Is 144Hz Enough for CS2? What Two Studies Actually Found

In 2020, NVIDIA published figures claiming that players running 140 FPS had a 78 percent better kill death ratio than players on 60, and that 180 FPS pushed it to 90 percent.

Those numbers went everywhere. They are still quoted in monitor reviews, in Reddit arguments, and by every shop selling a 360Hz panel.

In June 2026, NVIDIA’s own research lab published a controlled study in a peer reviewed journal. One hundred and one players, three refresh rates, proper experimental conditions.

They found no significant performance difference between 144Hz and 360Hz.

What each study actually did

Start with the arithmetic, because it explains the result before you read a single paper.

Frame time is just 1000 divided by the refresh rate. At 60Hz a new frame arrives every 16.67 milliseconds. At 144Hz, every 6.94. At 240Hz, every 4.17. At 360Hz, every 2.78.

So the jump everyone actually feels, 60 to 144, saves 9.72 milliseconds per frame. Every jump after that is small change: 2.78ms, then 1.39ms, then 0.69ms.

Against a human reaction of roughly 250 milliseconds, the 60 to 144 upgrade is worth about 3.9 percent of your reaction. The 240 to 360 upgrade is worth 0.6 percent.

That is the whole story in one line, and the studies confirm it.

The study NVIDIA ran on itself

The June 2026 paper, published in Social Sciences and Humanities Open by a team including NVIDIA researchers, put 101 FPS players through a custom target acquisition task at 60Hz, 144Hz and 360Hz, and also tested whether they could perceive the difference at all.

Three findings matter.

Players could tell 60Hz from 360Hz. Easily. Perception of smoothness was clearly different.

Players could not reliably tell 144Hz from 360Hz apart. Not performance, perception. They could not see which was which.

Performance improved from 60Hz upward, then flattened. Target accuracy and destruction time both got better moving off 60Hz, and the gains stopped being significant between 144Hz and 360Hz.

The authors’ own wording is that perceptual and performance gains diminish at higher refresh rates, and they propose 144Hz as a possible threshold beyond which further improvements yield marginal returns.

That is NVIDIA’s research arm naming the point where NVIDIA’s products stop helping.

A second study, run by other people, found the same thing

One study is one study. So here is another, run independently, with a different design.

Twenty six participants, within subject design, five refresh rates: 30, 60, 120, 144 and 240Hz. Every participant played the same one minute shooting task at all five, in randomised order.

The score result was significant overall, driven almost entirely by 30Hz being terrible. Accuracy followed the same shape, and the differences between 60Hz and 240Hz were all non significant, with adjusted p values of 1.

Their conclusion: the benefit appears to stabilise above 144Hz.

Two studies, different teams, different methods, different sample sizes. Same answer.

So why does 360Hz feel better in the shop?

Because it is better. Just not by an amount that changes who wins a duel.

That orange sliver is the entire 240 to 360 upgrade drawn to scale against the time it takes you to react at all. It is 1.39 milliseconds against 250.

A few honest things that are true at the same time:

Higher refresh rates are genuinely smoother. Motion clarity improves, tracking a moving target feels cleaner, and that is measurable.

The feeling is real and the advantage is not. You can perceive a difference that does not produce a different outcome. The 2026 study measured exactly that gap.

Your frame rate has to keep up. A 360Hz monitor fed 180 FPS is a 180Hz monitor. If your machine cannot hold the frame rate, the panel is decoration.

None of this applies at 60Hz. If you are on 60, upgrading is the single biggest hardware change you can make to your aim, and both studies agree.

What to actually do

On 60Hz: upgrade. This is the one with real, measured, significant returns, and it is not close.

On 144Hz or 165Hz: you are at the threshold the research names. Spending money to go higher buys you smoothness, not wins. If the money exists and you want it, fine, but do not expect a rank out of it.

On 240Hz: going to 360 or 480 is a preference purchase. Nobody has produced evidence of a performance difference at that end of the scale.

Any refresh rate: make sure your frame rate actually exceeds it, your cable supports it, and the refresh rate is set correctly in Windows. A surprising number of people buy a 240Hz monitor and run it at 60 because the display settings never changed.

If you want a bigger improvement than any monitor will give you for the same money, it is in where your crosshair is sitting before the duel starts, not in how fast the screen redraws. Here is how the layers stack, and why your reaction time is almost never the thing costing you rounds.

Frequently asked

Is 144Hz enough for CS2? By the research, yes. Two independent studies found no significant performance difference above it.

Is 240Hz worth it over 144Hz? For measured performance, no evidence says so. For perceived smoothness, yes, modestly.

Is 360Hz worth it? Players in a controlled study could not reliably distinguish it from 144Hz, and performed no better on it.

Does higher FPS matter if my monitor is 144Hz? Frame rate above the refresh rate still slightly lowers end to end latency, but the returns shrink the same way.

Why do pros use 240Hz or 360Hz? Sponsorship accounts for some of it. Marginal gains at the very top of the game account for some of it. Neither means the gain is available to you.

Did NVIDIA lie in 2020? The 2020 figures were correlational telemetry from battle royale games, with no published sample size, from a company that sells graphics cards. The 2026 figures are a controlled, peer reviewed trial. They are not the same kind of claim, and only one of them was tested properly.

The 2026 study is Toth and colleagues, Monitor refresh rate impacts FPS video gamers’ perceptions of display smoothness and target acquisition performance, published in Social Sciences and Humanities Open in June 2026, with 101 participants at 60, 144 and 360Hz. The second study is a within subject trial of 26 participants across 30, 60, 120, 144 and 240Hz. Neither was conducted in Counter-Strike 2 specifically, and both measure target acquisition tasks rather than full matches. The frame time figures are arithmetic and can be checked with a calculator.