1000Hz Monitors Are Real Now. Nothing You Own Can Feed One.

Two 24.5-inch monitors on the same show floor in Berlin this week run at a native 1000Hz. Not a 720p dual mode, not a marketing peak: 1920 by 1080, a thousand refreshes a second, on IPS. LG's UltraGear 25G590B is listed at $999.99 with preorders open and an overclock to 1100Hz. Acer's Predator XB253Q U1, announced at IFA on September 2, is $1,099.99 and arrives in North America in the first quarter of 2027. Both companies are using the words "world's first"; LG announced its panel in May and Acer announced at the show, so the claim is a question of what counts as announcing.

The number is real, and this is the moment refresh rates stopped being a race. Where it goes from here is a question of what can feed the thing, and the answer from our own data is: nothing, not yet, not in a live match.

What each one is

LG's panel is the more completely specified of the two because it has a live product page. It is 24.5 inches, Full HD, IPS with a low-reflection film, native 1000Hz, 1100Hz overclocked. It carries one DisplayPort 2.1 input at UHBR20 and two HDMI ports plus a headphone jack. It is G-Sync Compatible, and LG says the certification holds at 1000Hz; FreeSync Premium is supported at 1000Hz but not at the 1100Hz overclock. It has LG's Motion Blur Reduction Pro strobing mode, a height, tilt and swivel stand with marked positions, and the AI picture and sound features LG puts on everything now. VideoCardz reported preorders at $999.99 with shipments targeted as early as September 3, which would make it the first 1000Hz panel anyone can own.

Acer's spec sheet, from the press release, reads like a more rounded monitor. Same 24.5 inches, 1080p, IPS, native 1000Hz. A 0.3ms response figure, which is a strobing number from Acer's VRB Pro mode rather than a grey-to-grey time, so read it as a blur-reduction claim and not a panel speed. 400 nits, 450 peak, DisplayHDR 400 certified, 90% DCI-P3, 8-bit plus FRC. FreeSync Premium and G-Sync Compatible. Two HDMI 2.1 ports and one DisplayPort 2.1. A full ergonomic stand with pivot, and a VESA mount. $1,099.99 in North America, 1,099 euros in Europe, both in Q1 2027.

Acer used the same release to show a 31.5-inch 4K 180Hz QD-OLED at $899.99, a 27-inch 4K 160Hz IPS that drops to 1080p at 500Hz for $449.99, and two 27-inch tri-mode IPS panels at $299.99 and $329.99 that run 1440p at 275Hz, 1080p at 360Hz or 720p at 520Hz. LG, for its part, brought a 39-inch 5K2K OLED ultrawide with a 330Hz WFHD mode. The dual-mode trick is now everywhere, and it is worth noting that the 1000Hz panels are the ones that refuse to use it.

Why LG's fine print names your graphics card

Buried on LG's product page is the sentence that matters more than the headline: the maximum refresh rate requires Windows 11, an NVIDIA RTX 50-series card or an AMD Radeon RX 9070, 9060 or 7900-series card or newer, and a DisplayPort 2.1 connection.

That list is not a performance requirement. It is exactly the set of consumer graphics cards that have a DisplayPort 2.1 output. The RX 7900 XT and XTX were AMD's first with DP 2.1; the RX 9000 series kept it; the RTX 50 series added it on NVIDIA's side. Every RTX 40-series card, including the 4090, ships with DisplayPort 1.4a, and every RX 7800 and below does too. The arithmetic is simple enough: 1080p at 1000Hz is around 50 gigabits a second of pixel data before blanking intervals, and DP 1.4's payload is about 26. Compression can close some of that gap, but LG certified the mode on DP 2.1 hardware and is not promising the full rate over an older port.

So the first thing a 1000Hz monitor asks of you is not frames. It is a graphics card from the current or previous generation with the right connector, which rules out every RTX 40-series card, including the 4090.

The frame rate problem

The second thing it asks of you is a thousand frames a second, and that is where the wheels come off.

Our FPS estimator, the same model behind the bottleneck checker's per-game panel, puts a Ryzen 7 9800X3D with an RTX 5090 at roughly 570 fps in Counter-Strike 2 at 1080p, and roughly 690 fps in Valorant. Both numbers are CPU-limited. Swap the 5090 for an RTX 5070 and the estimate does not move, because the graphics card is not the part running out. The fastest processor we track feeds a 1000Hz panel a little more than half its frames in the two lightest games people play competitively.

