Technology

Try the UFO test. https://www.testufo.com/

If you still can't see the difference there may be a setting on the monitor or PC preventing you from seeing it.

It’s wildly obvious if you grab a window and drag it around. Try having the settings on 60 and dragging it around when you change it to 165; it’s very glaringly obvious.

Have you configured your OS to use a higher refresh rate in monitor settings? The difference is night and day...

You're only going to notice if the thing playing goes up to 165fps. If you're, say, watching a movie or video you won't notice anything because there's nothing to notice.

Play a game that you can get really high FPS in (maybe Half Life 1 which a modern machine should have no trouble getting 300+). Limit it to 60. Check it out. Then go up to 144. Then 165.

Also if you have an nVidia GPU, it may not be setting the refresh rate properly. I constantly have this issue with driver updates resetting it back to 30hz on my machine. You gotta go into the Nvidia control panel, find the display settings and scroll down somewhere toward the bottom is a refresh rate setting. Change that to the highest your display can use.

It should be wildly obvious just moving your mouse across the screen. Maybe your graphics adapter has an issue and isn't properly setting the mode?

You almost certainly have the settings screwed up. Your eyes worked have to be royally fucked to not see a 60 to 165 jump.

You may have to set the refresh rate manually to go higher than 60hz. Things should look much smoother.

Run 'xrandr -q' and see if it gives you multiple refresh rates for your displays.

Also, what GPU are you using?

How are you testing? You can run the UFO test for a quick and dirty comparison: https://www.testufo.com/

More subjectively, you could load up a game you know well and start it at 30FPS. Wave your mouse around a bit looking for blurring or artefacting, then step it up to test 60, 90, 120, etc to see if you can tell the difference.

When you say "settings", did you check the settings on the monitor menus too? And in your graphics card settings, outside the game?

What cable is connecting your monitor to your PC?

I’ll never forget when I went from 60hz to 165hz, everything seemed so fluid and smooth. I couldn’t imagine going back.

Is it possible that there are ghosting issues with the panel? I had a 120hz monitor at work at one point that had ghosting issues so bad it made it look barely any better than a 60hz panel. Going from 60hz to 120hz+ should definitely be noticeable to most people

How old are you? I'm nearing 40 and can't see the difference between 60 and 120 on my phone

Have you checked this?

https://www.testufo.com/

I find this one especially telling (180hz here)

https://www.testufo.com/framerates-text

I am totally with you. I have had a 144Hz monitor for 2 years now. I am 100% sure that everything was configured correctly and I could spot some small differences in the UFO test. But other than that I do not feel any differences in day-to-day activities or games. Windows reset my frequency settings occasionally, but I never noticed it.

Whip the mouse back and forth quickly, it's the only time it's visible really.

If you have a phone that does high rate slo-mo you can video record the screen when you switch modes and see if the rate is actually changing or not. Have an object moving around the screen while you're recording the switch. Note that I've not tried this myself, I'm just working off of theory.

I have used https://github.com/Nixola/VRRTest before to check the refresh frequency. I use X11 and wanted to check if my 144Hz monitors work with my older 60Hz one. Set the test mode to squares and the frame rate to twice your monitor's refresh rate. You should see every second square light up. If this is not the case, play around with the frame rate in the program until every second square lights up.

I can't see the difference either though. Yes, the mouse moves a bit quicker if I pay attention to it. But I do not care or notice, to be honest.

Me being super jealous of everyone here going to 144 or 165 when I just upgraded my pc a few months ago to finally use 120 on my current ultrawide monitor.

All I can say is even 120 from 60 was amazing and very obvious. As someone else said the biggest wow moment was just moving desktop items around and it being super smooth.

I do know there are a bunch of settings you may need to change to make sure your using the correct settings above 60. Check the advanced display settings which should list out all resolutions with refresh rate to pick. Sometimes monitors need to be set. Sometimes the driver software for the GPU has options for it listed. I know on mine I had to have freesync enabled as well. Lots of variables that may keep it from being set correctly to check. I remember setting up my audio equipment and you think your using everything correctly then realize your advanced settings had an option set to like 44 bit rate instead of at least something more reasonable like 192.

I'm also unable to see the difference directly, but everything just feels more snappy. If you can't feel it, maybe you have some extra latency from somewhere else

My experience of 144hz is that in terms of seeing a difference, it's not much. I mostly see it when looking around a scene and the movement is more fluid. However, what you can notice isn't as much as what makes a difference in games.

I tried the dust2 awp test map on 60hz and 144hz. The difference with how many I could hit with 144hz was not down to chance and was quite repeatable. I think (and it's just a layman theorizing here) that unconsciously our muscle memory, or hand/eye co-ordination are working on cues beyond what we consciously see. And this is why it helps for split second game decisions like this.

My opinion is, if you cannot see the difference consciously and you don't play FPS then maybe you should de-prioritize refresh rates over other monitor features. There's nothing wrong with that.

Check your mouse cursor by moving fastly left to right and back and again. With 60 Hz you'll see 5-6 cursor renders (depending on your distance obviously) and with 100 Hz it should be double that. 144hz a lot more cursor renders appear. White cursor, black background or inverted for better visibility. Thats my fast check to see if the settings are correctly set.

You might not notice anything at first, but after some days of gaming and then going back, you'll probably notice the difference then.