Vindicated: after speaking to some pro Counter-Strike players I’m sure I was right when I said 360 Hz is the sweet spot for competitive FPS

A few months ago I made the case that a 360 Hz refresh rate on your monitor is the sweet spot for competitive FPS before diminishing returns kick in. I had nothing but my own testing and a big bottle of ‘trust me bro’ back then, but I’ve now spoken to a couple of Counter-Strike 2 pros and I remain convinced I was right.

At Logitech’s G Play event (featuring a Counter-Strike 2 tournament) in Warsaw earlier today, I spoke to Oscar Bell, AKA ‘Azuwu’, and Simon Boije, AKA ‘yxngstxr’. Both currently play for Luminosity, a team that particularly tugs at my CS2 heart strings given it was very big circa 2016 when I was still lapping up the tailwinds of CS:GO novelty.

Regarding refresh rates, Azuwu tells me: “When I had 240 at home, I didn’t even really notice 360. But now I’m 360 I can’t go back down, you know, I feel it a lot. So I think 360, 400, 600 are all pretty similar… I’d say 400 is a nice spot and 600 is extra nice. But anyway, in a lot of PCs, you won’t hit 600 frames.”

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And Yxngstxr says: “I think it’s kind of a placebo, personal thing, you know? Because on most PCs you rarely get 600 fps, right?… 600 Hz with like 300 fps, it doesn’t even matter.”

I run CS2 on a pretty high-end rig—featuring a Ryzen 7 7800X3D and RX 9070 XT—and I can’t usually hit 600 fps in CS2, even at 1280 x 960 or 1080p. Usually I’m hovering around the 500 mark.

One thing that does make a difference, according to Yxngstxr, is Zowie’s DyAc anti-ghosting tech. The team all uses Zowie monitors, as do many other pro players, and it’s in part because of this.

“The edge of the players,” Yxngstxr says, “get more noticeable.”

I noticed the same when I tested the 600 Hz Zowie XL2586X+. The tech is a proprietary kind of backlight strobing that helps improve motion clarity. For most uses it’s overkill, but if you’re a pro gamer I can see why it would be useful.

However, regarding this DyAc tech, Azuwu says, “I have it on, but it’s hard to tell.”

If there’s one thing we all seemed to agree on, in so many words, it’s that when you get up to these ultra-fast refresh rates, the returns start to become diminishing. But given what both pro players said, I don’t think I was wrong when I said 360 Hz is the sweet spot for competitive FPS.