From 360Hz monitors to 8000Hz keyboards, 2021 has been the year of the hertz.

When technology becomes obsolete, the industry tries to get buyers interested in new products by offering bigger and better features. In 2021, a lot of attention has been paid to improving the hertz performance of PC peripherals (hertz or Hz is a unit of frequency that represents one cycle per second). We have seen how manufacturers have increased the frequency of polling and updating everyday devices, turning them into cutting-edge hardware to spark interest among enthusiasts.

Here’s how it happened.

First, monitors

2021 was the year of the Hertz, but to get to it we have to go back to 2020, when the world was introduced to 360Hz monitors.

Monitors can be the smartest place to view increased Hertz values ​​if you’re the right audience. For avid gamers with the right gear, higher hertz specs mean smoother movement with less wobble. And if you had a computer that could hit 360fps in certain games, you could finally get a display that could keep up. The best example I can think of of a 360Hz monitor showing an added edge over slower gaming monitors was when I watched fast-scrolling text on one of them. Words were much more legible on the 360Hz monitor than they were on the 144Hz panel, where the characters were more blurry.

For a while, 144Hz was the gold standard for PC gamers who wanted to be taken more seriously. Then we started seeing 240Hz monitors. In late 2020, 360Hz refresh rate monitors such as the Asus ROG Swift 360Hz PG259QN and the Acer Predator X25 became available. There are five 360Hz monitors available today. Alienware AW2521H, MSI Oculux NXG253R, and another Asus WeU with additional accessories and a round of software from the list.

This trend continued to have an impact in 2021. Not only because we saw the addition of a 360Hz MSI monitor, but also because these gaming monitors have raised the bar for extreme PC gamers. If you have a powerful computer and a fast monitor, surely other gaming equipment must keep up with the times, right? The availability of 360Hz monitors fueled this narrative and paved the way for other tech gear that boasts outrageously high clock rates.

Mice at 8000 Hz

In 2021, Razer released the Viper 8K Hz with unprecedented peripherals.

Outwardly, he looked like an ordinary mouse. In fact, it looked like the Razer Viper, the company’s popular gaming mouse. But the difference was within. The mouse can use an 8000Hz polling rate, which is at least eight times faster than almost any other mouse available.

What exactly does this mean? Mice typically have a polling rate of 1000 Hz. We have already seen mice with a frequency of 2000 Hz. The 1000Hz polling rate means the mouse can send a location report to the PC up to 1000 times per second. The Razer Viper 8K Hz was the first to do this at 8000 times per second.

A mouse with a 1000Hz polling rate has an expected latency of 1ms for the mouse to send each report. One second divided by 1000 reports is 0.001 seconds or 1 ms per report. For an 8000Hz mouse, the latency is 0.125ms (1 second divided by 8000 reports, or 0.000125 seconds).

For most people, mice with a frequency of 8000 Hz are completely unnecessary. But enthusiast publications, such as the display site Blur Busters, have pointed to increased micro-chipping in mice at 1000 Hz when the refresh rate reaches 120 Hz and above.

The Razer Mouse comes with some prerequisites, including minimum CPU and GPU specifications. It also required a monitor with Adaptive-Sync turned off (which also affects the power of the video card) and a refresh rate of at least 144 Hz.

With all the hardware you need, gamers can now enjoy 360fps with a mouse, updating their PC eight times more often than the vast majority of mice. I tested the Viper 8K Hz with a 300Hz screen, a 10th gen Intel Core i7, and an Nvidia RTX 2070 Super Max-Q. These parts aren’t the latest or greatest, so it’s entirely possible that I could have seen more impressive results with a more powerful build, but the Viper 8K Hz didn’t make me a better player. However, this seemed to cause my display to update my cursor location more frequently. Arrow trails formed when I swiped my finger, and the circles made the pointers appear closer together than what I was used to.