How Refresh Rate and Response Time Affect Gaming Aim
When it comes to first-person shooters like CS2, Valorant, Overwatch, or Apex Legends, information delay can mean the difference between landing a headshot or losing the round. Your monitor is the final link in the chain of latency. Understanding how refresh rates (measured in Hertz) and panel speeds interact is essential.
Hz: How Frequently the Display Updates
Refresh rate represents the number of times your monitor updates the on-screen image per second.
- 60 Hz updates the screen every 16.67 milliseconds. Slow tracking targets look staggered and jumpy, making micro-adjustments highly difficult.
- 144 Hz updates every 6.94 milliseconds. A massive jump that reduces eye fatigue and cuts perceived motion blur in half.
- 240 Hz updates every 4.17 milliseconds. Highly fluid tracking. Greatly reduces tracking errors.
- 360 Hz updates every 2.78 milliseconds. The absolute pinnacle for tactical FPS players, giving players the most immediate physical feedback.
Response Time (Gray-to-Gray) & Ghosting
While Hz dictates how many times a frame is sent to the display, pixel response time (measured in G2G ms) determines how fast the screen's liquid crystals can transition from one color to another. If a pixel cannot change colors fast enough to match the refresh rate, you get ghosting (semi-transparent trails behind moving objects).
As shown in the simulator, slow VA panels (8ms response time) leave wide ghosting trails behind the UFO. Under 60Hz, this smearing is widely dispersed, creating visual clutter. High-end OLED displays (0.03ms response) update color states instantaneously, eliminating trails completely, even when tracking at rapid speeds.
What is Input Lag and Display Lag?
Display lag is the sum of pixel response times, internal scaler processing delay, and frame delivery time. High refresh rates reduce input lag by delivering frames closer to the moment they are generated by the GPU. On a 360Hz monitor, the minimum frame-time latency is just 2.8ms, allowing for near-instant physical hand-to-eye feedback.
Want to find your ideal DPI and in-game sensitivity?
Adjusting your monitor refresh rate is just half the battle. Use our multi-game Sensitivity Finder to align your game sensitivities across Valorant, Apex, CS2 and more.
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