Refresh rate

Refresh rate is the number of times per second a display updates the image from the GPU, measured in Hertz (Hz). In VR and AR applications, refresh rate is a critical specification that directly impacts visual comfort, motion sickness, latency, presence, and overall user experience. It refers to the frequency at which the head-mounted display (HMD) screen physically redraws the image presented to the user's eyes. Current headsets usually offer several selectable rates, most often between 72 and 120 Hz, and the rate an application actually uses is often below the maximum: Meta's Quest headsets default to 72 Hz for apps, Samsung's Galaxy XR defaults to 72 Hz, and Valve's Steam Frame offers a configurable 72 to 120 Hz with an experimental 144 Hz mode.

Many developer guides treat 90 Hz as the minimum for a comfortable VR experience, the standard established at the launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive in 2016, although standalone headsets such as the Oculus Quest popularized 72 Hz. Many modern consumer headsets support rates of 120 Hz or higher to further enhance visual smoothness and reduce the potential for user discomfort.

Reviewed 17 October 2026. Full source pass of the article: lead, every row of the headset refresh-rate table, the cited research (Zhao et al. 2022, Wang et al. 2023, Weech et al. 2019, Nurnberger et al. 2021, Warchol et al. 2024, Warburton et al. 2023, Lincoln et al. 2016, Abrash 2014), Carmack statements, reprojection history, platform rules, standards (IEEE 3079, ISO 9241-394) and the VRR and future-trends sections were checked against the cited sources. About review dates.

Technical Fundamentals

Refresh rate represents the maximum frequency at which a display can redraw or update the pixels on screen. The GPU renders frames and sends them to the display controller, which then updates the pixel states during each refresh cycle. The display receives new frames from the GPU or rendering system and refreshes accordingly, operating by cycling the display panel to update the image at fixed intervals. Modern VR displays use specialized approaches including pulsed emission and low persistence techniques to minimize motion blur and optimize the viewing experience.

Measurement and Mathematical Relationships

Refresh rate is measured in Hertz (Hz), representing the number of complete refresh cycles per second. The relationship between refresh rate and frame timing is expressed mathematically as:

Frame Period (ms) = 1000 / Refresh Rate (Hz)

This frame period directly affects motion-to-photon latency and determines the temporal resolution available for rendering head movement updates. Higher refresh rate means less latency between frames. For example, a display with 30 Hz has a frame latency of approximately 33.33 milliseconds (ms), calculated as 1000 ms / 30 Hz = 33.33 ms. In contrast, a 60 Hz display reduces this to 16.67 ms, halving the latency.

Frame Period by Refresh Rate

Refresh Rate	Frame Period	Frames per Second
30 Hz	33.33 ms	30 frames
60 Hz	16.67 ms	60 frames
72 Hz	13.89 ms	72 frames
80 Hz	12.50 ms	80 frames
90 Hz	11.11 ms	90 frames
100 Hz	10.00 ms	100 frames
120 Hz	8.33 ms	120 frames
144 Hz	6.94 ms	144 frames
180 Hz	5.56 ms	180 frames

Latency due to limitations of refresh rate can be reduced by increasing the refresh rate. For example, a display with 60 Hz would have the latency of 16.67 ms, half of the 30 Hz display.

Display Technologies in VR

VR displays utilize two primary technologies with different temporal characteristics:

OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode): Self-emissive pixels that can be modulated at the pixel level, achieving duty cycles around 17% in devices like the HTC Vive and HTC Vive Pro. Rise time is approximately 0.3 ms and fall time is approximately 0.5 ms. In an OLED display, each pixel is a self-emissive light source. This allows pixels to switch on and off quickly; John Carmack wrote that "OLED pixels can have switching times well under a millisecond". This speed suits the rapid strobing required by low persistence displays, providing crisp motion with minimal ghosting.

LCD (Liquid Crystal Display): Requires backlight modulation using fast-switching LED backlights. The HTC Vive Pro 2 achieves an extremely low 5% duty cycle at 120 Hz, with both rise and fall times of approximately 0.3 ms. In an LCD, pixels do not produce their own light; they act as shutters that modulate light from a separate backlight. These shutters are made of liquid crystals that physically reorient themselves to change color, a process that is much slower than OLED switching, with response times measured in milliseconds. To achieve low persistence, VR-specific "fast-switching" LCD panels with improved liquid crystal formulations are used in conjunction with a strobing backlight. The backlight flashes very briefly, but only after the liquid crystals have had sufficient time to settle into their new state, thereby simulating the effect of a low persistence OLED.

On traditional displays like CRTs, the refresh rate was tied to the electron beam scanning the screen, but modern LCD and OLED displays in VR/AR headsets hold pixel states until updated, reducing intrinsic flicker but still requiring high rates for smooth motion.

While OLEDs have a clear advantage in response time, manufacturing complexities historically meant that high-end LCD panels could sometimes achieve higher refresh rates in a given product generation. For instance, the LCD-based Valve Index (2019) runs at 120 Hz with an experimental 144 Hz mode, while the OLED-based HTC Vive and Vive Pro ran at up to 90 Hz. However, this technological gap is closing. Modern fast-switching LCDs have become highly effective for VR, while new Micro-OLED displays are pushing the boundaries of resolution and efficiency at high refresh rates.

