Refresh rate test

Measure what your screen is really doing right now. A monitor sold as 144 Hz very often runs at 60 until someone changes the setting by hand.

Keep this tab in the foreground while measuring — background tabs are throttled.

Refresh rate
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Frame time
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Worst frame
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Stability
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The measurement is timing of the browser animation loop on your own machine. Nothing about your display is uploaded.

How to get an accurate reading

  1. Close anything heavy — video calls, games, exports — that competes for the GPU.
  2. Keep this tab focused and visible for the whole five seconds.
  3. On a laptop, plug in the charger. Battery saving reduces refresh rate on many models.
  4. If you use several monitors, run the test with the window on the screen you care about.
  5. Run it two or three times. A single outlier run means little.

Reading the results

  • Refresh rate — frames the browser presented per second, taken from the median frame interval. The median rather than the average, so one hitch does not distort the figure.
  • Frame time — how long each frame lasts. 60 Hz is 16.7 ms, 120 Hz is 8.3 ms, 144 Hz is 6.9 ms.
  • Worst frame — the longest single frame. This is what you perceive as a stutter, and it matters more for how smooth something feels than the average does.
  • Stability — the share of frames close to the median. Above 95% is healthy. Much lower means something is interrupting rendering, and the average rate is hiding it.

My monitor is not running at its rated speed

This is the most common finding, and it is nearly always a setting rather than a fault. Windows and macOS both default a newly connected display to 60 Hz, and nothing tells you that a faster mode is available.

On Windows 11: Settings → System → Display → Advanced display, then choose the highest rate in Choose a refresh rate. On Windows 10 the same setting sits under Advanced display settings → Display adapter properties → Monitor.

On macOS: System Settings → Displays, then pick the refresh rate from the dropdown beside the resolution.

If the higher rate is not offered at all, the bottleneck is the connection. High refresh at high resolution needs bandwidth: an older HDMI cable or an adapter chain will silently limit you to 60 Hz. Use DisplayPort where the monitor offers it, or an HDMI cable rated for the resolution and rate you want. On desktops, also check the cable is in the graphics card rather than the motherboard.

Does a higher refresh rate actually matter?

For fast motion, yes, and the jump from 60 to 120 Hz is obvious to most people the moment they drag a window. Above 144 Hz the returns diminish quickly outside competitive gaming.

There is a catch worth knowing: the refresh rate sets the ceiling, not the floor. A 144 Hz monitor fed 45 frames per second by a struggling graphics card looks worse than a steady 60. Consistency beats peak numbers, which is why the stability figure above is worth more attention than the headline rate.

Frequently asked questions

The result is lower than my monitor is supposed to do.

Check the display setting first — a 144 Hz monitor plugged in and left alone very often runs at 60 Hz until you change it by hand in Windows or macOS display settings. After that, suspect the cable and the port: HDMI and DisplayPort versions differ in how much bandwidth they carry, and a cable that came with something else may not manage a high refresh rate at your resolution.

It shows 59.9 instead of 60. Is that wrong?

No, that is correct and expected. Many display modes run at 59.94 Hz rather than exactly 60, a legacy of analogue colour television timing. Small deviations of a fraction of a hertz are normal and have no practical effect.

My laptop reports less on battery.

Power saving is doing its job. Many laptops drop the panel to 60 Hz, or lower, when unplugged, and some browsers also reduce their frame rate under battery saver. Plug in and measure again for the real figure.

How does this behave with G-Sync or FreeSync?

Variable refresh displays change their rate to follow what is being drawn. This page renders a light animation, so the panel may settle well below its maximum — that is the feature working, not a fault. To measure the ceiling of a variable refresh display, disable it temporarily or use its own on-screen menu.

Does the browser limit what I can measure?

Yes, and it is worth knowing. Browsers drive animation callbacks at the display refresh rate, so this test measures how fast the browser is presenting frames, which normally matches the panel. Background tabs are throttled heavily, so keep this tab focused and in the foreground while measuring.

I have two monitors with different rates.

The measurement applies to whichever screen this window is on. Drag the browser window to the other monitor and run the test again — on many systems the reading changes, and on some the browser keeps using the primary display timing until the window is fully moved across.

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