Refresh rate

Refresh rate — a common piece of computer hardware/software terminology. Read on for what it does and when it matters.

Refresh rate is the number of times per second a display updates its image on the screen. While you see a continuous moving picture, the hardware is actually cycling through a series of static frames at a specific frequency. This measurement is expressed in Hertz (Hz), where 60Hz means the screen redraws itself 60 times every single second. If your monitor has a higher refresh rate, those updates happen faster, which results in smoother motion and less perceived lag between your physical movements and what you see on the glass.

Why it matters

The impact of refresh rate depends entirely on what you are doing with your device. For a typical office worker using a Dell XPS 13 to write emails or manage spreadsheets, 60Hz is perfectly adequate because static text doesn’t require rapid updates. However, when you move your mouse cursor across the screen or scroll through a long PDF, a higher refresh rate makes those movements feel much more fluid. You might not notice a massive difference in a single still image, but the “ghosting” effect—where a moving object leaves a faint trail behind it—becomes significantly less noticeable as the Hz number climbs.

Gamers and video editors require much higher numbers to stay competitive or maintain visual accuracy. If you are playing a fast-paced shooter on a high-end gaming monitor, a jump from 60Hz to 144Hz can feel like night and day because the motion blur disappears. This smoothness allows your eyes to track moving targets more easily during intense gameplay. While a higher refresh rate makes everything look better, it also puts more strain on your GPU die. You cannot simply buy a 240Hz monitor and expect a budget laptop to run smoothly, because your graphics card has to work much harder to produce enough frames to match that speed.

Higher refresh rates also affect battery life on portable machines like the MacBook Pro Retina or a Surface Laptop 5. Since the screen is refreshing more often, the hardware consumes more power to keep up with the demand. If you are working remotely near Centerville, OH, and realize your battery is draining faster than usual, checking your display settings might reveal that you have a high refresh rate enabled when you only need basic productivity.

When this comes up at the shop

We see refresh rate issues most often when customers complain that their screens look “choppy” or “laggy” despite having expensive hardware. Sometimes, a user buys a high-end gaming monitor but realizes it is stuck at 60Hz because they used an older HDMI cable that lacks the necessary bandwidth. In these cases, the hardware isn’t broken, but the connection is bottlenecking the signal so that the high refresh rate cannot reach the display. We often have to swap out a standard cable for a DisplayPort or a high-speed HDMI 2.1 cable to fix this specific problem.

Another common scenario involves driver conflicts after a Windows update. You might notice your screen flickering or displaying strange patterns when you try to switch from a standard refresh rate to a higher one. This often happens because the graphics driver is struggling to communicate the correct timing parameters to the monitor’s controller. When we run diagnostics on these machines, we check the Event Viewer to see if the display driver is crashing during those transitions.

We also encounter hardware failures related to the physical panel or the ribbon cable inside a laptop. If a user reports that the screen looks fine at 60Hz but starts flickering violently when they try to enable “ProMotion” or a high-refresh mode, it usually indicates a failing digitiser or a damaged internal connection. A cracked ribbon cable might allow enough data through for low-frequency updates, but the increased signal load of a high refresh rate causes the connection to fail. We check the SMART data on the system and test with external monitors to determine if the issue is the GPU itself or just the built-in display panel.

If your screen starts flickering during fast motion, bring it by our shop at 264 N. Main Street. We can run a bench test to see if your GPU is outputting a clean signal or if your panel needs a replacement.