You may have heard the claim that the human eye cannot see more than 60 FPS on a monitor. For many people, that is an absolute truth, especially when it comes to gaming. The problem is that this idea, although popular, is not entirely true and ends up shaping how many people understand screens and game performance.
Human eyes are far more complex than a camera that records isolated frames each second. Which means that when someone says that no one notices a difference above 60 FPS, that person could either be sharing misinformation or mixing up two different concepts. Viewing an image without flicker is one thing, but tracking fast motion, noticing blur, and seeing smoothness in real time is another.
That is exactly why you’ll find more and more PC monitor makers switching to OLED panels supporting faster speeds, with rates well above 60Hz. Competitive games benefit from higher frame rates, since a smooth image offers some advantages too. So, the idea that the human eye cannot see beyond that isn’t true, mainly because our vision works in a different way.
The 60 FPS monitor myth and human eye flicker fusion
There is a concept called flicker fusion, which explains why this confusion also exists about whether the human eye can or cannot see something beyond 60 FPS. This term describes the frequency at which a rapidly blinking light stops looking intermittent and starts to look continuous to our eyes. Something like this happened with old light bulbs, which could blink at a certain frequency without most people noticing it all the time.
Some people commonly take this older concept and apply the same logic to monitors. Stopping the perception of a screen flickering does not mean that human eyes do not notice a difference once it goes past 60 FPS, since these are two different things. One relates to flicker perception, while the other involves our ability to detect motion, track fast objects, and notice changes in how fluid an image looks.
It is exactly this higher refresh rate that makes all the difference for us in the end. In action-packed scenes, especially in some games, picking a gaming monitor over a TV can make gameplay less blurry and smoother for our eyes. While there is some logic behind the idea that our eyes cannot perceive more than 60 FPS, the reasoning combines two different ideas and ignores the fact that our eyes are more complex than the number of frames per second.
Why higher refresh rates still matter above 60 FPS
Although 60 FPS is a good target for most games, especially single-player titles on PC, that does not mean any frame rate above it stops mattering. For those who prefer competitive games, a higher FPS gives you a competitive advantage. If you’re playing at 144 FPS on a 144Hz monitor for gaming, you’ll receive visual information faster than someone using a slower display. It’s one of the biggest differences between 120Hz and 144Hz displays.
In the end, that difference may come down to a few milliseconds, but in a competitive match, that’s a major advantage. That matters even more in shooter games like “Fortnite” or “Valorant,” where players need to stay aware of an enemy’s position at all times and a small edge can mean the difference between winning or losing a match.
A higher refresh rate also affects how quickly your actions appear on screen because of input lag. This is a concept that explains the time between pressing a button and seeing that action happen on the screen. So playing at a higher frame rate makes the gameplay feel a bit smoother, since the delay between the command and what happens on-screen is smaller.
