Monitor Test — Every Display Test in One Place

A sensible order for testing a new monitor

When a new display arrives — or an old one starts feeling wrong — the tests have a natural order, because the faults do. First, the rate: confirm the panel is running at its advertised refresh rate, since a monitor stuck at 60Hz invalidates every judgement you make afterwards about smoothness. Second, completeness: run the frame skipping check if you use an overclock, a capture card or a dock, and the dead pixel sweep while the return window is open — those two are time-sensitive in a way the others are not. Third, quality of motion: ghosting for trails, stutter for uneven delivery. Fourth, delay: the input lag pair, once everything else is known-good, because lag numbers only mean something relative to a healthy baseline.

Each test in the suite measures one thing and states its limits on its own page. That discipline is deliberate. Display testing on the web has a credibility problem — pages claiming laboratory precision from a browser tab — and the honest version is more useful anyway: frame timing really is exact, panel internals really are invisible to a web page, and knowing which is which tells you when to trust a number and when to reach for a camera. The guides deepen each topic: the stuck-at-60Hz walkthrough, FPS versus refresh rate, and frame time explained.

What the mini readout above is doing

The live Hz figure in the introduction is the refresh rate engine in miniature: it times ninety consecutive frames, takes the median gap, and converts it to hertz, refreshing continuously. It is the same measurement the full refresh rate test performs with statistics, a graph and a diagnosis attached. If that number surprises you, start there.