This convergence has led to market diversification rather than a single "winner." High-refresh-rate LCDs are common in the mainstream consumer market (for example Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3, Valve Index), offering a strong balance of performance and cost. Meanwhile, high-end Micro-OLEDs are featured in premium, next-generation devices (for example Apple Vision Pro, Bigscreen Beyond) where ultimate contrast, color, and form factor are prioritized over cost.

Other trade-offs influence the choice as well. Zhao et al. note that the screen-door effect is particularly common in headsets with PenTile OLED displays, that fast-switching LCDs with high-resolution RGB panels mitigate it, and that one drawback of fast-switching LCDs is their limited dynamic range compared with OLED. In their measurements the LCD-based Vive Pro 2 had the highest static resolution of the three headsets tested, but the extra layers of its liquid crystal module (polarizers and color filters) appeared to add blur at low and middle spatial frequencies.

Refresh Rate vs Frame Rate

While often used interchangeably, refresh rate and frame rate (measured in frames per second, or FPS) are distinct but closely related concepts.

• Refresh Rate (Hz) is a hardware-level specification of the display panel itself. It dictates the maximum number of times the screen can physically draw a new image in one second. A 90 Hz display, for example, updates its image 90 times every second, regardless of the content being sent to it. It is a property of the display hardware: the fixed frequency at which the screen updates.

• Frame Rate (FPS) is a software-level metric that describes how many new frames the computer's GPU is actually rendering and sending to the display each second. This rate can fluctuate based on the complexity of the scene being rendered and the power of the hardware. Frame rate refers to how many images per second the system's graphics engine is producing and represents the temporal resolution of the content.

For an optimal experience, the frame rate should ideally match the display's refresh rate. If the GPU renders at 90 FPS and sends these frames to a 90 Hz display, the user sees a smooth, consistent image. However, a mismatch can cause problems. If the GPU can only produce 60 FPS for a 90 Hz display, the user will experience judder and stutter because the display is ready for new frames that the GPU has not yet provided. Conversely, rendering frames faster than the display can show them is a waste of computational resources, as the extra frames will simply be discarded.

A monitor or headset will refresh at a constant rate regardless of how many frames are being rendered. If the application's frame rate is lower than the display's refresh rate, some refresh cycles will have to re-show the previous image (resulting in repeated frames and possible stuttering). Conversely, if the GPU outputs frames faster than the refresh rate, the display cannot show them all; this can lead to artifacts like screen tearing, where parts of multiple frames appear at once.

The relationship is hierarchical: no matter how powerful the GPU, if a headset has a 90 Hz refresh rate, it cannot display more than 90 unique frames per second. Conversely, a 120 Hz headset will not provide smooth visuals if the application only renders at 60 FPS.

Synchronization Problems

When frame rate does not match refresh rate, several visual artifacts can occur:

Judder: A stuttering or jerky visual experience caused when the rendering engine fails to produce frames in time for each display refresh. In VR, dropped frames create a particularly unpleasant sensation. John Carmack described it as "like a kick in the head" and emphasized that "dropping a frame in VR is a bad thing." In VR, dropping below the native refresh rate (e.g. a game only running at 45 FPS on a 90 Hz headset) will typically cause noticeable judder or the need for reprojection.

Screen tearing: Visual artifacts where portions of two different frames display simultaneously, creating a "torn" appearance where images don't align properly. Carmack noted that "a tear line in VR just ruins the experience." Techniques such as vertical sync (V-Sync) and adaptive sync (including VRR technologies like G-SYNC/FreeSync) or asynchronous reprojection are used to better align frame delivery with the refresh timing, ensuring a smoother output.

Motion sickness and discomfort: Unlike traditional displays, low or inconsistent frame rates in VR can induce nausea, vertigo, and disorientation as the visual system struggles to process images that don't update naturally.

Importance in VR and AR

In VR and AR, refresh rate is a critical factor affecting user comfort and the sense of presence: the psychological feeling of "being there" in the virtual environment. A higher refresh rate results in lower latency between frames, leading to smoother motion and reduced visual artifacts. VR and AR devices typically require high refresh rates to maintain a comfortable and immersive experience.

Visual Comfort and Presence

In VR, the brain is highly sensitive to any disconnect between physical movement and visual feedback. When a user turns their head, they expect the virtual world to update instantaneously and smoothly, just as the real world does. A high and stable refresh rate is essential to maintaining this illusion of presence.

Low refresh rates in a head-mounted display can lead to noticeable flickering and increased motion blur during head movements, contributing to discomfort and disorientation. If the refresh rate is too low, users may perceive flicker or motion blur, which can cause eye strain and discomfort in immersive environments. A low refresh rate introduces a noticeable delay and lack of smoothness, which creates a sensory conflict. The user's inner ear (vestibular system) reports motion, but their eyes see a laggy, stuttering world. This mismatch is a primary cause of cybersickness, with symptoms including nausea, disorientation, and headaches.

Research has shown that higher refresh rates significantly reduce these symptoms and enhance the sense of presence. When work on the original Oculus Rift prototype began, "the common wisdom was that 90Hz (and therefore 90 frames per second) was the minimum target for VR presence to work." In a 2019 review, Weech, Kenny and Barnett-Cowan wrote that higher frame rates are associated with higher self-reported presence ratings "due to the increased realism afforded by smooth motion", citing Meehan et al. (2001), and that low display frame rates (below 20 fps) have long been known to cause motion sickness in simulated environments.

