 and 144

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hertz for fresh rate days it was typical to see anywhere from 7 milliseconds on

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asus's older 144s all the way up to 25

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milliseconds on some of the worst 120

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hertz panels in terms of pixel response time

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by comparison we're looking at three milliseconds here which means that even

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at lower frame rates you can expect better clarity on objects that are

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moving around on the screen and there's even some other small upsides so here's a cool thing even if

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you can't run a given game at 300 frames per second

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technologies like v-sync which eliminate tearing in game animations have a lag

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period that's measured in display frames so the shorter those frames are the less

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floatiness or lag you're going to feel while you're using features like vsync

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now the final units of this particular model

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will have g-sync anyway but the strix ones that asus will be showing at the

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same time with this tech won't have g-sync so you could see a benefit there

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so thanks for watching guys if you're interested in learning more about high refresh rate gaming check out the collab

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video we did with gav and make sure you're subscribed because we've

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partnered up with nvidia to do a follow up to that piece with some pro gamers

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and some other cool stuff don't miss it