World's first 500Hz gaming monitor leaves your HD display in the dust

Though most people haven’t even upgraded to a 240Hz display, Beijing Oriental Electronics is making waves with its unprecedented Full HD gaming monitor with a more than 500Hz refresh rate.

In a report by Chinese news outlet Sina, the company said it made breakthroughs in the oxide semiconductor display technology to achieve this record-breaking refresh rate. It doesn’t seem like BOE is planning to release these monitors just yet, but BOE is keen on showing off its super-fast Full HD monitor.

Double the Hz — First off, the monitor is Full HD and has a 1920x1080 resolution, so it’s far from the detail you can get with a 4K monitor, but BOE was clearly more focused on offering an ultra-high refresh rate to make input lag an issue of the past for competitive gamers. There are 4K gaming monitors out there with pretty fast refresh rates, but they’ve only recently hit a high of a 240Hz refresh rate with entrants like Samsung’s ​​Odyssey Neo G8.

Many competitive gamers opt for Full HD monitors because of their faster refresh rates — at a professional level, every millisecond counts. With less input lag, there’s less delay between the GPU sending the image to the monitor, so it could mean the difference between landing that headshot or not. Current industry-leading monitor manufacturers like Alienware, ASUS, MSI, and Acer, all offer Full HD monitors that have a 360Hz refresh rate, making the jump to 500Hz a pretty significant one.

Demo version — According to the Sina report, BOE’s 500Hz+ display will be 27 inches wide and built with a high-mobility oxide backplane that allows for its fast refresh rate. The Full HD display also has a 1ms response time, 8-lane eDP connection and true 8-bit color gamut support.

BOE didn’t say anything about when it’s planning to release its 500Hz gaming monitor, but Tom’s Hardware noted that it’s currently just a prototype meant for demonstration purposes. That being said, with the way companies one-up each other these days, it’s might only be a matter of time until BOE or another manufacturer pushes the capabilities of monitors to pass the current standard of 360Hz.

In either case, we still have some time before our current high-end monitors are obsolete since the industry isn’t really in a place where 500Hz displays are a necessity yet. Some of the most popular monitors used by pros are still at 240Hz, and you probably wouldn’t really notice a difference between that and 360Hz. Besides, when considering a monitor upgrade, most consumers would probably opt for luscious 4K detail over a bump in refresh rate.