Can You Have Too Many FPS? This Samsung OLED Monitor Wants to Find Out

Lately in Overwatch 2, I’ve taken up playing Wrecking Ball. Compared to my usual main, Mercy, it somehow involves even more disorienting motion, whipping across the map, and tracking fast-moving characters. So I was excited to play on the Samsung Odyssey G6. It has a 360-Hz refresh rate that’s faster than just about anything I’ve played on. At last, I finally have more frames than I need.
The Odyssey G6 is a 27-inch flat-panel OLED display with a 2,560 x 1,440 resolution. It supports AMD FreeSync Premium Pro, which supports HDR content, something that other FreeSync-compatible monitors can’t necessarily do. That said, the standout feature here is the ludicrous refresh rate, which is faster than many will have ever used before.
The Odyssey G6 stand is a delight to set up and use. The monitor pops onto the sturdy stand with a click, though it does support VESA mounts if you’d prefer to bring your own monitor arm. It can swivel up to 60 degrees horizontally (30 in each direction), and you can rotate the screen between portrait and landscape mode in either direction.
My only complaint on the rotation is that there’s no center hole in the stand to run cables through. There’s a small rubber clip on the back to hold cables in place, but if you plan to rotate your screen a lot, you could end up getting cables tangled if you don’t run them properly.
When I tested the Razer Blade 18 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) gaming laptop, it packed a blisteringly fast 300-Hz refresh rate, which I thought would be overkill. Human eyes don’t exactly see in “frames per second.” Our brains are tuned to focus more on things like contrast and motion, so even if we can technically see flickering artifacts that flash by at very high speeds, in practice we might not notice much difference between a 120-Hz display, where things refresh 120 times a second, and a 300-Hz display, where they refresh 300 times, simply because we’re not focusing on how quickly the image on the screen updates.
However, frame rate becomes far more relevant when you’re trying to track fast-moving objects (or players) in video games. When there are fewer frames per second, objects will look less like they’re moving and more like they’re making little micro jumps from one place to another. You can see this effect in action with this online tool. Try comparing 24 fps to 120 fps (if your monitor can support it), with or without motion blur. The effects become pretty obvious.
It’s important to understand why this works the way it does, because the Odyssey G6 doesn’t just make motion smooth. It almost makes it unnecessarily smooth. I’ve been using this monitor for a couple weeks, and I’m still undecided on whether such smoothness is a good thing. At a certain point, I have to wonder whether my brain is the real bottleneck preventing me from mentally updating where the enemy Cassidy is 360 times per second.
I found myself genuinely thinking about this question while playing as Wrecking Ball. The monitor was able to maintain well over 300 fps during my games, but I couldn’t even tell if it mattered. When I fixed my camera on a target, my eyes could keep up with where they were, no matter how fast we were moving in relation to each other. The experience was a bit smoother than on the 240-Hz (or even 300-Hz) displays I’ve played on. But how much smoother? I couldn’t say if I was getting paid to, which I am.
That, to me, says that we’ve finally reached peak refresh rate. This monitor is finally enough. And that’s a metric that really matters. I haven’t bothered to even look up what resolution my phone’s screen is in years because I know the answer already: It’s enough. My phone’s pixel density is so high, my stupid fleshy eyeballs are incapable of seeing any more pixels. Likewise, after playing 360-fps games of Overwatch 2, I’m confident that no amount of extra frames is going to make me a better tank. I’m just gonna have to work on my game sense now.
It’s also worth highlighting that 360 fps is an ambitious goal for even fairly high-end machines. My personal desktop has an RTX 3080 Ti that’s a few years old at this point but still pretty powerful. I struggled to hit even 300 fps on some games. If you really want to take advantage of a 360-fps cap, you might need more than just a display upgrade.
OLED displays are known for their black levels, which are effectively infinite, but it’s the colors, not the contrast, that impressed me on this one. Using my Spyder X2 Ultra test, I found that the G6 covered 98 percent of the DCI-P3 color space, though the results were so close that I wouldn’t be surprised if it could achieve closer to 99 percent under proper studio conditions.
That means it’s not just a gorgeous monitor, it’s also a great option for professional design work. I sometimes use DaVinci Resolve to edit videos, thanks to its industry-leading color-grading suite, but I often bump into the limitations of my monitor when I’m trying to grade footage. All the fancy spectrograms in the world won’t help me if my monitor crushes colors far more than my footage does.
I expected this to be a monitor I’d be comfortable using for writing and gaming, but I was pleased to discover it was excellent for everything. Even watching YouTube felt a bit more immersive, thanks to the rich color palette. For most content, the monitor reaches about 250 nits of brightness, but HDR content can crank up to 1,000 nits, making it a great option for working at a desk or watching videos from across the room.
While it doesn’t have the fanciest version of quantum dot OLED panels, like some of the others I’ve tested recently, I still found myself impressed by the G6. It’s highly accurate, easy to set up, and smoother than any gaming monitor I’ve tested. I could use it for work, play, and media projects, and it’s hard to find a monitor that nails it at all three. But Samsung pulled it off.