MONITOR REVOLUTION

14 GAME-CHANGING SCREENS THAT WILL TRANSFORM THE WAY YOU WORK & PLAY

There’s no point dropping thousands of dollars on a sweet gaming rig, only to pair it with a basic monitor that can’t show off the full capabilities of the machine you spent all that money on. A quality monitor is essential for getting the best out of your gaming experience and the right purchase can last you many years and be attached to many GPUs over that time.

In 2018 there’s a plethora of selfdeclared gaming monitor choices, in every price range you can imagine. Monitors starting at $150 that reckon they’re good for gaming and other monitors that will set you back thousands are also gaming centric. What’s the go then? What should you get to make sure it’ll be useful for years to come?

WHAT TO LOOK FOR

If you’re in the market for a gaming monitor, you want to ensure that your shopping list includes monitors meeting the following requirements:

High refresh rates for silky smooth gameplay. A resolution your GPU can handle at a display size you’re comfortable with. Low response time to avoid image ghosting in fast-paced action scenes. FreeSync or G-Sync, depending on your GPU manufacturer. An LCD panel type that suits your needs. HDR support for future proofing.

Let’s look at all the gaming monitor criteria in detail so you make the right choice!

REFRESH RATE

The main feature that separates a gaming monitor from a generic monitor is refresh rate, being how many times per second the display refreshes the image on the screen. This number is important to gamers as the higher the refresh rate, the

“The main feature that separates a gaming monitor from a generic monitor is refresh rate, being how many times per second the display refreshes the image on the screen. ”

smoother game play appears.

First person shooters are the predominate game that benefits from a high refresh rate. The human eye detects motion by blurring together still images, like a cartoon flip book. The faster these still images appear on screen, the less blurring, making enemies more discernible and potentially, easier to hunt and kill. 60Hz is the bare minimum refresh rate for smooth gaming and once you go above 120Hz, the benefits diminish for most ordinary people. Professional e-Sports gamers swear by their 240Hz displays.

A higher refresh rate also reduces input lag, which is the time between when the monitor receives the signal from the computer and when it appears on screen. This can be measured in milliseconds and is another one of those stats that once you get below a certain threshold (around 10ms) anyone except e-sports professionals won’t tell the difference.

RESOLUTION

4K, 1080p, 1440p – these terms are all screen resolutions, i.e: how many pixels are on the screen at once. The higher the resolution, the crisper the image looks. But pump the resolution too high and your graphics card may struggle to keep up, resulting in slow, laggy graphics. There’s a fine balance between a resolution high enough to look sharp, but low enough to maintain a steady frame rate (FPS) so gameplay is smooth. Gaming at 4K requires a much more powerful graphics card than gaming at 1080p.

The resolution of a display in relation to its screen size can change how large or small on-screen items like icons and text appear. This is called PPI – pixels per inch. A 1440p display on a 27-inch monitor gives what most people would describe as a standard PPI of 108, with text and icons clearly legible at around 60cm away. That same 27-inch monitor, but at a 4K resolution provides a 163 PPI, which results in text most would consider minuscule at standard viewing distances. Games however, can look amazing if they’re designed with this in mind – generally called HiDPI support.

RESPONSE TIME

How long it takes for a pixel in an LCD to change colour is called response time. If you’re a gamer and the monitor you’re using takes too long to change colour, you get ghosting and blurring. A very unpleasant experience.

Response time is often measured in two different ways – BtW (black to white) and GtG (grey to grey). If you check out a monitor’s spec sheet and it says “4ms GtG”, that means it takes 4ms for the pixels to change from one colour to another, but generally not from black to white. BtW response time is higher as essentially the pixel is going off (black) to on (white), which is slower than simply changing the colour (grey to grey for example).

A good monitor will have a GtG response time of under 10ms. Basically, anything lower than 10ms can’t be detected by most normal humans. There are e-Sports pros that demand 1ms monitors, but they’re not human.

FREESYNC VS. G-SYNC

When your graphics card is pumping out a different frame rate than than what your monitor’s refresh rate is set to, things get weird. Graphics