 I don't think I can remember the last time I had a wish granted this quickly. So in our recent video collab with Gav from the Slow Mo Guys, we investigated the real-world benefits of high refresh rate monitors for gamers. And we found ourselves at the time wishing that we had even higher refresh rate displays to further improve the accuracy of our results. And ASUS must have been watching or something because they reached out to sponsor a video about their prototype ROG Zephyrus laptop with the world's first 300 Hertz display 300 refreshes per second Alright, let's get right into it. Ah, look at them run around. This is only running at like a hundred, hundred and fifty frames per second right now. It's pretty good, I guess, but basically peasant stuff as far as this laptop's concerned. Anyway, ASUS has long been a believer when it comes to the benefit of high refresh rate gaming laptops. They were first to 120 Hertz in 2016, first to 144 Hertz the following year. They showed 240 Hertz earlier this year, and now they're ratcheting it up again. But, ASUS sponsor talking points aside, this product raised a lot of questions for me that need to be answered. How did they do it? Are there any trade-offs? Who can benefit from this? How much is this gonna cost me? And where did Linus get that super cool hard drive shirt that he's wearing? LTTstore.com Anyway, let's start with how they did it. Thanks to the existing embedded DisplayPort 1.4 interface between the GPU and the panel in the GX701, there was already enough bandwidth available to make a 300 Hertz display, basically a drop-in replacement from ASUS's side. But the engineering on the display itself wasn't quite as simple. Now, unfortunately, AUO, the makers of this particular unit right here, wouldn't share the exact details of the jump to 300 Hertz. Something something, proprietary, blah blah, trade secrets, etc. But to give you some idea of what they've probably been up to, I can tell you about some of the technological challenges that had to be solved to go from 120 to 144 Hertz a couple of years back. So it was a collaborative effort that went outside of the tech industry as you'd think of it, and included not only ASUS and AUO, but even chemical giant Merck. Here's the thing, you can drive any crappy LCD panel at whatever refresh rate you want, but unless the true gray-to-gray response times of the pixels themselves are fast enough to display a clear image that many times per second, you're just going to end up with a smeary mess like we did when we were playing around with our DIY monitor at 480 Hertz. So then, at a microscopic level, the old structure of the crystals themselves had branches that were broad, kind of like a tree, while the new structure brought them in much closer. That made the crystals more difficult to grow. Then, in order to let them switch faster, the viscosity, or the the gooeyness of the liquid that they were immersed in, had to be lowered for less resistance to their switching. But then you can't go too low, because then you lose the control that you need to achieve optimal uniformity and brightness on the panel. So a ton of tuning went on there. The structure of the gaps that they leave for the crystals needed tuning too. So more room is good for their mobility, but if you leave too much, that ends up affecting your color gamut and your contrast. So you don't want to let too much light through. They even used a new anode and cathode material, so that's the part of the display that actually changes the liquid crystal structure, and that was to reduce resistance and crosstalk. And all of that work was for a similar 20% increase. Woof. Let's talk trade-offs now. My biggest concern here was that we'd be giving up something in terms of visual fidelity. Like it used to be that you had to choose between a fast TN type panel for gaming, or a slow IPS type panel for creative work. But Asus says that both in terms of color fidelity and brightness, we can expect the new 300 Hertz 3 milliseconds displays to be just as good as their outgoing 240 Hertz ones with the same Pantone validation. Great news indeed. Now it's time to talk about who this benefits. Now, it's no secret that running games at 300 frames per second consistently is no easy feat, and to do it in a laptop is even more difficult. Not only are Nvidia's top model GPUs not available for laptops, due to thermal constraints, mobile CPUs also can't reach quite the same clock speeds as their desktop counterparts. Now, Asus was quick to point out that their ROG boost closes the gap a little bit, but little is quite honestly the key word here. In a game like Doom, the complex shading and detailed character models mean that you can ROG boost all you want, but you're not going from the 200 or so FPS that we're running right now, all the way to 300 FPS. And this game doesn't even support demanding features like Nvidia's real-time ray tracing. So anyone shopping for a high refresh rate display, actually I kind of want to rephrase that, I'm going to define anything beyond 1080p 240 Hertz, the limit of DisplayPort 1.2 as an extreme refresh rate