To be fair, low refresh rates are much more bearable on LCD screens they used to be on CRTs, since there is no flicker.

(This is assuming the task at hand doesn't require a high refresh rate of course - a reflex based game like an FPS would be a no-go)

This, is a really important point. LCDs are NOT CRTs. So it isn't that the top left pixel of the screen is getting dimmer and dimmer while the CRT is painting lower pixels, on an LCD it is simply not changing.

What "30Hz" means in LCD terms is that if you go to change a pixel, the fastest you can do that is once every 33 mS but during the whole time it isn't changed, it stays the same intensity.

Basic desktop usage is unbearable at 30fps. Just dragging windows around you have to insert a deliberate pause to make sure the pointer is really where you want it to be because the screen is updating so slowly. Flicker is not the problem, slow screen updates are.

That is completely different from my experience; I think you must have another problem besides the 30 fps frame rate. Perhaps your machine is just having trouble pushing that many pixels? On my machine, animations are just slightly, subtly choppy -- like Android used to be before all the "butter." But there's still very much the sense of instant responsiveness.

Perhaps you mouse slowly in the first place so it doesn't impact you.

I'm pretty sure I mouse as quickly as anybody. It's just that the difference between 17 ms per frame and 33 ms per frame on my system only affects the smoothness of animations. There's no perceptible lag no matter how quickly I move things around.

To add one more data point, I usually set my mouse sensitivity to maximum (people usually complain about how sensitive my mouse is when they borrow my computer), and while 30fps is fine for everything else, it's unbearable to me when mousing.

I just did a test: Over 5 seconds I moved my mouse to the top of my monitor and back down 15 times, which works out to 12000 pixels per second, or 396 pixels per frame - which seems about right for how far the mouse seems to jump per frame. For comparison, Chrome's Close Tab button is 15x15 pixels, and HN's upvote button is 8x7 pixels. Framerate really is the limiting factor for how long it takes me to move my mouse onto the kinds of click targets common in computers.

Another test: it takes around 6 seconds to close 7 tabs with a mouse in Chrome in 30fps, and 4 seconds to close the tabs in Chrome in 60fps.

So I think I've pinpointed the exact problem. There are two parts to moving a cursor to a click target: quickly moving the cursor in the target's general direction, and then slowly moving to its exact position. Both are much more unpleasant in 30fps.

Quickly moving in the target's general direction: it's a lot easier to track a 10x20 pixel cursor when it's jumping 150 pixels per frame than if it's jumping 300 pixels per frame. (These are my own numbers, judging by people's reactions to my mouse sensitivity settings, it's likely yours would be lower.)

Slowly moving to the target's exact position: if the click target is 8x7 pixels like HN's upvote button, I can't move any faster than 2-3 pixels per frame, which is obviously half as fast in 30fps as in 60fps.

Well, if you mouse that fast then your use-case is similar to the aforementioned twitch-based FPS games.

> There are two parts to moving a cursor to a click target: quickly moving the cursor in the target's general direction, and then slowly moving to its exact position

This is a pretty basic usability issue and one of the reasons we put clickable things on the edge of the screen if we can.

See also:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000063....

(note that this is a great example of mouse and touch screens having completely different usability requirements)

I'm certainly not a twitchy mouse user, but I see very visible lag when using a mouse at 30fps and it drives me crazy.

Even scrolling text on a terminal becomes and 'issue' at 30fps. It get's 'blurry' is the closest I could say, Again, it drives me crazy.

Monitors with 40ms of input lag used to be commonplace and regarded as completely usable for non-gaming purposes. The extra input lag on a modern monitor that comes from running at 30Hz instead of 60Hz shouldn't be a huge problem, though depending on how much input lag there is due to other sources it might be at least noticeable.

Right - but when you stop moving the mouse, there's now an extra 17ms before you see the result. I assume that's his/her point.

Maybe this wouldn't bother me any more personally, but I bet I would have noticed it when I was 23!

Yes there is, you just pointed it out. There 16-17 ms of extra lag compared to a typical monitor. When I stop moving my mouse, I have to wait up to 33 before I can see where it actually is. That is easily noticeable. Stick a bunch of people with 30Hz monitors and watch their misclick rate jump.

Can confirm, I am running a UP2414Q @ 30 Hz because my 2013 13" MBPr does not support 4k at 60 Hz and it is pretty bad. I am planning on replacing the laptop soon. Otherwise the screen is great and non-4k 24" screens look terrible to my eyes now.

Dragging windows does not constitute my basic desktop usage. I probably drag or resize a window at most once per day, and I'm not even using a tiling or significantly keyboard-driven window manager, it's just stock OS X.

>Dragging windows does not constitute my basic desktop usage

Fair enough, but it does for most people. The claim I was disagreeing with is that >30fps only matters for action games. It is noticeable for most tasks that use a mouse.

I was able to get 60 Hz by simply enabling DP1.2 on the monitor, but then I had two virtual displays, which was quite annoying. The patches to make the whole stack properly support this sort of monitor are not quite there last I checked (a few weeks ago). Dave Airlie, who's responsible for most of the work on this at all levels (from the kernel through through the window manager) has things mostly working, but it's not ready for prime time. He ended up giving up on doing everything entirely in the kernel as he had originally tried, so now everything up the stack to the window manager needs patching. He has experimental support in GNOME. I may attempt stretching myself and seeing if I can get similar changes into kwin while I'm on winter break, but I've found 30 Hz to be entirely bearable; most of the time I don't even notice.

Is there a way to get 60Hz on a mac you think?

I'm pretty sure I came across information that up-to-date Macs can do all the necessary wrangling to make it work. If I planned to buy one and connect it to a Mac, I'd do some Googling to verify that, though.

In my experience, I can tell whether or not a display is at 30Hz or 60Hz, but it doesn't really affect actually getting things done.

The same could be said for things like color accuracy: it's annoying that it's wrong, but it doesn't really matter for my work.

That said, when it's fixable (and in the author's case it is), you should fix it.