Every self-respecting gamer is sure that at some point in his life he had to find out about the hertz when buying a gaming monitor. And it is that although it may not seem like it, there is a lot of misinformation on this matter, mainly because another concept is completely confused, such as the Frame Rate with the FPS and the hertz themselves. So are you sure you know what they are?
We cannot talk about Frame Rate, FPS and Hertz as such without talking about the refresh rate. They are all related to a greater or lesser extent, so, although we will not see their differences as such, we must understand why hertz is so important.
Hertz or Hz: Why are they more important than FPS?
You may not know it, but hertz or Hz is named for its creator, Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, a German born on February 22, 1857 who was a physicist and who discovered the photoelectric effect, the propagation of electromagnetic waves and of course hertz as such.
If the telecommunications of today are as we know them, it is thanks to this man, since his discovery was such with the hertz that he ended up adopting his last name: Hertz .
Contrary to popular belief, the Hertz is not a refresh rate as such, it is a unit of frequency that defines the number of cycles per second of a periodic phenomenon. Applied to gaming monitors, one hertz represents one frame on the screen, where the unit of time for both is the same in the industry: 1 second.
That is, hertz represents how quickly the content displayed on the screen can change in a second, or more technically said, it is the speed at which the panel updates its buffer.
Therefore, it is necessary to separate both FPS and Hz as well as Frame Rate with update frequency, since not having higher hertz means that our Frame Rate accompanies and vice versa. One thing is the number of times the screen is refreshed to be able to show a new image and another quite different is the capacity of the graphics card to finish rendering a frame and offer it to the monitor.
Why do Hertz matter?
The definition itself tells us: the higher the hertz rate of a monitor, the more refreshments on the screen we will have in a second and therefore what we will appreciate when looking at it will be a greater smoothness in everything that is represented, especially video games.
The scalability in these terms is total, since having 120 Hz in a panel means twice the screen updates in the same time as if we have 60 Hz. Higher hertz rate, smoother our eyes will appreciate on screen, there is no secret here .
For this reason, players value the fact that their monitor has a very high Hz rate, as it gives them a clear advantage over their rivals. And it is not the same to play with jumps in a FPS at 15 Hz than to play at 144 Hz on the same hardware.