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Nintendo Switch 2 Slammed for Poor Display–120 Hz with 30 FPS Response Times

(www.techpowerup.com)
20 points kristianp | 2 comments | 26 Jun 25 21:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.566s | source
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zapzupnz ◴[26 Jun 25 22:50 UTC] No.44392233[source]▶
The comments on that article are wild. They're of people who seemingly play tech specs rather than actual games.

All that mixed in with plenty of people spouting some of the talking points about the screen protector, how the screen in supposedly fragile, etc. that also applied to the Switch OLED. All in all, a lot of unjustifiable, manufactured rage from people who neither own the console nor ever intended to get one.

For $500, were people expecting to put an LG G5 in their backpacks?

Also, I know that we don't editorialise titles on HN, but I wish we could for this: "30 FPS response times" comes directly from the article, but they mean "30 ms", not "30 FPS".

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frollogaston ◴[26 Jun 25 23:05 UTC] No.44392309[source]▶
The "30FPS" part is about how 1/0.030s = 33.33. The article also says "While testing was conducted at 60 FPS, the response times even fall short of this low bar, with 16.67 ms being the slowest response time required for the pixels to refresh between frames such as to avoid blur or smearing." Tbh I don't understand this, I thought refresh rate and response time were totally independent, but 1/0.01667 = 60.

And yeah people complaining about Nintendo hardware is an old thing. Wii can't play BluRay, GameCube can't play DVD, N64 not enough RAM, and before that games/consoles were compared by data bus size. Doesn't really matter usually, except some N64 games were annoyingly laggy like 007 GoldenEye.

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1. labcomputer ◴[27 Jun 25 05:14 UTC] No.44393872[source]▶
> Tbh I don't understand this, I thought refresh rate and response time were totally independent, but 1/0.01667 = 60.

They are, and I also feel like people don't really understand what response time means: It's the time for the pixel to transition from one color to another. More precisely, it's the time to transfer some percentage of the way to the second color. Since the pixel tends to asymptotically approach the destination color, so you get more than 50% of the transition when 50% of the "response time" has passed.

You can have a 240 Hz refresh rate with a 16ms response time. It just means that the pixel won't fully transition to the destination color before it is updated again. So black-white-black-white would look more like black-grey-darkGrey-lightGrey.

Another thing is that if you show people (humans) alternating black and white frames at 240Hz, it's going to look grey anyway.

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2. frollogaston ◴[27 Jun 25 19:21 UTC] No.44399498[source]▶
Thanks, the technical distinction makes sense now, but also it seems like the real rate most people care about should be 1 / (response time).