You’d think that setting up a gaming monitor would be as easy as putting it on your desk and plugging it… and for the most part it is!

The thing is that Windows will by default have the monitor run at a 60Hz refresh rate.

A lot of people never bother checking if their high refresh rate monitor is actually running at the right refresh rate until they find out months later by chance that they were gaming at 60Hz the whole time!

To quickly address this go to your desktop, right-click and select the “Display settings” option, click “Advanced display settings”, click “Display adapter settings” and then the “Monitor” tab.

Here you will know at what screen refresh rate the monitor is running at.

You can double check this by going to your graphics card settings:

NVIDIA: Right click on your desktop, select the NVIDIA Control Panel, and then select the “Change resolution” option under the “Display” category.

AMD: Right click on your desktop and open Radeon settings. Select the “Display” menu, click “Additional settings”, and then select the monitor you want to check.

If you are still in doubt then you can perform a test for frame skipping within your browser.

For some games (instructions differ) you can force it to run at a high frame rate via the settings, console, or launch options.