In a January 2014 talk at Valve's Steam Dev Days, Michael Abrash described the hardware Valve had found necessary for presence. He said presence "starts to work somewhere around an 80 degree field of view" and improves at least out to 110 degrees; that persistence of 3 ms or less was required with a 1K x 1K, 110-degree display; and that latency of 20 ms "combined with good prediction, works well", with up to 25 ms possibly adequate. On refresh rate, he said that "at 60 Hz, low persistence images flicker badly" and that Valve's fastest low-persistence prototype ran at 95 Hz, which "successfully eliminates visible flicker"; a somewhat lower rate might be adequate, but Valve had not yet done the experiments. He also said presence requires rock-solid head tracking that reports position as well as orientation, with accuracy of a millimeter in position and a quarter-degree in orientation maintained over a volume no smaller than a meter and a half on a side.

In AR applications, high refresh rates ensure that digital overlays remain synchronized with the real-world environment, reducing discrepancies that could break immersion.

Motion Sickness Reduction

Research links display timing to cybersickness (VR-induced motion sickness), but the evidence is less settled than the common 90 Hz rule of thumb suggests. Weech et al. note that the link between motion-to-photon latency and cybersickness "has been disputed", citing a 2003 study by Meehan and colleagues. That study compared end-to-end latencies of 50 ms and 90 ms on a 60 Hz display; according to the account in Wang et al. (2023), the lower-latency group reported a higher sense of presence and showed a greater change in heart rate, but the authors found no significant relationship between latency and simulator sickness.

A 2023 study by Wang and colleagues, published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, compared 60, 90, 120 and 180 frames per second in two VR task scenarios with 32 participants (16 women and 16 men). They used a Pimax 5K Super, chosen because it had the highest refresh rate (180 Hz) of the headsets they surveyed; because its driver offered only 90, 120 and 180 Hz, the 60 fps condition was shown on the 90 Hz setting. The authors concluded that "120fps is an important threshold for VR. After 120fps, users tend to feel lower SS [simulator sickness] symptoms without a significant negative effect on their experience", and that 120 and 180 fps gave better task performance than lower rates. UploadVR noted that the study was confined to one niche, wide-field-of-view headset, so it is unknown whether the results generalize to other headsets.

Physiological Mechanisms

Several mechanisms have been proposed for how display timing contributes to motion sickness, although the studies below did not vary refresh rate directly.

Visual-vestibular conflict: VR displays visual motion without matching signals from the vestibular system (inner ear), and conflict between these cues is thought to be central to cybersickness. In an evolutionary hypothesis published in 1977, Treisman proposed that motion sickness is triggered by repeated, unpredictable disturbances between the spatial frameworks defined by visual, vestibular and proprioceptive input, and that vomiting evolved mainly to rid the body of ingested neurotoxins, which can cause similar disturbances; its occurrence in response to motion would be an accidental by-product.

Prediction error: Nürnberger and colleagues recorded EEG from 14 healthy participants exposed to increasing levels of visual-vestibular mismatch in VR. Subjective visually induced motion sickness rose with the mismatch, and the proportion of slow EEG waves (especially 1-10 Hz) increased, mainly in temporo-occipital regions. The authors hypothesized that the brain responds to an unresolvable mismatch by reducing information flow, in an attempt to replace an unstable internal model that has a high prediction error with a stable one.

Vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR): The VOR causes a person's eyes to rotate automatically in the opposite direction of head movement to keep an image stable on the retina. Warchoł and colleagues note that the head-tracking delay of an HMD is, according to manufacturers, around 20 ms but can reach 50 ms in practice, much longer than the latency of the VOR, and that the nervous system adapts to the resulting visual-vestibular mismatch.

Motion-to-Photon Latency

Motion-to-Photon Latency (MTP) is the total time elapsed from when a user initiates a movement (for example turning their head) to the moment the corresponding change in the virtual world is fully illuminated on the display. It is arguably the single most important metric for user comfort in VR. This latency is a cumulative result of several stages in the VR pipeline:

1. Sensor sampling (tracking head/controller position)
2. Data transmission to the processor
3. Application processing and physics simulation
4. GPU rendering of the new frame
5. Display refresh (drawing the new frame on the screen)

Refresh rate only governs the final stage of this pipeline. For example, a 90 Hz display updates every 11.1 milliseconds (ms), meaning it can contribute up to that amount to the total MTP. However, even with an infinitely fast display, high latency in the tracking or rendering stages will still result in a poor experience. For VR to feel responsive and to avoid inducing cybersickness, the total MTP should ideally be kept below 20 ms.

This makes MTP a more holistic, user-centric metric than refresh rate alone. While a high refresh rate is necessary to achieve low MTP, it is not sufficient. The entire system, from sensors to software to pixels, must be optimized for low latency.

Target latencies

Published latency targets come mostly from VR hardware developers rather than from controlled studies. John Carmack wrote that when absolute delays are "below approximately 20 milliseconds they are generally imperceptible", that "a total system latency of 50 milliseconds will feel responsive, but still subtly lagging", and that the 20 ms goal is challenging because an application running at a smooth 60 fps can still have host latencies of over 50 ms. Abrash said in 2014 that 20 ms combined with good prediction works well and that up to 25 ms may be adequate. At GTC 2016, NVIDIA vice president of research David Luebke said that while less than 20 ms is generally considered good enough for VR, things get better toward 10 ms and there are measurable benefits down to as low as 1 ms.

