Chinese display specialist BOE showed off a laptop with a 16-inch 600 Hz display (opens in new tab) at the 2022 World Display Industry Conference in Chengdu, China. The new panel uses BOE's panel-accelerated oxide backplane technology.

Although BOE is not a household name, it is in fact one of the largest display panel manufacturers in the world. Its LCD panels are used by a wide range of desktop monitor and notebook PC manufacturers. If you have a laptop from a major manufacturer like Dell or HP, chances are good that it uses BOE panels.

In any case, a release date for the 600Hz 16-inch panel has not yet been set, and further specifications such as resolution, brightness, and responsiveness remain a mystery for now. What we can say, however, is that 600 Hz means that a new frame will be rendered every 1.67 ms. That's quite a few frames.

The immediate question, of course, is how useful such a panel would be in the real world, especially on a laptop. Aside from laptop chips, it is difficult to think of a desktop GPU that can hit the 600 fps needed for modern games. Even if such a GPU were available, it is equally debatable whether the difference between, say, 480 Hz and 600 Hz is something the human eye and reflexes can actually appreciate.

Perhaps more interesting is the response time of such a high-speed LCD panel. Currently, IPS panels claiming 1 ms response times are common, but this metric is usually for gray-to-gray rise/fall times and covers only a portion of the true pixel transition time of the panel; for an LCD panel to truly achieve 600 Hz, it would need to be much closer to real 1 ms performance would need to be much closer to 1 ms.

BOE also showed off a number of new panels at the show, including a 34" 165Hz mini-LED ultrawide model and a 17.3" foldable OLED panel.