Here's a 600Hz gaming laptop screen no one asked for

Chinese display specialist BOE has shown off a laptop with a 16-inch 600Hz display at the 2022 World Display Industry Conference in Chengdu, China. The new panel uses BOE's panel-accelerating oxide backplane tech, first seen in its 500Hz 27-inch desktop panel.

While not exactly a household name, BOE is in fact one of the world's largest manufacturers of display panels. Its LCD panels are used by a wide array of desktop monitor and laptop manufacturers. If you own a laptop from one of the big boys like Dell or HP, there's a good chance it has a BOE panel.

Anyway, there's no release date for the 600Hz 16-inch panel and, for now, further specs such as resolution, brightness and response remain a mystery. What we can say is that 600Hz means a new frame rendered every 1.67ms. That's a lot of frames.

Of course, the immediate question is just how relevant such a panel would be in the real world, especially in a laptop. It's hard enough to think of a desktop GPU that's going to be kicking out the required 600fps in modern games, let alone a laptop chip. Even if such GPUs existed, it's likewise debatable whether the difference between, say, 480Hz and 600Hz is something that the human eye and reflexes can actually appreciate.

Arguably of more interest will be the response time of such a fast LCD panel. While IPS panels with claimed response times of 1ms are now common, that measure is typically for the grey-to-grey rise/fall time, which only covers part of the panels' true pixel transition time. For an LCD panel to truly deliver 600Hz, it will likely need to come much closer to delivering genuine 1ms performance.

Jeremy has been writing about technology and PCs since the 90nm Netburst era (Google it!) and enjoys nothing more than a serious dissertation on the finer points of monitor input lag and overshoot followed by a forensic examination of advanced lithography. Or maybe he just likes machines that go “ping!” He also has a thing for tennis and cars.