How many Frames-Per-Second (FPS) you get in a game is super important.

It will not only affect your performance but also your overall gaming experience. When people hear FPS, they instantly think of a graphics card, however, there is much more to it than that.

In fact, you can have the world’s best PC but if you play on a pretty bad monitor, chances are that your gaming experience will be quite incomplete. As a side note, if you are running a powerful build, find out how to change the refresh rate for Nvidia and AMD GPUs to try and squeeze a little bit more performance out of your setup.

Because of that, one of the most commonly asked questions we get is how many FPS can a 60Hz monitor display?

So that’s exactly what we’re going to clear up here: how many FPS a 60Hz monitor can display and even how you might be able to improve this.

What is FPS?

By definition, FPS or Frames Per Second is the frequency at which consecutive images — called frames — appear on a display every second. In gaming terms, the higher the number of consecutive images that appear on the screen every second, the smoother and better your gaming experience will be.

What is Hz?

By definition, Hz or Hertz is the derived unit of frequency in the International System of Units and is defined as one cycle per second. As an example, there are 60Hz, 75Hz, 100Hz, 144Hz, and 244Hz monitors amongst other units of frequency.

This also applies to televisions. Hz aren’t so relevant if you are watching a normal TV show or are doing some writing work on your computer. However, when it comes to gaming, Hz matter a lot as it essentially makes your gaming experience much smoother.

This is because your screen can display whatever is going on more often. Essentially, the higher the frequency or the Hz, the better.

How Do FPS and HZ Correlate?

FPS refers to the frames per second that your GPU is able to produce every single second. Hz on the other hand is the frequency that the display can produce per second.

A 60Hz monitor will not hurt your FPS, although high FPS can cause some issues which I will explain below when you play on a 60Hz monitor.

In 2019, Nvidia released a study showing that a faster-refreshing monitor results in a higher K/D ratio on shooter games, with 144Hz monitors driving a K/D increase of nearly 50% over 60Hz (and 240Hz offering a further 8-34% increase on top of this).

How Much FPS Can a 60 Hz Monitor Display?

A 60 Hz monitor has the ability to display up to 60 frames-per-second. If you have a more powerful machine that can output more than 60 FPS, your 60Hz monitor will still display exactly the same 60FPS, but there will be screen tearing.

For those that aren’t aware, screen tearing refers to fast-moving objects, or flashes may not appear correctly or appear at all. Essentially, if you have a powerful PC, all that a 60Hz monitor does is bottle-neck your gaming experience and the capacity of graphics that your PC is truly capable of delivering.

One thing that you can do though is overclock your refresh rate and try to get more out of your monitor for better performance.