Latency Pipeline

Total motion-to-photon latency comprises multiple stages:

1. Sensor Latency: IMU sampling and camera processing
2. Tracking/Processing: Sensor fusion and pose calculation
3. Rendering: Scene rendering on GPU (varies with complexity)
4. Display: Frame scanout and pixel update (determined by refresh rate)

Higher refresh rates directly reduce the display component of latency, and VR runtimes also use predictive tracking to compensate for the rest of the pipeline. Warburton and colleagues measured controller motion-to-photon latency on the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Oculus Rift S and Valve Index using Unity and SteamVR: at the start of a sudden movement all four had mean latencies between 21 and 42 ms, but once motion prediction could account for the inherent delays, latency was functionally reduced to 2-13 ms, a reduction that occurred within about 25-58 ms of movement onset. They concluded that sudden accelerations, such as movement onset, impacts and direction changes, increase latency and lower spatial accuracy.

Display Persistence and Low Persistence

Display persistence (also called pixel persistence) refers to the duration per frame that the display actively emits light, as distinct from being dark or black. This is separate from but closely related to refresh rate. Long persistence is a primary cause of motion blur in VR: the longer pixels persist, the farther their images smear across the retina when the eye moves relative to the display.

The Motion Blur Problem

Most conventional LCD and OLED screens are "sample-and-hold" displays. This means that when a pixel is set to a specific color for a frame, it holds that color and remains continuously lit for the entire duration of the refresh cycle (for example for the full 11.1 ms at 90 Hz).

Traditional displays use sample-and-hold presentation where each frame remains visible for the entire refresh period. During head movement in VR, this creates motion blur because the brain receives the same static image even as the user's head position changes. The longer a frame persists, the less accurate it becomes relative to the current head position, causing a visible "smearing" effect.

In VR, this causes significant motion blur because of the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR), which keeps the eyes steady during rapid head motion. Since an HMD is attached to the head, a continuously lit ("high persistence") image is effectively smeared across the user's retina during a head turn. Abrash gave the example of a "leisurely" 120 degrees per second head turn on a 60 Hz full-persistence display, which produces two degrees of smearing across the retina per frame.

The relationship between persistence and motion blur can be quantified by what Blur Busters calls Blur Busters Law: 1 ms of persistence equals 1 pixel of motion blur during motion at 1000 pixels per second. A full-persistence 60 Hz display (16.7 ms) creates 33 pixels of motion blur at 2000 pixels/second motion, while a 3 ms low-persistence display creates only 6 pixels of blur at the same speed.

Low Persistence Technology

Another reason high refresh rates are vital in VR is the use of low-persistence displays. VR headsets minimize motion blur by only illuminating each frame briefly (turning pixels off between refreshes). This low-persistence technique requires a fast refresh to avoid visible flicker. All modern VR headsets (e.g. Valve Index, Meta Quest 3, etc.) use high refresh rates coupled with low-persistence OLED or LCD panels to achieve a clear, stable image during head movements.

Low persistence displays strobe the image on and off rapidly, with the screen only illuminated for a small fraction of each frame; the HTC Vive and Vive Pro measured by Zhao et al. had a 17% duty cycle and the Vive Pro 2 a 5% duty cycle. In low-persistence mode each frame is displayed for a very short period, with a black screen for the rest of the time before the next frame arrives, which reduces motion blur; Google's VR documentation notes that a small number of users are sensitive to the flickering of low-persistence displays. UploadVR described low persistence as a much cheaper solution to smear than raising the refresh rate, able to "deliver the same blur reduction as a 500 Hz panel would", and noted that it first shipped in the Oculus Rift DK2 in 2014. Abrash put the requirement for presence at 3 ms of persistence or less on a 1K x 1K, 110-degree display, with shorter persistence needed at higher pixel densities.

Duty Cycle (%) = (Emission Time / Frame Period) × 100

Measured and specified persistence values in commercial VR headsets:

• Oculus Rift CV1: 2 ms pixel persistence, as confirmed by John Carmack, who also said the Oculus Rift S has lower persistence than the original Rift
• HTC Vive and HTC Vive Pro: about 1.9 ms pulse width at 90 Hz (17% duty cycle), measured by Zhao et al.
• HTC Vive Pro 2: 0.42 ms pulse width at 120 Hz and 0.55 ms at 90 Hz (5% duty cycle in both modes), measured by Zhao et al.
• Valve Index: illumination period of 0.330 ms to 0.530 ms depending on frame rate (0.330 ms at 144 Hz), according to Valve

Research published in Nature Scientific Reports demonstrates that "reducing the display emission duty cycle to less than 20% is beneficial to mitigate motion blur in VR HMDs." The study also found that increasing refresh rate from 90 Hz to 120 Hz provides minimal additional benefit when already using low persistence with less than 20% duty cycle, suggesting that persistence is more critical than raw refresh rate for motion clarity. By contrast, with continuous emission (100% duty cycle) the improvement from raising the refresh rate from 60 to 120 Hz was prominent, while a 60 Hz refresh rate combined with a short single pulse per frame may lead to flickering. The authors also found that content rendered below the display refresh rate (for example 60 or 30 fps on a 120 Hz display) produces replicated "shadow" images during smooth pursuit, so the content frame rate should match the display refresh rate.

