120 hertz? Kid’s stuff. 240? Barely competent. eSports players won’t take a second, super-fast glance at a new gaming monitor unless it’s 300hz, preferably 500hz and worth a mortgage payment. But a new TCL panel might just blow every gaming monitor on the market out of the water. At the Display Week conference, the company showed off a 1000Hz LCD for the first time.
Details on the new display tech are sparse. The 4K panel was spotted on the show floor by Blur Busters and posted to their X profile. (Someone on Twitter got really mad at me for calling it Twitter the other day. Sorry, Twitter user). According to the writeup, this is indeed an LCD panel and seeing it debut at such a high resolution is a bit of a shocker — typically these super-speedy panels start at 1080p before expanding to higher resolutions.
Since this is a trade show display and presumably prototype hardware, there’s no telling how long it’ll take to actually make it into production LCD panels seen in TCL monitors and elsewhere. And I suppose it’s just as well — currently there are no graphics cards on the market that can actually output a 1000Hz, 4K video signal. The newest and most powerful GPUs use HDMI 2.1a and DisplayPort 2.1, which might just have the technical bandwidth to hit that using compression, but probably require a bit of tweaking in order to make it happen.
And, of course, you’d need a GPU and a gaming PC actually capable of rendering 1000 frames per second in a game to make that practical. You can do it in DOOM or Team Fortress, but getting 1K FPS in something people are actually playing competitively would be a struggle for any machine.
As Blur Busters points out, OLED tech is rapidly catching up with LCDs in terms of speed. They’re expected to hit the market in 1000Hz capacities sometime in 2027.
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer, PCWorld
Michael is a 10-year veteran of technology journalism, covering everything from Apple to ZTE. On PCWorld he's the resident keyboard nut, always using a new one for a review and building a new mechanical board or expanding his desktop "battlestation" in his off hours. Michael's previous bylines include Android Police, Digital Trends, Wired, Lifehacker, and How-To Geek, and he's covered events like CES and Mobile World Congress live. Michael lives in Pennsylvania where he's always looking forward to his next kayaking trip.