The meter below is already timing how fast your screen shows new pictures — the number settles in a few seconds. No download, nothing leaves your device.
Measuring — keep this tab in the foreground…
Both dots travel at the same speed. The top one updates with every picture your screen shows; the bottom one skips every other picture. The bigger the difference, the faster your screen.
No skipped pictures so far — the motion above is as smooth as your screen allows.
The meter above times how quickly your display shows new pictures and settles on the answer after a few steady seconds. Here is what the number means and what to do when it looks too low.
A display shows motion by flipping through still pictures very quickly. The refresh rate, written in hertz (Hz), is how many of those pictures it shows each second. 60 Hz is the everyday standard; 90, 120, 144 and beyond are common on gaming monitors and newer phones.
At 60 updates a second, a moving object jumps a noticeable distance between pictures. At 120 or 144 the jumps are half the size or smaller, so scrolling, cursor movement and games look calmer and feel more immediate. Once you get used to a fast screen, an ordinary one is easy to spot.
The screen's rate is how many pictures it can show per second; frames per second is how many pictures your computer or game actually produces. Whichever is lower wins. A powerful gaming PC on a 60 Hz monitor still shows only 60 pictures a second — and a fast 144 Hz monitor can't fix a game that only manages 40.
Usually something is deliberately slowing it down to save power. Phones drop to 60 when battery saver is on or the battery is low, laptops do the same on power-saving profiles, and some browsers hold pages at 60 even on faster screens. Plug in, turn battery saver off, and run the test again.
A surprising number of fast monitors leave the factory set to 60. On Windows, open Settings → System → Display → Advanced display and pick the highest rate in the list. On a Mac, System Settings → Displays → Refresh rate. Also check the cable: older HDMI cables and ports can't carry high rates at high resolutions — DisplayPort usually can.