Judder and Stutter

Judder is a visual artifact perceived as a shaky, inconsistent, or stuttering motion; Microsoft's HoloLens documentation describes it as "uneven motion and double images", more pronounced with faster motion and lower render rates. It is primarily caused by a desynchronization between the application's frame rate and the display's fixed refresh rate. When the rendering engine takes too long to produce a new frame and misses the display's refresh deadline (an event known as a "dropped frame"), the old frame is often displayed again. This repetition causes a perceptible hitch in what should be smooth motion, breaking immersion and contributing to discomfort. Microsoft notes that when an application renders at 30 fps on a 60 Hz display, the same image is shown twice in a row with different amounts of latency, and that a constantly fluctuating frame rate is more noticeable to a user than running consistently at a lower frame rate. While related to the general perception of "stutter" from a low frame rate, judder is often characterized by its inconsistency, arising from a fluctuating frame rate that fails to align with the display's rigid refresh interval.

A higher refresh also reduces judder (skipping or stuttering motion) when the headset or objects are moving quickly. Overall, a fast display update rate is one of the key factors (along with accurate tracking and high resolution) in creating a comfortable VR/AR experience.

Performance, Hardware, and Design Trade-offs

Achieving the high refresh rates demanded by modern VR is a significant engineering challenge that involves a delicate balance of performance, power, and physical design.

The Rendering Budget (Frame Time)

A display's refresh rate imposes a strict, non-negotiable deadline for the GPU, known as the frame time or rendering budget. This is the maximum amount of time the system has to render a complete, stereoscopic frame before the display needs to show it. The calculation is a simple inverse of the refresh rate:

Frame Time (ms) = 1000 / Refresh Rate (Hz)

This relationship means that as the refresh rate increases, the time available for rendering decreases dramatically. At 90 Hz, the GPU has 11.1 ms to complete its work. At 120 Hz, this budget shrinks by 25% to just 8.3 ms. At 144 Hz, it is 6.9 ms. Meta's developer documentation notes that "higher refresh rates require your app to perform its work in shorter amounts of time".

Computational Demands

Meeting these extremely tight deadlines for two separate eye views at increasingly high resolutions requires enormous computational power. For tethered VR, this necessitates a "VR-Ready" PC equipped with a powerful, modern GPU capable of handling the immense rendering load.

The challenge is even greater for standalone headsets, which rely on power-efficient mobile chipsets. To consistently hit a 90 Hz or 120 Hz target on this hardware, developers must employ aggressive optimization techniques and often make sacrifices in graphical fidelity, such as using lower-resolution textures, simpler 3D models, and less complex lighting and shadow effects. The requirement to render each frame in just a few milliseconds severely limits the graphical and simulation complexity possible on mobile hardware.

Engineering and Design Compromises

For HMD manufacturers, the push for higher refresh rates involves a cascade of engineering trade-offs:

• Power Consumption: Driving displays at higher frequencies and running the processor at maximum speed to meet the rendering budget significantly increases power consumption. This leads to shorter battery life in standalone headsets.

• Heat Dissipation: Higher power draw generates more heat, which must be managed through passive heatsinks or active cooling systems like fans. Inadequate cooling can lead to thermal throttling, where the processor slows down to prevent overheating, causing performance to drop and breaking the immersive experience.

• Weight, Bulk, and Cost: More powerful processors, larger batteries, and active cooling systems all add weight, bulk, and cost to an HMD. This runs directly counter to the industry's goal of creating VR devices that are lightweight, comfortable, and affordable for the mass market.

Reprojection and Frame Rate Mitigation Technologies

Modern VR platforms employ sophisticated techniques to maintain smooth display output even when applications cannot sustain the target frame rate. Given the immense difficulty of consistently rendering frames at the native refresh rate of an HMD, a class of software technologies has been developed to mitigate the negative effects of dropped frames. These techniques prioritize maintaining smooth head tracking above all else, as this is the most critical element for preventing cybersickness.

Asynchronous Timewarp (ATW)

Asynchronous reprojection is a general term for a family of techniques that synthetically generate a new frame when the application fails to deliver a real one in time for the display refresh.

Asynchronous timewarp (ATW) is the implementation of this concept developed by Oculus, now part of Meta; Valve's similar SteamVR feature is called Asynchronous Reprojection. It builds on Timewarp, which John Carmack added to the Oculus software in April 2014 to lower perceived latency; UploadVR wrote in 2019 that the concept of Timewarp is used by all major VR platforms. On the Oculus platform ATW is always active. When a new frame isn't ready, ATW takes the previous fully rendered frame and geometrically warps or "reprojects" it based on the most up-to-date head-tracking data. It takes rendered frames and reprojects them at the last possible moment before display using the newest available head tracking data. If the current frame doesn't finish rendering in time, ATW reprojects the previous frame with updated tracking, providing smooth head rotation even during frame drops. This process corrects for the user's head rotation (3-DoF) that occurred since the last frame was rendered. The "asynchronous" nature means it runs on a separate, high-priority thread from the main rendering process. This allows it to interrupt a slow-rendering application to ensure an image with the correct orientation is always displayed at the precise moment of the screen refresh, dramatically reducing the perceived judder and latency from a missed frame.

