What just happened? Display refresh rates keep on getting faster. The latest company to join the exclusive 500Hz club is Alienware, whose blisteringly speedy IPS monitor that is set to be unveiled at CES next week has appeared in a leak.

Twitter user Chi11eddog shared an image of the Alienware AW2524H. As with most super-fast displays, the IPS monitor features a 1920 X 1080 refresh rate. It can reach 480Hz natively using DisplayPort and hit 500Hz with DisplayPort and a small overclock.

The monitor's name suggests it will feature a 25-inch or 24.5-inch diagonal display. It also has the company's familiar backlit logo and text on the rear that looks similar to several Alienware monitors, including our top pick for high-end graphics cards: the Alienware AW3423DW, a 34-inch 1440p Ultrawide 175Hz OLED monitor.

This isn't the first 500Hz display to arrive. Back in May, Nvidia used its Computex 2022 keynote to reveal an Asus monitor with the same refresh rate. Nvidia said the Asus Rog Swift 500Hz (below) was the world's first 500Hz G-sync monitor. But unlike Alienware's model, it uses a TN panel.

There was also the 27-inch 1080p monitor that BOE announced as having the world's first 500Hz display in January. It boasts a 1ms response time, support for an 8-lane eDP connection, and a true 8-bit color gamut, though it was still in the prototype stage and has yet to be given a full release.

If 500Hz isn't fast enough for you, manufacturer AU Optronics, which provided the panel for the Asus Rog Swift 500Hz, said in June that it is planning a 540Hz eSports display. And at the start of the month, BOE (again) showed off a 16-inch notebook display at the World Display Industry Conference in China with a 600Hz max refresh rate.

All these super-high refresh rate panels are aimed squarely at players looking for that extra edge in eSports and competitive games, such as CS: GO, Valorant, and Overwatch 2. Coincidentally, following the release of the monstrous RTX 4090, Blizzard had to increase Overwatch 2's frames-per-second cap to 600 FPS.