NVIDIA Announces 360Hz Refresh G-SYNC Monitors For eSports

With just a couple of days left to go until CES 2020 officially kicks off in Vegas, NVIDIA is starting early with a number of announcements to start giving people on a heads-up of what’s to come. One of the first things out the gate is a new series of G-SYNC certified, high-refresh rate monitors for eSports.

The new monitors will feature an insane refresh rate of 360Hz, or just 2.6ms. They will also make use of NVIDIA’s variable rate refresh, G-SYNC, to prevent screen tearing. One of the first examples given was provided by ASUS with its ROG Swift 360, a 24.5-inch 1080p display.

The monitors are aimed at eSports gamers, as well as enthusiasts. According to NVIDIA, more than 60% of GeForce gamers play competitive games each month, and it’s no surprise when there has been over $200 million a month being awarded in prizes for eSports titles.

We’ll get to see more specific examples of these high-refresh monitors over the next few days. We saw plenty of examples last year of 200-240Hz laptops, as well as monitors, so in many regards, this push for higher refresh rates is expected. 360Hz is quite a number to behold, though.

When most games tend to top out at 150 FPS, be it because of CPU, GPU or just plain software bottlenecks, it seems unlikely things will push beyond these 360Hz monitors anytime soon. With the right gear, we’ve managed to just hit 360 FPS in Rainbow Six Siege with an RTX 2080 Ti and i9-9900K, but that’s the only game that’s managed to hit those kinds of speeds; Counter Strike: GO caps out at 240 FPS, regardless of the hardware used. In the press deck, we see ‘flick-shot’ metrics for Overwatch at 360 FPS, so there are games that can potentially hit these speeds, but they have to be optimized extensively, and this assumes such displays would even be allowed in a tournament.

As far as we’re aware, these 360Hz refresh rates are at 1080p only, with 1440p and 4K options being a lower refresh rates, but these have been an option for a while. Still, the demand for higher refresh rates has been the number one request in games for a long time. 4K is nice, but smoother gameplay is more preferable. We’ll be checking out these monitors, and much more, later this week.