ATW was first shipped on Gear VR in late 2014 and added to Oculus Rift PC in March 2016. Valve added similar functionality to SteamVR in October 2016.

Limitation: ATW only corrects for rotational head movement, not positional movement or moving objects in the scene.

Asynchronous Spacewarp (ASW)

Asynchronous spacewarp (ASW) is a more advanced Meta technology that extends reprojection to handle positional movement and object motion. It builds on ATW and uses a fast extrapolation algorithm that analyzes differences between previous frames to predict what a synthetic "in-between" frame should look like using motion vectors. Oculus released it in December 2016. ASW is not always enabled: it switches on automatically when an application is consistently dropping multiple frames over a few seconds, then forces the application to run at half frame rate (45 FPS on a 90 Hz display) and synthesizes every second frame. Oculus stated that ASW "doesn't scale well below half the display's refresh rate".

ASW 2.0 incorporates depth buffer information to greatly reduce visual artifacts; the developer has to submit the depth buffer each frame, otherwise it falls back to ASW 1.0.

Motion Smoothing is Valve's equivalent technology. It functions on the same core principle: when the frame rate drops, it forces the application to render at half-rate (or even one-third or one-quarter rate) and synthesizes the missing frames by extrapolating motion from the previously rendered frames. Valve introduced it as a SteamVR beta in October 2018; Engadget reported that it drops a 90 FPS application to 45 FPS and generates a synthetic frame for every real one, and that it can generate two to three frames for every real one if things get especially bad. In January 2019 UploadVR reported that it worked only on NVIDIA GPUs.

These technologies let VR run on a wider range of hardware, but they trade the discomfort of judder for a different set of visual artifacts. Meta's PC performance guidelines tell developers not to rely on ASW to hit their rendering frame rate.

Application SpaceWarp

Application SpaceWarp (AppSW), introduced by Meta for Quest headsets in November 2021, gives the application control of frame synthesis. The application renders at half the display refresh rate and supplies a motion vector buffer and a depth buffer, from which the system synthesizes the remaining frames. Meta said it supports all available refresh rates on Quest 1 and Quest 2 (72, 90 and 120 Hz, with the application rendering at 36, 45 or 60 FPS), and that in initial testing with a first-party application it gave up to 70 percent additional compute, a figure that varies with content.

Positional Timewarp

Positional timewarp adds positional correction to the always-on timewarp system using depth buffer information, similar to ASW 2.0 but active for all frames rather than toggling on during sustained frame drops. Like ASW 2.0, it works only for applications that submit their depth buffer.

Visual Artifacts and Limitations

The process of synthetically generating frames is an estimation, and it can introduce noticeable visual artifacts, especially during fast or complex motion. Common artifacts include:

• Warping and Wobbling: The edges of objects, particularly those moving against a complex background, can appear to warp, ripple, or melt.
• Ghosting: A faint, transparent trail or "double image" may appear behind moving objects.
• Disocclusion Artifacts: When a foreground object moves, it reveals the background behind it. Since the algorithm only has data from previous frames, it must guess what this newly revealed area looks like, which often results in smearing, stretching, or tearing artifacts in that region.

While these artifacts are often preferable to the severe judder of dropped frames, their presence means that native, full-frame-rate rendering remains the gold standard for visual quality.

Modern VR/AR Headset Specifications

Commercial VR and AR headsets span a range of refresh rates, and most offer several selectable modes; the rate an application actually uses is often lower than the headset's maximum. The table lists rates published by manufacturers or reported by technical press as of October 2026.

Refresh rates of selected VR and AR headsets

Headset	Type	Supported Refresh Rate(s) (Hz)	Release Date
Meta Quest 3	Standalone / PC VR	72, 80, 90, 96, 100, 120	October 2023
Meta Quest 3S	Standalone VR	72, 80, 90, 96, 100, 120	October 2024
Meta Quest 2	Standalone / PC VR	72, 80, 90, 96, 100, 120 (60 for media apps only)	October 2020
Meta Quest Pro	Standalone VR	72, 80, 90	October 2022
Valve Index	PC VR	80, 90, 120, 144 (experimental)	June 2019 (discontinued October 2026)
Steam Frame	Standalone / PC VR streaming	72-120, 144 (experimental)	September 2026
PlayStation VR	Console VR (PS4)	90, 120	October 2016
PlayStation VR2	Console VR (PS5)	90, 120	February 2023
Apple Vision Pro (M2)	Standalone AR/VR	90, 96, 100	February 2024
Apple Vision Pro (M5)	Standalone AR/VR	90, 96, 100, 120	October 2025
Samsung Galaxy XR	Standalone AR/VR	60, 72 (default), 90	October 2025
HTC Vive	PC VR	90	April 2016
HTC Vive Pro	PC VR	90	2018
HTC Vive Pro 2	PC VR	90, 120	June 2021
HTC Vive XR Elite	Standalone / PC VR	90	February 2023
HTC Vive Focus 3	Standalone VR	90	June 2021
HP Reverb G2	PC VR	90	November 2020
Pico 4	Standalone VR	72, 90	2022
Pico 4 Ultra	Standalone VR	90	September 2024
Pimax Vision 5K Super	PC VR	90, 120, 144, 160, 180 (experimental)	December 2020
Pimax Crystal	PC VR	72, 90, 120	2023
Varjo (all models)	PC VR	90	Various
Oculus Rift CV1	PC VR	90	March 2016
Oculus Rift S	PC VR	80	May 2019
Microsoft HoloLens 2	AR	60 (app frame rate)	November 2019
Magic Leap 2	AR	120	September 2022

