Skip to content
KNOWLEDGEMyth

Are frames beyond your monitor's refresh rate wasted?

For your eyes, yes. For your hands, not quite. Your monitor shows a fixed number of frames, but you can still feel the time between moving the mouse and seeing the result.

Rigmint, Updated

The myth

Any frame beyond your monitor's refresh rate is completely wasted. We almost say this sentence on our own optimisation page, and yet it is too simple.

What is actually true

For your eyes it holds. Your monitor displays a fixed number of frames per second, and anything above that you simply do not see.

What you can notice is the time between moving your mouse and the picture on screen. NVIDIA says it themselves: in general, higher FPS correlates with lower system latency, even though the relationship is far from one to one. That latency is exactly what you feel as directness.

The grain of truth

This time it sits on the other side than usual: the myth is right about seeing and wrong about feeling.

What to do instead

If your monitor supports FreeSync or G-Sync, turn it on: the monitor then matches its refresh rate to the card's frame rate, and AMD describes the result as tear-free, flicker-free gaming. How to set it up, and why capping slightly below the refresh rate pays off, is covered on the optimisation page.

Without variable refresh rate, and in competitive games, you can happily let the card render past the refresh rate: you keep the lower latency even though you never see the extra frames.

Rigmint

Free PC buying guidance, system checks and build instructions: clear, traceable and without a subscription.

kontakt@rigmint.deSupport

The site is free and funded by ads and partner links. Support helps keep it less ad-heavy.

Main sections

More

Legal

Rigmint is an unofficial fan and community project. All mentioned game names, logos, trademarks and screenshots are property of their respective publishers (such as Blizzard Entertainment, Epic Games, Riot Games, Grinding Gear Games, Valve, and others) and are used solely for reference and identification purposes.

Performance figures are either derived from published measurements or explicitly marked as model estimates; they are not measurements taken on your machine. Prices are either merchant prices from the daily sync with a checked-on date or estimates marked as reference values. They are points of reference for your own decision, not a promise and not advice in any legal sense.

Buy links on this site are advertising. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. The price does not change for you, and which part gets recommended is decided by the model, not by the commission.

© 2026 Rigmint. All rights reserved. Not affiliated with any game publisher mentioned on this site.