Since when does a LCD refresh? Its not a CRT. Yes we see one so its compatible with our hardware like a gpu.
Response time is setting we must refer to rather than refresh rate.
Now lets look at a LCD with a labelled response rate of 2ms.
Now lets see what refresh rate it can emulate
1000/2 = 500hz
Far over 500 ain't it.
Ok the connection limits us to 120hz. Don't think you will see much LCDs running at 60hz with a 2 response time. Alarm bells must ring when you see something like that honestly *cough HANS cough* you have to remember a gpu doesn't know anything about your monitor. It will race ahead unless you enable vsync which tells it about that limitation. But how many go and install or go out and use Rivatuner to make a driver for your monitor? Who use the windows native driver for your monitor?
Okay I understand the difference between response time and refresh rate. Or I think I do after reading those articles.
Response time is the time it takes for a given monitor's pixels to transition. The idea is the longer the response time, the more of a ghost the image will be left across your screen because the pixels don't change quickly enough.
Refresh rate is something that originated from CRTs, and is measured in hertz. CRTs would blank the screen and then draw a new image according to the hertz of the monitor. 60hz, it does that process 60 times a second. Your eyes can't perceive the blanking, so it appears as a solid image. All of the games and video stuff was made to work with this technology.
When LCDs came out, in order to still work with old software and hardware made for CRTs, they made the refresh rate similar to CRTs, except on an LCD there is no blanking. The image is still being updated according to the refresh rate just like on CRTs, however.
Alarm bells should
not ring if a monitor states a 2ms response time on a 60hz monitor. Each time the monitor refreshes, the pixels are able to change to that image within 2ms of that information being received (due the varying difficulty depending on the type of transition, the response times will actually vary). Then the monitor sits there with that image waiting for the next time it refreshes. Where's the problem with that?
Yes, there is marketing BS that goes on with response times because they can specifically engineer the monitor to be awesome at GTG transitions, which is what the typical response time spec is referring to, and yet have terrible response when handling harder to do transitions. But 2ms is not impossible on a 60hz monitor.
The only time you will get the computer "racing ahead" is when your FPS is very high relative to the refresh rate. This means the computer is sending out new images to the monitor faster than the monitor can initiate the changes, so maybe half the monitor is displaying one image and half is already displaying a newer image. This is called tearing. You seem to be mixing this up with response times.