I understand the appeal of greater and greater resolution so perhaps I'm missing something but since the human eye/brain cannot distinguish beyond 30-40 fps, what is the purpose or reasoning behind faster and faster frame counts? This all seems to be similar to deodorant ... in that they are "creating a need" where none exists ...... no?
I have two 4K monitors in front of me, right now. The primary one has a refresh rate of 144 Hz, whereas as the secondary is 60 Hz. There's a quantifiable difference between them, in terms of smoothness of movement on the screen (e.g. moving windows about, mouse cursor scanning across the screen). However, the primary is also has an IPS panel; the other is a TN -- so one may think that this is the cause of the difference, but setting the IPS one to 60 Hz makes it feel like the other one.
And feel is the key word here, because one's peripheral vision is more sensitive to changes in light intensity than one's foveal vision (this is why stars appear brighter when you don't look directly at them). A large monitor, relatively close in front of you, will take up quite a bit of your field of vision, so having something that's
appears to flicker less than another monitor is going to be less distracting and so on.
For gaming, it's a different story. Unless one is using vsync, the frame rate of a game will not necessarily be the same as the refresh rate of the monitor. Games are developed to operate around a primary clock where, in each cycle, the software will poll for inputs, calculate game responses, and then generate the frame for the GPU to render (along with various other outputs).
A game
designed to run at 30 fps will appear fine, but changes in the graphics will appear better if it is running at, say, 60 fps. Or more rather,
feel better. This is because there is more persistent information between the changes that the engine generates according to its internal clock. If one is running at 30 Hz (one cycle every 33.3 milliseconds), and there is no cap on the render rate, it will generate the same frames again until the next engine cycle.
The monitor is, though, not running at that rate (assuming there is no vsync, again). So there are three aspects to how smooth we perceive what's going on in a game: the engine's internal clock (aka the tick rate), the render rate, and the monitor's refresh rate. Having a 144 Hz over a 60 Hz monitor just means there's one less barrier to reaching the smoothest possible gaming experience.
For me, I just appreciate the higher refresh rate for my ancient eyes...
