Even though CES proper doesn’t kick off for one more day, NVIDIA and ASUS are getting in an announcement a bit ahead of the curve relating to a new monitor. The two companies have been working on a new high-performance 1080p display aimed at competitive gaming that offers a blistering 360Hz maximum refresh rate,  50% faster than the current crop of 240Hz market leaders. The new monitor will be sold by ASUS as the ROG Swift 360, and is set to be available later this year.

Like other G-Sync projects, NVIDIA’s latest display endeavor looks to be an effort for the company to differentiate itself and its technology in a crowded market, this time by offering an LCD monitor with a rather absurd refresh rate.

The ROG Swift 360 itself is based on a 24.5-inch panel being supplied by AU Optronics, and which is capable of running at up to 360Hz. This is 120Hz faster than the current generation of high-end gaming monitors, which top out at 240Hz, and is an uncommonly large jump to make in a single generation. Unfortunately NVIDIA isn’t disclosing what type of panel is being used here, however all of the 24.5-inch 240Hz G-Sync monitors that have been released to date have been TN, so that’s a safe bet, especially with the kind of refresh rate NVIDIA and ASUS are looking to hit. The bigger question is whether this is a new panel from AUO, or if it’s a further overclocked version of their popular M250HTN01 panel.

NVIDIA and ASUS have not released much else with regards to technical details at this time. The monitor isn’t set to ship until later this year – which as we’re at the very start of the year, likely means it’s still several months off – so the companies undoubtedly still have some technical details to hammer out. Though as most of the work is in the panel and controller, it shouldn’t be too different from ASUS’s 240Hz ROG Swift PG258Q.


ASUS 360 Hz on left, 240 Hz on right. It is a TN Panel

One thing that NVIDIA has confirmed, however, is that this will be a true G-Sync monitor, with NVIDIA supplying the monitor’s display controller. This is an important distinction not only for compatibility purposes, but because it means that the monitor supports full variable overdrive functionality, which will become increasingly important with such a wide refresh rate range. Even fast TN monitors still need to overdrive their pixels to hit high refresh rates, so the overdrive logic is practically as important as the panel itself in order to minimize ghosting. Though it goes without saying that with NVIDIA aiming to beat current generation monitors by 50%, it’ll be interesting to see just how well 360Hz works in practice, and if the monitor really is fast enough to make a 360Hz refresh rate useful.

The target market for the ROG Swift 360, in turn, is competitive gaming, as well as anyone who wants a competition-grade monitor. The benefits of higher refresh rates are pretty well known at this point – higher refresh rates make for smoother experiences and reduce rendering latency – and NVIDIA thinks that there’s still enough benefit to justify a 360Hz monitor. That said, with 240Hz monitors offering an already tiny 4.16ms frame time, the absolute benefit of 360Hz is small: that 50% jump in refresh rate only shaves off a further ~1.4ms at the monitor level (for a total of 2.77ms), which isn’t nearly as great as the jump from 60Hz to 120Hz, for example.

Still, NVIDIA has done their own research around the new monitor and player performance, finding that even with the diminishing returns, a 360Hz monitor did improve flick shot performance in Overwatch. As well, they measured a 14.5ms reduction in total (end-to-end) latency, going from 34.5ms at 240Hz to 20ms at 360Hz.

NVIDIA and ASUS will have the ROG Swift 360 on display this week at CES. So while the monitor won’t be on sale for a while yet, we should be able to get a first-hand look at how well NVIDIA’s future gaming monitor is set to perform.

Source: NVIDIA

Comments Locked

38 Comments

View All Comments

  • Devo2007 - Monday, January 6, 2020 - link

    Completely false!

    Even on the Windows desktop, it's easy to see the difference between a 60Hz and a 144Hz panel. The mouse cursor is smoother and scrolling text is also clearer (and it's partly this one that makes higher refresh rate displays more suitable for gaming). Turn around quickly on a 60Hz and everything will turn into a blurry mess while you're turning. It's much improved on a higher refresh rate.

    As others indicated, the latency is also reduced
  • lilkwarrior - Monday, January 6, 2020 - link

    This is BS. Let this BS die in 2020 already, FFS.
  • Zizy - Monday, January 6, 2020 - link

    Nah. Average eye saccade lasts 20-200 ms (5-50 FPS). This is your floor and source of often quoted 42 FPS (because it is a nice number). This leads to ~90 FPS on the screen to avoid aliasing. Trained people that don't have any special eyes manage to *recognize* aircraft when seeing it for mere 5 ms (200 FPS). Part of this is afterimage though, which makes a lot of research quite problematic. Anyway, few people can go above that, seeing artefacts in 2 ms (500 FPS) with similar intensity to the image - no afterimage to help. But all this is foveal vision, which is slower than peripheral. Evolution and stuff. I have no idea what is the ceiling there, but I wouldn't be surprised if some people can see "something happened" with a mere 0.1 ms (10k FPS) stimulus.
  • Lord of the Bored - Tuesday, January 7, 2020 - link

    Peripheral is definitely more sensitive. Back in the day on CRTs, I couldn't use my monitor at 60Hz for desktop stuff because of terrible flickering, but only around the edges. Any raise above 60 helped. I believe 80 was where it stopped being consciously perceptible, though it has been a few years.
  • mdrejhon - Tuesday, January 7, 2020 - link

    There's OTHER effects than flicker to consider. Such as stroboscopic effects (phantom arrays) and persistence blur (sample-and-hold). And input latency (quicker frame transport).
  • 69369369 - Monday, January 6, 2020 - link

    "unlock gamer skill"

    Cringe.
  • PeachNCream - Monday, January 6, 2020 - link

    I wonder how much they paid that washout CS player to spout some nonsense. Probably not much since, if he's like most people, he is up to his eyeballs in debt and needs the cash to cover all that debt.
  • TheWereCat - Monday, January 6, 2020 - link

    I haven't seen it mentioned in the article but I think its safe to guess that this will be a TN panel?

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now