Our model is conservative on purpose, and published benchmark runs in benchmark maps land above it. Valorant in particular can brush four digits on a flagship processor in some published runs. A benchmark map is not a live match with ten players, an anti-cheat kernel and a Discord call, though, and nobody has published a sustained thousand from one of those. The honest framing is that a 1000Hz panel will spend most of its life at 500 to 700 fps with variable refresh on.

There is one way to fill it, and it is the one its buyers will refuse. NVIDIA's multi-frame generation can turn 250 rendered frames into 1000 displayed ones. Input latency stays at the rendered rate, and every serious competitive player turns frame generation off for exactly that reason. The only route to a full 1000Hz today is the feature the target market has already rejected.

What 1000Hz is for, then

Motion clarity, not frame count. On a sample-and-hold display every frame sits on screen until the next one arrives, and your eye tracking across it smears the image in proportion to that hold time. At 240Hz a frame persists for just over four milliseconds; at 480Hz, two; at 1000Hz, one. Blur Busters has argued for a decade that one millisecond of persistence is where an LCD finally matches the motion clarity of a CRT without strobing, and 1000Hz is the first time a consumer panel gets there natively.

The useful part is that the benefit does not need 1000 fps to show up. With variable refresh, a game running at 600 fps on a 1000Hz panel shows each frame for 1.7 milliseconds, less persistence than a 480Hz panel can manage at any frame rate. So the fastest CPU we track, at its CPU-limited 570 to 690 fps, still gets clearer motion out of this panel than out of anything slower. It just does not get the number on the box.

The step is also smaller than the last one. Going from 240Hz to 480Hz cut persistence in half; going from 480Hz to 1000Hz cuts it in half again, but the first halving is the one trained players report seeing and the second is a good deal subtler. Diminishing returns do not mean no returns, and for a professional the last few percent of motion clarity is the job. For everyone else it is a thousand dollars for a difference they will need to be told about.

Where it sits against what you can buy today

Free to cite with a link: of the 50 gaming monitors in the catalogue behind Monitor Match, the fastest is the ASUS ROG Swift PG27AQDP, a 27-inch 1440p OLED at 480Hz for about $698. Three of the 50 run at 360Hz or above, all of them 1440p OLEDs between $599 and $698. The two IFA panels double our fastest tracked refresh rate at roughly one and a half times its price, and give up 1440p and OLED contrast to do it. Before this week the native ceiling was 600Hz in Western retail, from BenQ's Zowie XL2586X+ on TN and Samsung's Odyssey G6 G60H at 1440p; Display Ninja's 2026 tracker lists a 750Hz TN from HKC that launched in China in August at around $1,000, and the four-digit modes that existed before this week all got there by dropping to 720p.

Our opinion, which we will hold until a 1000Hz OLED shows up at 1440p: for anyone not paid to play, the 480Hz OLED is the better monitor on every axis but one. Higher resolution, per-pixel contrast, a wider panel, three hundred dollars cheaper, and a refresh rate that the same 9800X3D still cannot fully feed in Counter-Strike. The 1000Hz IPS is a tool built for a few thousand people, and it is priced like one.

An admission goes with that. We do not review monitors; nobody here has sat in front of either of these panels, and motion clarity is exactly the kind of thing a spec sheet cannot show. Our refresh advice comes from two places: the FPS model, which tells you what your processor and card can push in a given game, and the catalogue, which tells you what refresh rates people can buy at what price. Monitor Match combines the two and will tell you, for your parts, the highest refresh rate you can use rather than the highest one you can buy. For most people the answer is still 240 or 360, and the 1440p guide and the OLED price piece cover that end of the market at a quarter of this price.

One more thing the 1000Hz panels quietly raise: an 8K-polling mouse, which only earns its keep on a 240Hz or faster display, finally has a monitor that can use all of it. If you buy one of these, the $50 mouse upgrade is the cheap part of the setup.

The short version

• LG UltraGear 25G590B: 24.5-inch 1080p IPS, native 1000Hz, 1100Hz overclocked, DP 2.1 UHBR20, $999.99, preorders open.
• Acer Predator XB253Q U1: 24.5-inch 1080p IPS, native 1000Hz, HDR400, DP 2.1, $1,099.99, Q1 2027.
• You need a DisplayPort 2.1 card: RTX 50, RX 9000 or RX 7900. RTX 40 cards do not qualify.
• Our fastest tracked combo models ~570 fps in CS2 and ~690 in Valorant at 1080p, CPU-limited. Nothing sustains 1000 in a live match.
• The benefit is one millisecond of persistence, and you get most of it at 600 fps with VRR on.
• A 27-inch 1440p 480Hz OLED at ~$698 is the better buy for anyone not competing for money.