This 500Hz Gaming Monitor Goes So Fast It Should Come With A Whiplash Warning
Remember when gaming monitors with 144Hz refresh rates were considered fast? They still are, really, but then came along the likes of 240Hz and even 360Hz displays. Well, all of them can bend the knee to a new gaming monitor by BOE, a company you probably never heard of but is making waves with a blisteringly-fast 500Hz monitor.
It's a 27-inch display and it qualifies as the fastest gaming monitor on the planet. Apparently it can even exceed 500Hz (presumably by way of enabling overdrive), though BOE doesn't say exactly how fast it can go. Not that it needs additional headroom—even at its native 1080p resolution, pushing 500 frames per second is a tall ask (start saving up for that GeForce RTX 3090 Ti).
BOE bills itself as an IoT company with a "semiconductor display business" at its core. The company is actually the largest display maker in China and supplies panels to customers like Samsung and Apple for some (not all) of their products. What it's built now, however, is a 27-inch FHD gaming monitor with a higher refresh rate than of its peers.
The company credits the feat to breakthroughs in semiconductor oxide display technology. BOE doesn't get into the nuts and bolts of the underlying technology at play here, other than to note it makes use of a high-mobility oxide backplane with a low off-state current, according to Sina.
Other features include a fast 1ms response time, an 8-bit eDP signal, and 8-bit output. Details like brightness and contrast levels, and whether or not it supports HDR content have not been made available. This is a prototype anyway, and not a mass produced product.
That said, now that it's been made, it's probably only a matter of time before the usual suspects (ASUS, Acer, AOC, Samsung, and so forth) announce a 500Hz gaming monitor of their own, whether it ends up being based on BOE's panel or something else.
