EXCLUSIVE: We have a 480 Hz monitor!

[darzo]

Well, out of morbid curiosity I'd like to hear people's experiences of 480hz at 960x540 with scanlines and artifacts in the future. Two questions for people considering to purchase. One, is the picture acceptable at 1080 and 4k? Two, is there any drawback to this being an engineering kit or whatever rather than an ordinary manufactured monitor and is there a plan or expectation to reach the latter stage?

[Chief Blur Buster]

The picture at 4K 120Hz looks fine -- it is the most artifact free mode as it does not have any scaling pixellation. It is certainly lovely -- more tests on that in weeks -- but we are testing 480Hz "vision research" stuff and lag first for the next while. 4K 120Hz (Part 3?) is going to be tested sometime after the 480Hz lag tests.

Everyone here has seen 120Hz at some resolution (e.g. 1080p)
But nobody here has ever seen 480Hz at any resolution!

We're Blur Busters, and we must bust 480Hz myths quickly first even if 4K 120Hz is more useful for many! 480Hz tests were numero uno priority due to Hertz myths.

[Chief Blur Buster]

And now....

The First 480Hz Tests is now up on BlurBusters.com Cover Page

[masterotaku]

Nice review! You talk about point scaling (I assume it's like nearest neighbor filtering) as if it's a drawback, but actually many people (including me) have been asking Nvidia about it, to have it as an option in the drivers. I think pixelated 1920x1080 in a 3840x2160 monitor is a good idea. It's like native 1080p with smaller subpixels!

I was expecting to see some strobing UFO pictures, and maybe some normal strobing vs backlight scanning. And some TN vs VA comparisons. Will those come someday?

By the way, it's really cheap compared to what I was expecting ($1500-2000). I would totally be in the market if it had some optional overdrive and 3D Vision compatibility (after all, I play in 3D 99.9% of the time nowadays).

[darzo]

The thing from many of our perspectives is whether this monitor is worth buying. At this point I think being able to switch from 4k at a relatively high refresh rate to 1080 at 240hz is the biggest draw. But considering the issues you point out at 480hz I'm wondering whether the picture at any resolution is like that of mainstream monitors or whether this is as you call it an engineer's product in every respect.

I like the high refresh rate crusade and I think in general you do a good job. I've learned a thing or two to extend my impression of why higher refresh rates are better and matter into a truthful specific point. I always thought everything was smoother the higher you go and you point out that even though people can't pick out individual frames at 480hz fluidity keeps improving, which sounds like a paradox I'd like to hear more about. After all, you must be picking out something due to more frames. But sometimes you should be sensitive to the other non-dead horses present (I also find calling people idiots and ignorant to be more adequate than you might think). Some people, including myself, got excited by this monitor and at this point I wonder if there's any reason to buy it. But I suppose that could conflict with relationships.

By the way, I don't get what the big deal is about looking through fences and ajar doors. I would hope that's not the only actual improvement out of a technical improvement.

[Chief Blur Buster]

By the way, I don't get what the big deal is about looking through fences and ajar doors. I would hope that's not the only actual improvement out of a technical improvement.

This will be increasingly important with virtual reality games to have no stroboscopic effect artifacts over the long term. If you're running through dense bushes in a combat simulation game, and trying to identify enemies through scrolling dense bushes, the higher Hz increases the resolution of the persistence-of-vision effects. Persistence-of-vision doesn't have to be straight lines; it affects any shapes with many holes in them -- e.g. running through a dense forest hunting for animals or enemies, etc.

Think about it this way, stealth combat type games that people play, may have lots of accidental persistence-of-vision effects that many people don't think about; e.g. what actual people do in real life, versus what people try to do with a screen (whether desktop or VR or whatever). It's something you don't think about in real life, but becomes a limitation (that they are unaware of) on displays.

It may not be important at 540p and low-resolution gaming (that does not provide "much opportunities for" persistence-of-vision effects), but it's important to inventing a "matches reality" display in the future. "Retina + infinite Hz" may be impossible to do, but we'll still keep bumping up the Hertz as much as humankind can, as long as there's any benefit at all. This is needed to get as close as possible to reality (simultaneously solving blur AND stroboscopic effects -- you can fix one or the other -- not simultaneously -- unless you do ultra-high-Hz).

It's things "people do not realize what is needed to match real-life reality", that bites the asses of "We'll never ever need 240Hz or 480Hz or 960Hz, even in fifty years from now" people...

[cirthix]

I'd just like to chime in on the discussion.

