Motion Blur Test – Check Ghosting & Pixel Response

This motion blur test shows how sharp your display stays while an image is in motion. A marker glides across the screen at a fixed, even speed. When you follow it with your eyes, the fine stripes on the marker blur into a soft band, and the edges may show faint colour fringes. That smear is not in the image itself — your computer renders every stripe perfectly. It is added by the screen. Reading it tells you how your monitor, laptop, phone, or TV will look during camera pans, scrolling text, and fast gaming.

Motion blur is separate from your frame rate. A display can push a high, stable FPS and still smear moving objects, because blur is governed by how each frame is held on the panel and how quickly the pixels change colour. Use this page to judge that behaviour directly, then compare screens, refresh rates, and picture modes side by side.

How to use the motion blur test

The test runs the moment the page loads. For a clean reading, follow these steps:

• Go fullscreen. Use the Fullscreen button so the marker travels the full width of the panel with nothing else moving on screen.
• Track the marker with your eyes. Lock onto the pink band and the white dot in its centre, and let your gaze travel with it. This is called eye-tracking or a pursuit, and it is how your eyes behave during real motion.
• Read the trailing edge. The vertical stripes will soften into a grey blur. The wider that blur, the more motion persistence your display has.
• Look for ghosting. Coloured fringes, a faint second copy, or a dark halo trailing the marker are pixel-response artefacts, not persistence.
• Change the speed. Drag the pixels-per-frame slider from a gentle pan up to fast gaming motion. The Motion speed card shows the resulting pixels per second — your per-frame step multiplied by your refresh rate.

The stat cards report your measured screen FPS, how far the marker advances each frame (the value you set), and the resulting motion speed in pixels per second. Pixels per second equals your per-frame step times your refresh rate, so the same 10 px/frame produces about 600 px/s on a 60 Hz panel but roughly 1,200 px/s at 120 Hz. Driving the marker in fixed steps per frame keeps the motion perfectly even, which is what makes the blur easy to read.

What you are actually seeing

Two different physical effects create the smear. They look similar at a glance but have different causes and different fixes.

Display persistence (sample-and-hold blur)

Almost every modern LCD and OLED is a sample-and-hold display. Each frame is shown continuously until the next frame replaces it. Your eyes, however, move smoothly as they track a moving object. During the milliseconds that one frame is held static, your moving eye sweeps across it, and the still image is painted across your retina as a blur. This happens even with instant pixels and a perfect signal. It is the dominant cause of motion blur on good screens, and the only cure is to shorten how long each frame is visible — either by raising the refresh rate or by strobing the backlight.

Pixel response and ghosting

A pixel needs time to change from one colour to the next. While it transitions, it displays the wrong shade for a fraction of the frame. On the moving marker this shows up as a trailing smear that follows the object, often with a visible edge. Slow transitions — common on cheaper VA panels, especially in dark scenes — produce long, obvious ghost trails. This is a property of the panel technology, not of your frame rate, so a faster GPU will not remove it.

Overdrive and inverse ghosting

To speed pixels up, monitors apply overdrive, briefly overshooting the target voltage. Tuned well, it sharpens motion. Pushed too hard, it overshoots the colour and leaves a bright or inverted halo — a corona — on the trailing edge. If you see pale outlines behind the marker, try lowering your monitor's overdrive or response-time setting (often labelled OD, Trace Free, or Response Time) one notch and run the test again.

Speed, frame rate, and pixels per second

The slider sets how far the marker moves each rendered frame, in pixels per frame. That fixed per-frame step is what keeps the motion perfectly even, with no catch-up jumps — the same technique fast-motion tests use to stay smooth. The physical speed you perceive, in pixels per second, is simply that step multiplied by your refresh rate, which the Motion speed card shows live. The table below converts a few per-frame settings into real-world speed:

Around 960 px/s is the classic reference speed for motion tests — fast enough to reveal persistence blur, slow enough to eye-track comfortably. On a 60 Hz screen that is roughly 16 px/frame; on 120 Hz, about 8 px/frame. Set the slider so the Motion speed card lands near that figure if you want a like-for-like comparison between two displays.

How refresh rate reduces motion blur

Because persistence blur depends on how long a frame is held, the single most effective lever is the refresh rate. Double the refresh rate and you roughly halve the time each frame stays on screen, which roughly halves the blur width. The table below shows the persistence of one frame and the resulting blur at a reference 960 px/s, assuming a full sample-and-hold display.

This is why a 240 Hz screen looks dramatically clearer in motion than a 60 Hz screen, even when both are fed the same content. The number engineers use for this is MPRT (Moving Picture Response Time), which measures perceived motion blur in milliseconds. Lower MPRT means sharper motion. To confirm the refresh rate your display is actually running, use our refresh rate guide, and measure the live frame rate on the main FPS test.

How to reduce motion blur on your display

If the smear you see here is heavier than you would like, several changes help, in rough order of impact:

• Raise the refresh rate. Set your display to its highest available refresh rate in your operating system's display settings, and make sure your game or video actually feeds enough frames to match.
• Enable backlight strobing. Features such as ULMB, DyAc, ELMB, or generic black-frame insertion flash the backlight so each frame is shown only briefly. This attacks persistence directly and can make 120 Hz look like a much faster panel, at the cost of some brightness.
• Tune overdrive. Find the response-time setting that sharpens motion without adding coronas. A high per-frame step makes overshoot easy to see.
• Keep frame rate high and stable. Stutter and dropped frames add their own smearing. A steady frame rate matters as much as a high one.

Motion blur, frame rate, and response time are not the same thing

These three terms are often mixed up, but they describe different things:

• Frame rate (FPS) is how many new images per second your system produces. Learn more in our guide to frames per second.
• Refresh rate (Hz) is how many times per second the display can show a new image. See what frame rate is for how the two relate.
• Response time (ms) is how fast a single pixel changes colour, which drives ghosting.

Motion blur is the visible result of all three working together. This test lets you observe that result directly, rather than trusting a spec sheet. For the impact on play, our guide to frames per second in gaming explains why competitive players chase both high frame rates and low-persistence displays.

Frequently asked questions

Why does the marker look blurry even though my FPS is high?

Because most of the blur is persistence, not frame rate. As long as your eyes track a moving object on a sample-and-hold screen, each held frame smears across your retina. Only a higher refresh rate or backlight strobing removes it.

Is the blur coming from my screen or my eyes?

Both play a part, but the test isolates the screen. Your rendered frames are pixel-perfect, so any smear you see when eye-tracking is added by the display's persistence and pixel response. A phone camera in a slow-motion mode, panned to follow the marker, records the same blur objectively.

My monitor advertises 1 ms — why do I still see ghosting?

The advertised 1 ms is usually a best-case grey-to-grey response with maximum overdrive, not a real-world figure across all colour transitions. Dark transitions on VA panels are often far slower, which is why ghost trails remain visible on this test even on a "1 ms" screen.

Does a higher frame rate help if my refresh rate stays the same?

Not for persistence blur. Blur width is set by how long each frame is displayed, which is fixed by the refresh rate. Extra frames beyond your refresh rate cannot be shown. Raise the refresh rate to see a real reduction.

Related display and motion tests

Motion clarity is one piece of overall display performance. Continue with these companion tools:

• Frame Rate Test (FPS test) — measure your live frame rate and refresh rate.
• Frame Skipping Test — check whether your panel drops frames at its rated refresh rate.
• Screen Tearing Test — see whether VSync or a variable refresh rate is keeping frames aligned.
• Stutter Test — measure frame-time consistency and count dropped frames.
• Scrolling Smoothness Test — judge everyday scrolling jank in your browser.