>I am not totally convinced that a high refresh rate monitor allows human vision to respond faster.
Have you ever watched a high-level FPS player? They can aim and shoot in the span of about ~1/5 of a second, occasionally even faster. That's 200ms. At 25hz, that's 40ms. A big part of it is going to be increased input processing, but a lot of it is muscle memory at that skill level. At 165hz, that's 6ms. With two equally skilled players, one will see the other up to a whole 34 ms sooner, in a process that takes about 200ms total. That's going to show up as a highly statistically significant advantage. Of course, the increased sense of connectedness to the game at higher rates is another big advantage, but these effects combine. Pit one skilled shooter against another at equal refresh rates, but with one dealing with 34ms of additional input latency, and they're not going to play as well as they should.
Competitive players explicitly disable vsync, because the higher the game framerate, the faster it processes input. Also, the sooner you see updated information on the screen mid-refresh, but that doesn't help as much as a wholly higher refresh rate.
All of this only matters if cloud gamers were playing against locally-rendered players in the same match though.
Have you ever watched a high-level FPS player? They can aim and shoot in the span of about ~1/5 of a second, occasionally even faster. That's 200ms. At 25hz, that's 40ms. A big part of it is going to be increased input processing, but a lot of it is muscle memory at that skill level. At 165hz, that's 6ms. With two equally skilled players, one will see the other up to a whole 34 ms sooner, in a process that takes about 200ms total. That's going to show up as a highly statistically significant advantage. Of course, the increased sense of connectedness to the game at higher rates is another big advantage, but these effects combine. Pit one skilled shooter against another at equal refresh rates, but with one dealing with 34ms of additional input latency, and they're not going to play as well as they should.
Competitive players explicitly disable vsync, because the higher the game framerate, the faster it processes input. Also, the sooner you see updated information on the screen mid-refresh, but that doesn't help as much as a wholly higher refresh rate.
All of this only matters if cloud gamers were playing against locally-rendered players in the same match though.