Gaming LCD

Gentlemen, I really would like your help here:

I have a Viewsonic VX922 (19" LCD). It was considered to be one of the best gaming monitors at the time I bought it, mainly I think because of its 2ms grey-to-grey response time.

Nowadays, 19" seems kinda small for a gaming monitor, especially with all of these great looking 24" LCDs out there, and I also have 8800GTXs, which are sorta wasted on a monitor with only 1280x1024 native resolution.

My question is, will a monitor with for instance 8ms-16ms grey-to-grey response time be noticeably less responsive than the VX922? I mean, would normal human perception feel the difference? and how would it be manifested in terms of onscreen graphical performance? Honestly, I have no idea.

Besides for GW, I play COD2, and some other competive online shooters.

In short, anyone know if moving a bigger but slower monitor would noticeably degrade a player's ability to keep from getting fragged by other players (especially in games where a high percentage of players are prolly aimbotters)?

You won't notice the difference. New LCD monitors all have low response times now anyway.

Since you are looking at 24inch ones which are all high end models, just look at the best value ones. I personally have a Dell 2407wfp and it's great, you will really appreciate the extra screen realestate compared to a 19inch.

Hi there

I agree. difference between 2 and 10 miliseconds is not really visible for regular person. More impotant is how many frames per second you can actually display on your screen and what is resolution.

If you have great graphic card and can get to 60 fps and 10ms screen, you will have better "response time" than player with 20fps and 2ms screen. I always thought that bigger is better (some girls are just polite), so If your card can support higher resolutions, go for bigger screen, you will be able to fit more info on the sceen without obstructing the view.

I personally use Dells 30" monstrosity and I can't be happier. With reasonable (not yet great) graphic card, I have over 30fps at resolution 2560x1600 with all the bells and whistles turned on. And believe me It is a lot of fun.

There is a bigger chance of being fragged by other players due to some unexpected lag, or simply due to lack of PvP skills

You could always just go all out and get a large tv for your monitor.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage....=1142298457279

or something along those lines. Its so pretty!

Cool another person wanting to go bigger in screensize. I have a Gateway 22 inch model which can be gotten from Best Buy for a rather reasonable price. Here is a link to the exact one that I have, http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage....=1158104010371
I have had no problems using this model and it has a killer picture. I run it at 1680x1050 which is the native resolution. The only thing is DO NOT INSTALL THE EZ-TUNE software as it interferes with some games (I didnt have a problem with GW but did with others until I uninstalled it).
One thing about bigger monitors though is you may have to sacrafice some of the eye candy as it takes a rather powerful graphics card to drive them. Having a larger screen means that the graphics card must draw more items on screen especialy at higher resolution. So you may have to play with the graphics settings again to get the perfect balance. One last thing a TV cannot replace a good monitor as they do not give the resolution that we all want so I do not recommend one.

Mega Mouse

I picked this up, 22 WideScreen yet affordable.
http://accessories.dell.com/sna/prod...9&sku=320-5123

GW / Morroind / Oblivion look great on it.

It's maybe not the *best* gamming lcd, but to me its affordable and works great for me.

sorry for the noob questions but what exactly is response time? the times are in millieseconds right? isn't 1 milliesecond equal to 1/1000th of a second? i don't think a human wouldt be able to tell the difference between 2/1000th of a second and 10/1000 of a second. but if it's not that big of a deal why do manufacturers list the response time of their products is it doesnt matter? or does it effect the amt of frames the monitor can display somehow?

i'm a noob! i know somebody must know the answers to this! thanks!


soryy for the bad english

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Response_time

In a nutshell, this is an indicator of how long it takes for a pixel in the LCD to shift from one color to another (specifically, from black, to white, and back to black). Displays with larger than 16ms average response time will exhibit a "ghosting" effect (when things are in motion they will leave a ghostly trail behind them) because the pixels aren't completely changing color quickly enough. Yes, the difference between 25ms and 16ms is noticable. Be careful, though, as some of these manufacturers list specs under ideal conditions, and their real-world performance falls short of their spec sheets.

thanks for information! i have this ghosting effect ever since i used a lcd display. now i know what to look for if i buy another display

so basicly respsonse time of 16ms or less is what i should buy and more than 16ms is bad. generally speaking, do big display have slower response time than small display? mine is only 17" but it still has this ghosting effect.