The Apple Vision Pro switches refresh rate according to content and environment. MacRumors reported in 2023, based on Apple's WWDC session and code in a visionOS beta, that the original model runs at 90 Hz most of the time, switches to 96 Hz for video filmed at 24 frames per second, and uses 100 Hz only to "compensate for detected 50Hz flicker from artificial lighting". Apple says the current model supports playback of multiples of 24 fps and 30 fps "for judder-free video". With the M5 chip, introduced in October 2025, Apple says Vision Pro can increase the refresh rate up to 120 Hz "for reduced motion blur when users look at their physical surroundings, and an even smoother experience when using Mac Virtual Display".

Headsets do not always run at their maximum refresh setting. On Meta's Quest headsets the default display refresh rate for apps is 72 Hz. UploadVR wrote in 2024 that 120 Hz on Quest 2 and Quest 3 is a developer-side option that very few standalone apps use, because rendering each frame in about 8 milliseconds severely limits graphical fidelity and simulation complexity on mobile chipsets; most titles run at the default 72 Hz on Quest 2, while many have moved to 90 Hz on Quest 3. Console VR systems use reprojection to synthesize extra frames: on the standard PS5, many of the most graphically demanding PlayStation VR2 games run at 60 FPS extrapolated to 120 Hz, which UploadVR's technical analysis found leads to a double-imaging or ghosting effect.

In AR headsets, refresh behavior depends on the display architecture. Microsoft's HoloLens documentation describes color-sequential displays that refresh 240 times a second, showing four separate color fields (red, green, blue, green) for each newly rendered image, for a 60 FPS experience; applications must supply a new image every 16 milliseconds. When the eye tracks a moving hologram, the color fields can separate at its edges, an artifact Microsoft calls color separation. The Magic Leap 2 has a 120 Hz display, according to the specifications Magic Leap released when it announced the headset's price and release date in July 2022. Research prototypes go much further: Lincoln and colleagues at UNC-Chapel Hill, working with NVIDIA Research, described an optical see-through AR display built on a DMD chip with a 16 kHz binary update rate, which NVIDIA demonstrated at GTC 2017 with a reported motion-to-photon latency of 80 microseconds.

Historical Evolution

VR refresh rates have evolved significantly from early development kits to modern consumer devices.

Early Development (2013-2014)

The Oculus Rift DK1, shipped to Kickstarter backers in March 2013, used a 1280x800 LCD panel; Road to VR wrote that DK1 users would attest that its LCD panel "was heavily prone to smearing". Carmack later called full persistence "a blurry smeary mess like DK1", and Abrash said in January 2014 that the DK1 "is not good enough to enable strong presence for most people", noting that Oculus had shipped more than 50,000 of them.

The Oculus Rift DK2 (July 2014) moved to a 1920x1080 OLED panel with low persistence, a technology Road to VR credited to Valve. In his 2014 Oculus Connect keynote Carmack said "we achieved 75 Hz on DK2" and that the DK2 "is basically a Note 3 screen"; he also said the 60 Hz low-persistence display of the Gear VR "has flicker problems for a lot of people".

The 90 Hz Standard (2016-2019)

The Oculus Rift CV1 (March 2016) established 90 Hz as the industry standard for consumer VR. Carmack explained in his 2014 keynote that "90 Hz is where probably 95-99% of the people really don't see [flicker]." He argued that there was still reason to go to 120 Hz, because it "gives you the even divisions where you can run 60 Hz content with double frames", as well as 24 Hz content. This became the baseline for the HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality headsets, and most PC VR devices.

The Oculus Rift S, released in May 2019, dropped to 80 Hz. Engadget reported that Carmack was aware the Rift S could be seen as a "step sideways" because it had a lower refresh rate than the original Rift, although he also said it had lower pixel persistence.

The Oculus Quest (May 2019) launched at 72 Hz. In his September 2019 Oculus Connect keynote, Carmack said the Quest's OLED screen could run at up to 90 Hz, but the company stuck with 72 Hz because it was a more achievable frame rate for mobile games; he had considered unlocking 90 Hz for Oculus Link content but was warned it would void the headset's FCC certification.

High Refresh Era (2019-Present)

Higher rates were already on sale by then: Sony's PlayStation VR supported 120 Hz at its October 2016 launch, and the Pimax 5K Plus, launched in 2018, supported up to 144 Hz. The Valve Index (June 2019) runs at 120 Hz with backward compatibility to 90 Hz and an experimental 144 Hz mode; Valve said higher frame rates "improve realism and optical comfort".

The Meta Quest 2 (October 2020) launched with a 72 Hz refresh rate and the promise of an experimental 90 Hz mode; 90 Hz was rolled out across the board late in 2020, and 120 Hz followed as an experimental feature. In September 2022, PC Gamer reported that John Carmack had confirmed the experimental 120 Hz mode would soon be made "default-on", without a firm date.

