Refresh Rate Explained: 60Hz vs 144Hz vs 240Hz

By Joy Jacob · Updated 2026-06-05 · 3 min read

A monitor's refresh rate is how many times per second it redraws the image, measured in hertz. A 60Hz panel shows you a fresh picture 60 times a second; a 240Hz panel does it 240 times. That sounds abstract until you translate it into time — because what you actually feel isn't the big number, it's how fresh the image on screen is at the exact moment you flick your mouse or react to a peek. This guide converts Hz into milliseconds, separates refresh from frame rate, and tells you honestly where the upgrades stop being worth the money.

Hz, in milliseconds you can feel

The useful way to think about refresh rate is frame time: how long each frame stays on screen before the next one replaces it. It's just 1000 / Hz. At 60Hz that's 16.7 ms per frame. At 144Hz it's 6.9 ms. At 240Hz it's 4.2 ms. The gap between what's happening in the game and what your eyes see is roughly this frame time, so a higher refresh rate means the picture is never more than a few milliseconds stale. That's the whole mechanism: less time staring at an out-of-date frame.

Refresh rate is not frame rate

This is the mix-up that wastes money. Refresh rate is what the monitor can display; frame rate (FPS) is what your PC actually renders and sends to it. A 240Hz monitor can only show 240 distinct frames a second if your game is producing at least 240 frames a second. If your GPU manages 90 FPS, that 240Hz panel is mostly repeating frames — you're getting a 90 FPS experience on an expensive screen. The panel and the frames have to be fed together. Before buying a faster monitor, make sure your rig can actually push the frames with our FPS boost settings guide.

Response time is a different number

Don't confuse refresh rate with response time. Response time — usually quoted as GtG, grey-to-grey — is how fast a single pixel can change colour, in milliseconds. Refresh rate sets how often new frames arrive; response time sets how cleanly each pixel keeps up. A panel with a slow GtG relative to its refresh rate will smear or ghost in fast motion even at high Hz. For a crisp 144Hz or 240Hz experience you want a GtG comfortably shorter than the frame time, so pixels finish changing before the next refresh.

VRR: matching the panel to your frames

Variable refresh rate — G-Sync (NVIDIA) and FreeSync (AMD are the trademarks here) — lets the monitor change its refresh rate on the fly to match whatever FPS your GPU is currently producing. That kills tearing without the input-lag cost of traditional V-Sync, and smooths out the moments when your frame rate dips. If you can't hold a locked high frame rate (almost nobody can in every scene), VRR is the single feature that makes a high-refresh monitor feel consistent rather than stuttery.

The comparator: see your millisecond advantage

Enter any refresh rate below. It returns the frame time in milliseconds and how many milliseconds fresher each frame is compared with a 60Hz baseline — the actual latency you're buying.

When higher Hz stops mattering

The improvements are real but they shrink fast. Going 60 → 144Hz cuts frame time by about 10 ms — a big, obvious jump almost anyone notices in motion clarity and aim. Going 144 → 240Hz saves only about 2.7 ms more, and 240 → 360Hz saves barely another 1 ms. Each step gives less because you're dividing 1000 by a larger number. For competitive shooters where reaction windows are everything, those last milliseconds still matter — pair the display with drills from our reaction-time guide. For most single-player and casual play, 144Hz is the sweet spot and 240Hz is a luxury. Also watch your 1% lows: the average FPS number hides the brief dips that actually cause stutter, and a high-Hz panel does nothing to fix a game that keeps dropping frames — reduce that with our input-lag guide.