Picture this: You just got a new high-refresh-rate monitor, you've upgraded your graphics card or snagged a top-end gaming PC, you plug everything in and fire up your favorite game and think: "is this it?"
We've all been there. As has, apparently, popular streamer Northernlion, who just discovered his 165Hz monitor has been set to 60Hz for who knows how long, maybe even a decade.
"It looks like your display has a 165Hz mode, but is currently running at 60Hz. Using the highest refresh rate your display supports is generally recommended for an optimal gameplay experience," Northernlion said, reading a notification that popped up when loading into a game of Counter-Strike. "Is this good?"
"It's gonna change your life, in a good way," one of his teammates responded.
The clip appears in Northernlion's stream from today, starting at around the 1:44:25 mark. Upon updating his refresh rate both on the Windows level and in-game, NL was blown away by the upgraded visual experience – which his hardware had been capable of all along.
"This looks incredible!" he said, a few seconds into his first match with the settings fixed, "It looks like I just got a PlayStation 7."
While it's fun to enjoy some schadenfreud that even someone like Northernlion, who obviously has a lot of experience with the platform, can fall prey to one of the pitfalls of PC gaming, let this serve as a PSA of things to look out for:
Besides making sure your monitor's refresh rate is properly set, another common mistake is not enabling XMP, without which keeps your RAM shackled to its base speeds instead of the overclocked speeds advertised on the box. And perhaps worst of all, make sure your display cable is plugged into your graphics card, not the motherboard's video port. After all, if you've shelled out the cash for a discrete GPU, you want to make sure you're not bypassing the card entirely.
For more tech and hardware coverage, check out our guides to the Best Gaming Tech you can buy.
Photo credit: Getty Images
Bo Moore is IGN's Senior Manager of Tech. You can find him online @usebomswisely.
