At this year’s Display Week event, AU Optronics teased some laptop and desktop displays with blazing fast 480Hz refresh rates. The one shown above is a 24-inch Full HD 1080p monitor built around a Twisted Nematic (TN) screen. TN panels generally don’t look as good as IPS or Vertical Alignment (VA), but are generally cheaper and, in this case, really fast.
This particular model also touts a sub-1ms response time, though AU Optronics doesn’t mention if that’s a gray-to-gray (GtG) or some other measurement.
It’s not just desktop monitors that are getting a speed upgrade, so are notebook panels. AU Optronics also teased a 16-inch gaming laptop display with the same 1920×1080 resolution and scorching 480Hz refresh rate. The response time is ever-so-slightly higher at 1.xms, which even at the high (1.9ms) is still very responsive.
That’s probably a TN panel do, which is a bummer for anyone who either prioritizes image quality or wants both (speed and image quality). That said, these kinds of displays will undoubtedly find an audience among competitive gamers. Pushing 480Hz is a tall ask from today’s GPUs, though less demanding games used in esports often cruise into triple-digit framerate territory on even modest hardware, especially at 1080p.
