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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

60hz :( There's no going back once you're used to high refresh rates. Especially with a monitor like this which you might want to use in either orientation, 60hz panels are prone to jelly scrolling* when rotated 90 degrees from their native upright position due to the way that LCDs scan the image out line-by-line.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWKb_khoFzw

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I don't like < 120Hz on a phone screen, but I don't mind as much on a computer. I think touch interaction makes lower refresh rates unnatural. On a computer screen I am much more annoyed if the density is less than 200 PPI, since the fonts, etc. become jagged.

Ideally I'd have both (5k 27" 144Hz or 6k 32" 144Hz), but such a screen from a reputable brand seems to be a unicorn. Then I prefer higher PPI over higher refresh rate.

It's surprising what a higher refresh let's you do. I noticed I was scrolling through output and logs much faster because I wasn't afraid of missing what I'm looking for. The opposite is pair programming remotely having to go extra slow.

For pair programming I recommend VSCode Live Share extension. So much better than screen share and dictating code changes.

Depends, I have the 32 inch 6k dell and the lg ergo, both are 60hz and have no issues. Mind you, I specifically use these two monitors for work whereas I do have a 240hz 4k Oled connected to my gaming pc next to it.

The initial 60hz feel is jarring but you quickly get used to it. At least that's the case for me.

To me it feels more like a sliding scale on a monitor (30 hz sucks 60 hz is usable, 120 hz is awesome and beyond that I notice nothing but I also don't game) I have a dual 43" 4k setup at 60 hz right now for work, once those age out in a few years I will definitely be trying for 120 hz. The smaller the screen the higher the hz is that feels like it sucks.

What can you recommend?

4K 27-32" monitors at 144hz or better are a commodity at this point, just get whatever is currently cheapest and has RTINGS seal of approval. LGs are generally a safe choice.

If you are a Mac user then you have to compromise though, 4K at those sizes isn't dense enough to meet Apples ~220dpi Retina standard, and the monitors that do meet that standard are all limited to 60hz (and hideously expensive). You either have to deal with Apples janky fractional DPI scaling, or put up with 60hz for now.

Fully agree with the last part. If you are a Mac user, just get an Apple Studio Display. It's Retina, the integration with macOS is top-notch, and the speakers are pretty good. Initially the camera was not great (as pointed out by early reviews), but subsequent firmware updates have made it much better. Oh and it actually gets regular firmware updates and fixes -- it runs on Apple Silicon and uses a stripped-down iOS.

It is a nice monitor... but I would certainly hope so for what it costs. $1600+ for a non-HDR LCD monitor is pretty eye-watering when OLED monitors are arriving at <$1200 now. If you need Retina then you don't have much of a choice though, I know.

I am probably a bigger Apple critic than most, but I genuinely don’t understand the commonly stated sentiment that Apple is bad at fractional scaling. I’ve been running 27” 4K monitors at “looks like 1440p” scaling on my MBPs for years, and I literally cannot tell the difference in quality between the built in display and my monitors. Is there some particular app or use case where it’s more noticeable?

It’s likely the built-in display is also fractionally scaling. IIRC it has been that way by default for several generations of MBP now.

Duh, I hadn’t ever considered that possibility. Thanks! I’ll set it to 2x if so, and see if I can notice a difference.

Apple only supports pixel-perfect rendering at 1x or 2x scales, if you choose anything inbetween then they render at a non-native resolution then resample the result to fit the displays actual resolution. That has two effects, the scaling means the results aren't as sharp as they could be, and the oversampled rendering means there's a performance overhead (in your case the GPU is actually rendering 5K internally, which is then scaled down to 4K). The latter was more of an issue with Intel Macs, the Apple Silicon GPUs are generally beefy and efficient enough to take it in stride.

If you don't notice it then that's fine, but some people do, particularly if they are used to Windows' pixel-perfect fractional scaling.

Yeah, I understand how it works, I just don’t notice any real-world difference. I never saw any evidence that Intel Macs were slower at it either; I think that part is just an oft-repeated myth.

However, another reply said the built-in display is likely fractionally scaled as well; I hadn’t considered that at all, so I’ll have to set it to 2x if so, and see if I notice a difference.

Even on an Intel Mac with a discrete GPU, fractional scaling is rarely a problem. I typically run my trashcan Mac Pro (low-end D300 GPUs) at 4K/1440p, and only a few problems come to mind:

• Microsoft Remote Desktop (with "Optimize for Retina displays" enabled and RDP host settings optimized for quality) is usable and looks good, but things that rapidly change large sections of the display, like dragging windows around, have noticeable lag. Though this lag is generally only reduced, not eliminated, at native resolutions, so changing modes in this case is rarely worthwhile, and the Windows applications I use most (Visual Studio, JetBrains Rider, and Windows Terminal) run well enough that I choose to work via 1440p-like Remote Desktop 99% of the time even when a local connection is only a KVM switch away.

• Playing back 60 FPS videos in mpv with high quality presets and scaling algorithms drops frames. Default settings and lower frame rate videos both work fine, and in light of Retina superscaling, the quality difference is negligible, so I change mpv settings rather than scaling settings in this case.

• While not a performance problem, displays from OSes designed with pixel-perfect rendering in mind (e.g., classic Mac OS, NeXTSTEP) look bad at higher-than-VGA resolutions. The only scenario where I typically switch to another scaling mode is when emulating these.

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