Lack of overdrive is a bummmer. There are four options here : don't implement it, use a premade implementation, implement it yourself, or do it in software. Using a premade implementation (realtek/mstar/whoever scaler) was not feasable for a two-half display.
Implementing it myself would require adding enough RAM to the fpga to satisfy the bandwidth requirements, probably adding around $80~100 to the TCON cost, requiring a full board respin, and costs+delays associated with that. Software is always an option, maybe someone will take up the torch, ideally AMD/NV. In the end, it was simplest to drop the feature and release something. It is a bit of a bummer that its not there, and OD could certainly improve motion quality, but the monitor as a whole is very much usable without it.

IMO, the ability to switch between 4k120 and 2k240 and to switch between pwm-free and scanning backlight modes are the main two selling points of the display. Sure, 300Hz and 480Hz are huge numbers, but I'm not sure how much practical use they will really get. Certainly interesting from a test equipment perspective

I'm looking forward to hearing Mark's views on the scanning backlight modes. The backlight driver code will be open sourced soon and the board is available separately for people who want to hack backlights.

[Chief Blur Buster]

Yes, the 4K 120Hz is the main selling point. I said that at the beginning.

Obviously, we'll eventually write separate articles throughout the coming months on things like backlight hacking.

After all, Blur Busters originally launched because we began to work on an Arduino scanning backlight in 2012 (as scanningbacklight.com -- now redirects to BlurBusters), before we realized we could commandeer LightBoost (originally for 3D glasses) to do something similar. Full circle back to Blur Busters' origins! We'll write articles about backlight tweaking, as we've done the Hacking Backlights guide before.

First, we're hitting the "480 Hz Myth Busting" extremely hard first -- tests must be doe on this to bust myths of "Benefits can't be seen by the human eye" --- including having created multiple new TestUFO tests specifically to test 480Hz. The skeptics have attacked the usefulness of 480Hz, and we have to convince the world that 480Hz is not useless -- look at how long it took for official 240Hz monitors to arrive (2016), very long after you did 240Hz in year 2013! Many monitor manufacturers even said it wasn't going to be useful at all.

Today, it may not be too useful yet at 540p (except for things like Quake Live), but in the future, 480Hz may be important for things like VR, especially if we invent displays that renders the center-of-vision at ultra-high refresh rates than peripheral vision, while avoiding artifacts with peripheral vision, etc.

[darzo]

So you agree with me about the monitor's selling points. Which begs the question, what is the quality of the picture of this monitor in comparison to say Asus or Acer monitors at 4k and 1080? The things mentioned at 480hz didn't sound good beyond the resolution. Do you see the composition of the monitor as any issue besides assembly? Out of curiosity, why no 1440? With no overdrive factored in, what differences would I notice between this monitor at 240hz and the Acer monitor I have?

If you don't mind answering, what monitors do you think we'll see next year as Nvidia Volta is released? How far away do you think 480hz at 1920x1080 is?

On the topic of myths, one thing is making explanations that assume less knowledge of things, but something else, what about incorporating videos or animated gifs of actual games and showing where a higher refresh rate monitor makes a difference? Compare and contrast. CS:GO and Overwatch are a couple of very popular games that put a premium on high refresh rate monitors. Might make things more compelling to the non-believer.

[cirthix]

So you agree with me about the monitor's selling points. Which begs the question, what is the quality of the picture of this monitor in comparison to say Asus or Acer monitors at 4k and 1080? The things mentioned at 480hz didn't sound good beyond the resolution. Do you see the composition of the monitor as any issue besides assembly? Out of curiosity, why no 1440? With no overdrive factored in, what differences would I notice between this monitor at 240hz and the Acer monitor I have?

If you don't mind answering, what monitors do you think we'll see next year as Nvidia Volta is released? How far away do you think 480hz at 1920x1080 is?

Picture quality at 4k is pretty good, and should be on-par with all other 28" 4k monitors (there is only one 28" 4k panel so far).

At 1080p integer scaling is used for an exact 1:4 pixel mapping. If the computer is doing subpixel-aware things such as truetype font rendering, this can look odd (same issue with DLP projectors), but aside from subpixel-aware stuff, it should look *better* than a native 1080p panel. I say better and not the same for two reasons. 1) With 4x the subpixels per pixel, the screendoor effect is finer and not visually obvious. 2) With the adjacent pixels being out-of-phase, the 10bit to 8bit FRC looks better (this is pretty marginal).

1920*1080, 1280*720, and 960*540 are all integer scalings of 4k, 1440p is not. For testing purposes, you can actually scale vertical separately from horizontal, so you could use 3840*540@480Hz which would be very stretched, but interesting.

If you put this panel next to one of the new offically-240hz monitors with overdrive, the one with OD will appear to have faster transitions. I don't have an off-the-shelf 240hz display to compare in person to talk about how noticeable the diference is.