If one was being smart about it, wouldn't you rig it so only changed pixels switch? There is no reason to refresh static pixels. If you have a mostly static image, you could cut down severely on panel refresh rates too. Don't exactly need 144Hz refresh rate to read a page of text (though its nice).
Disclaimer, I only know the basics of panel technology...
I also know the basics only but from work experience and hobby experience :
The TFT transistors in a TFT liquid crystal display are connected to the liquid crystal pixels in a x,y matrix configuration.
And this is the case for all individual red, green and blue pixels.
This reduces the connections needed to address every single pixel.
An lcd controller switches the individual liquid crystals by addressing an x row and an y column. And does this at a very rapid speed.
I think it selects for example a x row and then activates all the y column pixels with a bias voltage. But i am not sure about this.
By varying the voltage on the pixel, it twists more or less and lets more or less light through , creating color intensity and contrast.
It needs to refresh the crystals because the crystals will return to there default position when not driven.
Changing only one crystal would need an individual tft signal for each pixel. That is impossible.
Gsync and freesync monitors are not interesting for me because they cannot go down to 0Hz.
They make it sound like the lcd controller in the monitor is way more expensive, but i find it strange because these monitors still have a minimum refresh rate as if it does not have its own dedicated ram.
Most monitors have only a small amount of dedicated ram just enough to display the OSD (on screen display menu) even when no signal is present.
When you move the OSD around the ram for the OSD gets mapped to different x rows and y columns, giving the idea of moving it around the entire screen.
Assuming that a future gsync and freesync monitor has its own dedicated ram for the signal allowing refresh rates as low a 0Hz (gpu to lcd refresh rate, the panel itselfs still needs to be refhreshed),
A HD monitor would need :
1920*1080* (3bytes for color) = 6075 kB of memory.
A 4K monitor would need
3840*2160*(3 bytes) = 24300kB of memory.
And the best way would even be to have two buffers of this ram.
Doubling the amount.
Then one can be filled with data by the gpu while the other is used by the lcd panel controller to drive the pixels.
After that flip the two ram buffers and display the content again.
It is a bit what a gpu does with double buffering or even triple buffering, but it would also work for an lcd screen that can go from 0Hz to 144Hz.
(edit forgot to mention that this also completely eliminates screen tearing as long as the gpu does not produce the screen tearing).
And current gsync and free sync monitors have still some need of refreshing hence the minum required Hz.
So a static image would reduce communication between gpu and lcd controller and power usage and even allows the gpu core and the memory controller(when it issues a self refresh command to the dram chips) to completely halt and become static until there is new gpu data to be calculated, but not necessarily be transmitted to to the lcd (think gpu cpompute).
But this future 0Hz to 144Hz only works on a static image.
It does greatly reduce power consumption and emi (electromagnetic interference) noise at the same time.