Samsung is rumored to be including a 120Hz display in the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, which promises super-smooth performance. But what does that actually mean? What is a refresh rate, and how does it affect your smartphone? Here’s an explainer on what a 90Hz or 120Hz refresh rate actually is.
A number of manufacturers have added 90Hz and 120Hz displays to smartphones — like the Samsung Galaxy S20 or OnePlus 8 Pro — and lots of numbers are being thrown around (60Hz,90Hz,120Hz), but what do they mean? Most importantly, what will they mean for how you’ll use your smartphone?
Smartphones are getting more and more powerful, but with last generation’s hardware still holding its own, the jump from generation-to-generation doesn’t seem as great as it once did. Where are manufacturers to go when a new phone doesn’t feel more powerful than last year’s device? One alternative is to make it feel smoother and more responsive — and a great way to do that is to increase the refresh rate of its display.
If you don’t know why you should get excited about a 120Hz display, then this guide is for you. We’re going to break down what an increase in refresh rate is, and how it will benefit your smartphone in the long run.
Before we can explain how a 90Hz or 120Hz display will benefit you, we need to unravel exactly what refresh rate is, and to do that, we need to know how displays work. There’s a lot of technical stuff involved here, but at its most basic level, a display works by showing you a series of images, or “frames”. To make a video, displays need to show a series of frames, one after another. The “refresh rate” of a monitor is how many times an image is updated per second. So a 60Hz display refreshes its image 60 times a second. This is obviously too fast for your brain to track, so it’s tricked into thinking it is watching a moving image rather than a series of single frames.
A higher refresh rate means more images are shown in the same amount of time, which means any movement between each frame seems smoother.
