What Is a High Refresh Rate? Explaining 120 Hz on Phones, TVs, and Monitors

Many of our favorite TVs and monitors diagnostic displays with precocious refresh rates, promising smoother on-screen enactment and a sharper picture. The aforesaid is existent for the best Android phones and each of Apple's iPhone Pro models (since the 13 Pro and onward). Today, every iPhone 17 model tin scope a 120-Hz refresh rate. It has go modular crossed the board.

High refresh rates are often discussed successful gaming, wherever accelerated reactions and instant on-screen updates tin mean the quality betwixt triumph and defeat. That includes gaming monitors and adjacent gaming phones, which tin usually deed 144 Hz, 165 Hz, oregon higher. But what precisely does surface refresh complaint mean? We interruption it down.

Updated September 2025: We've added notation of the latest iPhones, updates to surface technology, caller links, and refreshed copy.

What Is a Refresh Rate?

All contented connected your display, whether it's a telephone oregon machine monitor, is made up of idiosyncratic inactive frames (photos) shown successful series astatine a precise precocious speed. The refresh complaint is measured successful hertz (Hz), and it dictates however often the framework tin change. A refresh complaint of 120 Hz allows a caller framework to beryllium displayed up to 120 times each second. A 60-Hz show tin lone refresh the surface 60 times per second. And you tin conjecture however galore times a 90-Hz surface tin refresh.

What About Frame Rate?

The imaginable payment of a precocious screen-refresh complaint is constricted by the framework complaint of what's playing connected the screen. With videos oregon video crippled graphics, this is expressed arsenic frames per 2nd (fps). Movies typically tally astatine 24 frames per 2nd due to the fact that it's a theatrical standard, portion galore games tin tally astatine 120 fps.

And Touch-Response Rate?

To confuse you more, manufacturers sometimes database the touch-response complaint (or interaction illustration rate) for touchscreen displays, which is besides measured successful hertz. This fig relates to however often the touchscreen scans for a interaction from your finger. The higher the touch-response rate, the faster it responds to your touch.

How Refresh Rates Impact Your Phone

A higher refresh complaint allows a phone's show to support up with gaming enactment and reduces question blur connected video, but it tin besides marque navigating astir the interface consciousness much responsive than it would connected a show with a little refresh rate. Games look little choppy during frenetic action, video footage of fast-paced sports enactment appears smoother, and immoderate jerkiness erstwhile scrolling a agelong web leafage is reduced. To get the afloat payment of a precocious refresh rate, you besides request a precocious framework rate, and ideally, the 2 match.

The outgo is often your artillery life. Refreshing the representation connected a show much times per 2nd requires much artillery power. Processing powerfulness is besides needed to tally graphics astatine a higher framework rate. Processors person improved enormously, but artillery beingness is inactive constricted connected smartphones. For that reason, astir phones with precocious refresh rates bash not tally astatine the highest complaint each the time.

Higher refresh rates archetypal came to smartphones with the gaming-focused Razer Phone successful 2017, past manufacturers similar Apple, Samsung, OnePlus, and Google adopted them successful flagship devices similar the iPhone range, Galaxy series, and the Pixel range. Apple calls its mentation “ProMotion.”