Thanks for the suggestions about monitors. I just got back from work and I'm looking at all of these, starting with the gorgeous Dell 24"

http://accessories.dell.com/sna/prod...9&sku=320-4335

Man, this certainly looks tempting. Native 1920x1200, 2 USB ports, and a built-in media card reader. Very nice.

As an oldtimer, I've always regarded it as an article of faith that CRTs are better for gaming than LCDs, but I see that that isn't the case anymore. These new big LCDs have so much better refresh rate/response time than the ones I remember from 3 or 4 years ago. I hadn't realized that the performance gap had shrunk so much.

You might want to read more about the panel types these new LCDs have. The ones with the fastest response time are without exception TN panels, that are, as said, very fast but less accurate in their colour fidelity. If you plan to do anything else than game/movies, then it's worth checking IPS panels, that are a tad slower (shouldn't matter in a game like GW, some FPS might suffer, I've read) but have much better colour quality.

I don't know about 24" dell, but at least concerning 20", you might want to type 'Dell panel lottery' in google, and see some worrying results. They're equipped with two different panels, and there's no way of telling whether it's a superb (second hand info, take notice) IPS or low-quality MVA. However, not all MVA/PVA panels are bad in general, it's said that Dell's is particularly low quality.


Here's a nice link: http://forums.anandtech.com/messagev...nterth read=y

Personally if I had some money to dump on an awesome monitor (which I may in a few months) I would get this.
http://www.eizo.com/products/graphics/ce240w/index.asp

Until then I am quite happy with my 22' CRT. I would just have to get a LCD that will perform as well as it, which will be hard.

bigger is not always better
LCD is can only run at its native resolution otherwise it gets blurry
bigger screen you get the higher resolution you need to run the games on and the more GPU power it takes unless you like playing games that look like you are playing games with reading glasses on (blurry has hell).... (CRT luckily doesn't have this problem)

19" widescreen suites me fine
if you keep getting bigger you reach a point where you actually have to turn your head to see the edges of the screen and that is actually harmful in competitive gaming.

Resolution is only an issue with SDTVs. Newer HDTVs can handle 1280x720/1336x768 and 1920x1080, the ladder of which isn't too far off from the 16:10 resolution most 22"+ monitors use, 1920x1200. The reason people need to be weary about these is sub par dot pitch and response time on LCD panels.

I bought a BenQ FP222W 22" widescreen from newegg earlier this week for $300 shipped, I'm *extremely* happy with it compared to my old sony 21" trinitron CRT. Unfortunately newegg sold through all of the benq 22" lcds already

Unfortunately the native 1680x1050 resolution needs a lot of graphical horsepower, expect to spend at least as much on a video card as you spend on a monitor.

There will be a huge difference going from 2ms to 8-12ms response time. Grey to grey response time is a lot faster than true response time. This is how companies make their products look better. A 2ms GTG response rate is more like 8ms.

The new one will be fine for web browsing, but games will be horrible.

At the above poster... he has SLI 8800GTX's. Read his post next time. If that isn't enough video processing power, nothing is.

TV's usually suck for gamin monitors.

Almost all of the replies to this thread have been from people lacking knowledge in this area. Don't post to see yourself post, post if you know something intelligible.

Yes, LCD TVs as monitors will likely make you go blind. Here's a tip: don't go by specs at all. Read reviews or go somewhere that you can actually "test drive" the monitor. Spec sheets on these things aren't a lot more than glorified marketing.

The best thing to do when a monitor catches your eye is to Google for a review by someone that knows a thing or two about LCDs.

This is horrible advice. You need to at least look up things like dot pitch, response time and contrast ratio.


As far as gaming on a TV... If you have half a clue what to look for, HDTVs can be great for gaming. I have my living room panel set up for gaming with my Xbox 360 and home theater PC. Using an HDTV as a desktop replacement for a monitor isn't such a great idea, however.