Nvidia’s face-melting G-Sync Esports Displays hit a blistering 360Hz

When it comes to playing games, faster is better. The higher your frame rate climbs, the smoother and more responsive your game gets, and pesky problems like tearing and ghosting melt away. That reduced latency is especially important to competitive gamers, who use their lightning-fast reflexes to get the jump on opponents.

To scratch esports players’ itch for blazing-fast performance, Nvidia revealed G-Sync Esports Displays on Sunday at CES in Las Vegas. This new breed of monitor refreshes a blistering six times faster than traditional 60Hz displays.

We’ll give you a second to do the math. Got it? Yep. That’s a whopping 360Hz refresh rate.

Oh my.

Nvidia

G-Sync Esports displays are 24.5-inch, 1080p panels that hit face-melting speeds. Achieving 360Hz refresh rates require an advanced version of Nvidia’s G-Sync processor, along with a custom-tuned dynamic overdrive feature to reduce ghosting even further. G-Sync Esports Displays like the Asus ROG Swift 360Hz will come packing LCD panels by AU Optronics when they launch later this year, whenever that winds up being.

Nvidia released a study at Siggraph in March, 2019, showing a direct relationship between the average frame rates of gamers’ displays and the gamers’ kill-to-death ratios in competitive battle royale games Fortnite and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. Later, in December, the company released a follow-up article explaining why higher frame rates can give you an edge in esports games, synopsized in the video below.

Of course, you’ll need a powerful graphics card to drive games at ultra-high frame rates, but you can’t see and feel those higher frame rates unless you have a monitor that refreshes at high rates, too. Enter G-Sync Esports Displays.

Let’s be real. Most people won’t need a display this fast, and considering that 240Hz G-Sync monitors with similar specs already cost $390 on Amazon, don’t expect these lightning-fast 360Hz displays to come cheap. But when you’re playing at the top of your game, where every millisecond matters, price probably doesn’t matter. There’s been a lot of noise online about G-Sync becoming obsolete now that GeForce graphics cards support Adaptive Sync (read: FreeSync) displays. Innovations like this show there’s still some spice in Nvidia’s secret sauce.