display. Anyone shopping for one of these has to understand that only certain types of games are going to fully benefit from it. So yeah, I was going to fire up Rocket League. Sorry, I got distracted playing video games. It's really smooth. Now this is more like it. So Rocket League is running at, depending on who you believe, the in-game or the Nvidia control panel anywhere from around 240 to 320 frames per second. And man, is that ever smooth. That looks freaking fantastic. But here's the trick. This is a 240 Hertz display and also looks pretty darn fine and really smooth and basically freaking fantastic. Like I've got to go all the way down to a 120 Hertz model over here before I start to really go, oh yeah, I can easily and noticeably feel the difference here. It's also quite a bit more smeary, especially when we're panning around from the crowd and stuff. 300, there it is. Boom. Man, that is incredibly smooth. If I die here, I have no one to blame but myself. Okay, I don't know how to kill it. Okay. So in Overwatch, it's not bad, although we did see some dips below 300 FPS in spite of the fact that this is a game that we were able to run fairly well on the upgraded $69 gaming PC. So that makes matters even more complicated for extreme frame rate gamers because it's not uncommon for games that are pretty easy to run and look great on entry-level hardware to have engine or API bottlenecks or even built-in frame rate limiters that make them impossible to run at extreme frame rates, even if you're willing to crank down your details and your view distance or even upgrade to faster hardware. It's just part of the nature of how game development works. You target a given performance and or visual fidelity level, and then you fine-tune until you're satisfied that PlayStation 4 gamers are going to have a great experience on their hardware and everyone else can just live with exactly the same thing even if they have way more horses under the hood. Sorry, that's sort of a separate conversation. The point is that no one is looking at their game and going, well, on modern hardware, it looks amazing and runs at 200 frames per second. You know what we should do? We should delay this puppy another six months so we can spend another couple million dollars tuning the code to get it to 300 frames per second for all those future space age displays that may or may not ever even go mainstream. There is some good news, though. While the average player realistically doesn't need 300 Hz, there is a point of diminishing returns, and it was actually a little ways back in the rear view mirror. But Asus works with professional gamers who obviously want any competitive edge that they can get, which means the highest refresh rates possible. So because of this pressure from both sides, developers are starting to pay attention to this demand. So then, in the games that do support it today, is it worth it then? Well, like I said, I had a hard time making out the difference between 240 and 300 Hz. In fact, if I'm being completely honest, I couldn't tell the difference. But the thing is, Asus seems to have a pretty realistic view of what 300 Hz displays mean to the market. So if you just ran out and bought a 240 Hz laptop from them, they're not going to send Jeff over here to your door to, no, no, go ahead, rip it out of your hands, and expect you to run out and buy a 300 Hz panel. But that's fine, because the best thing about 300 Hz is that it is not expected to be a significant cost adder compared to existing 240 Hz models. So if you had a 120 or a 144 Hz machine and were looking for an upgrade, there'd be no reason to go out in search of a 240 Hz display if you can get a 300 Hz one for the same price. And something to keep in mind is that if you're upgrading from an older laptop, you're getting more than just a higher refresh rate. Back in the 120 and 144 Hz refresh rate days, it was typical to see anywhere from 7 milliseconds on Asus's older 144s, all the way up to 25 milliseconds on some of the worst 120 Hz panels in terms of pixel response time. By comparison, we're looking at 3 milliseconds here, which means that even at lower frame rates, you can expect better clarity on objects that are moving around on the screen. And there's even some other small upsides. So here's a cool thing. Even if you can't run a given game at 300 frames per second, technologies like V-Sync, which eliminate tearing in game animations, have a lag period that's measured in display frames. So the shorter those frames are, the less floatiness or lag you're going to feel while you're using features like V-Sync. Now, the final units of this particular model will have G-Sync anyway, but the Strix ones that Asus will be showing at the same time with this tech won't have G-Sync, so you could see a benefit there. So thanks for watching, guys. If you're interested in learning more about high refresh rate gaming, check out the collab video we did with Gav, and make sure you're subscribed, because we've partnered up with Nvidia to do a follow-up to that piece with some pro gamers and some other cool stuff. Don't miss it.