Recent headsets have widened the range of rates rather than converging on one. The Apple Vision Pro launched in February 2024 with 90, 96 and 100 Hz modes and gained 120 Hz with the M5 model in October 2025. Samsung's Galaxy XR, released in October 2025, defaults to 72 Hz and also offers 60 Hz and up to 90 Hz. Valve's Steam Frame, announced in November 2025, has LCD panels with a configurable refresh rate between 72 Hz and 120 Hz and an experimental 144 Hz mode, "just like the Index", according to UploadVR. In October 2026, a month after Steam Frame's release, Valve announced that the Index was discontinued; it remains supported on Steam and SteamVR.

Industry Standards and Recommendations

Technical Standards

IEEE 3079-2020: "IEEE Standard for Head-Mounted Display (HMD)-Based Virtual Reality(VR) Sickness Reduction Technology", approved by the IEEE SA board in September 2020 and published in April 2021, defines HMD-based VR sickness-reducing technology. Its working group (Human Factors for Immersive Content) also has an active project, P3079.1, to specify requirements and test methods for the motion-to-photon latency that causes VR sickness.

ISO 9241-394:2020: Part 394 of the ISO "Ergonomics of human-system interaction" series, titled "Ergonomic requirements for reducing undesirable biomedical effects of visually induced motion sickness during watching electronic images". It sets requirements and recommendations for image content and electronic display systems to reduce visually induced motion sickness, and applies to flat panel displays, projectors with a screen and VR-type head-mounted displays, but not to HMDs that present images on or with real-world scenes.

IEEE P2048 Family: The IEEE 2048 VR/AR Working Group is developing multiple standards for VR/AR technology including device taxonomy, video quality metrics, file formats, safety, and interoperability.

Platform Requirements

Meta/Oculus: To qualify for the Rift Store, PC applications must hold a consistent 90 FPS on a recommended-spec machine and 45 FPS on a minimum-spec machine. On Quest headsets the default display refresh rate for apps is 72 Hz, supported rates go up to 120 Hz depending on the model, and 60 Hz may be used only by media player apps; non-media apps that set 60 Hz fail Store review.

Sony: For the original PlayStation VR, Sony senior developer support engineer Chris Norden told developers at GDC 2016 that "60Hz is the minimum acceptable frame rate" and that a game dropping to 55 or 51 frames per second would probably be rejected.

Valve/SteamVR: On the Valve Index, SteamVR offers 80, 90, 120 and experimental 144 Hz modes, with Motion Smoothing available to synthesize frames when an application drops frames.

Apple: Vision Pro switches among its supported refresh rates (90, 96, 100 and, on the M5 model, 120 Hz) according to content and conditions.

Recommended Minimums

There is no single agreed minimum. Sony set 60 frames per second as the floor for original PlayStation VR games, Meta's Quest platform defaults to 72 Hz, and 90 Hz was the standard at the launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Wang et al. identified 120 frames per second as a threshold above which simulator sickness symptoms were lower in their 2023 study. Refresh rate also interacts with other display properties: Zhao et al. found that once pulsed emission with a duty cycle below 20% is used, raising the refresh rate from 90 to 120 Hz does not change spatiotemporal performance significantly, and Weech et al. note that a wider field of view increases presence but also cybersickness.

Variable Refresh Rate Technologies

Variable refresh rate (VRR) dynamically adjusts the display's refresh rate to match the frame rate, reducing stuttering and tearing.

Gaming monitors commonly support VRR technologies such as G-Sync and FreeSync. VR platforms instead document a set of discrete refresh rates: on Meta's Quest headsets an app sets one of the rates its device supports, with 72 Hz as the default, and Apple Vision Pro switches among fixed rates (for example 96 Hz for 24 fps video and 100 Hz to compensate for 50 Hz lighting flicker). When an application misses frames, VR runtimes rely on reprojection techniques such as asynchronous reprojection rather than changing the refresh interval.

Future Trends

Ultra-High Refresh Rates

At GTC 2016, NVIDIA vice president of research David Luebke demonstrated an experimental 1,700 Hz display mounted on a rail that moved it back and forth while its image stayed steady, and Luebke called it "effectively a zero latency display". Road to VR noted that the rail's wheels fed the carriage's movement into the system almost instantaneously, and that a display this fast still needs low latency across the whole motion-to-photon pipeline. In the 16 kHz AR display described above, the source input remained 60 Hz; post-rendering 2D offsets and just-in-time tracking updates, combined with a modulation technique that turns binary pixels into perceived gray scale, produced the very high output rate.

Advanced Display Technologies

Micro-OLED: Used in the Apple Vision Pro and the Samsung Galaxy XR, whose makers list micro-OLED displays with 7.5-micron and 6.3-micron pixel pitches respectively.

Micro-LED: A self-emissive display technology in development for AR and wearables. In June 2019 Mojo Vision announced a monochrome prototype microLED display 0.48 mm across with a pixel density of over 14,000 pixels per inch and a 1.8-micrometer pixel pitch.

Computational Enhancements

Foveated Rendering: Reduces rendering cost by rendering at full resolution only where the user is looking, using eye tracking to locate the gaze point.

See Also

• Frame rate
• Latency
• Low persistence
• Motion blur
• Judder
• Motion sickness
• Cybersickness
• Presence
• Presence
• Asynchronous timewarp
• Asynchronous spacewarp
• Asynchronous reprojection
• Motion-to-photon latency
• Foveated rendering
• Field of view
• Variable refresh rate
• Head-mounted display
• GPU
• V-Sync
• G-Sync
• FreeSync
• OLED
• LCD
• Micro-OLED