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Asus will release its first gaming laptop with an ultra-fast 300Hz display in October

Asus will release its first gaming laptop with an ultra-fast 300Hz display in October

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Asus is showcasing several 300Hz prototypes at IFA, but a commercial laptop isn’t far off

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Image: Asus

Asus has brought some prototype 300Hz laptop gaming displays to IFA 2019. The company has built them into several models of its Strix and Zephyrus machines, and plans to commercially ship a 1080p 300Hz display in the Zephyrus S GX701 starting next month. The prototypes on hand in Berlin feature the ultra-fast-refresh-rate screen at both 15- and 17-inch sizes.

Earlier today, Acer announced that its Predator Triton 500 laptop will soon be offered with a 300Hz display for $2,799.99. Reaching this new tier of smooth gaming action isn’t going to come cheap, unsurprisingly.

Here’s what Asus says a 300-hertz refresh rate makes possible:

Raising the refresh rate to 300Hz represents a 25% increase over the current standard for high-level esports tournaments. At that speed, the screen can draw 5X more frames than the 60Hz panels found on conventional laptops. Paired with a GPU that produces enough frames per second to keep up, the faster display makes gameplay silkier than ever before.

Higher frequencies can also improve the experience when the refresh rate is fixed and the FPS drops below the maximum. The delay between refresh cycles is shorter, allowing the display to respond faster to fresh frames produced by the GPU. When the system is running Vsync to eliminate visual tearing, the higher frequency mitigates visible stuttering that can occur when the display is forced to wait until the next cycle to show a new frame. At 300Hz, it’s ready to draw a complete new frame every 3.3ms, whichmatches the 3ms response time of the pixels.

The Zephyrus S GX701, which includes a GeForce RTX 2080 GPU “clocked up to 1230MHz at 100W in Turbo mode,” will be followed by “several” Asus laptops with 300Hz screens in 2020. The company notes that the 4K 120Hz display it showed at Computex remains destined for future devices on its roadmap.