Buyer’s guide to gaming monitors
When it comes to gaming monitors, there’s enough jargon to fill a dictionary. We suggest you ignore most of it and concentrate on the fundamentals
How many Hz?
Manufacturers are keen to push the “higher hertz is better” story. There’s a step change in clarity between a 60Hz monitor and one running at 144Hz, say, but we are unconvinced that anyone outside of elite esports competitors will gain any competitive advantage by switching up to 240Hz. Or 360Hz. Plus, you’ll need one meaty PC setup to consistently deliver even 144fps in modern games.
Response time
Aside from the gigantic Philips Momentum, every gaming monitor we test here includes a 1ms grey-togrey response time (even the Philips is super-sharp in practice).
Contrast and brightness
Don’t become fixated on contrast or brightness (although see our note about HDR support below). All good screens offer more than enough of both for images to be easily viewable in a typical indoors environment.
Colour gamut coverage
When playing most games we want colours that pop rather than outright realism, which is why we lean to the DCI-P3 colour gamut in our reviews. Any monitor covering more than 85% of this gamut will deliver rich colours, but dip below 70% and things start to look rather more boring.
Colour accuracy
If all you’ll be doing with your monitor is playing games, then you don’t need to worry about colour accuracy. Frankly, unless you’re buying a no-name screen of dubious origin, its accuracy (measured by its Delta E, as we explain on p78) should be more than good enough.
HDR support
HDR is increasingly popular in games, adding vivacity to the action due to the heightened contrast between dark and light. But it’s not yet a must-have. Notably, only a couple of this month’s offerings support the tougher standards of DisplayHDR 600 and DisplayHDR 1000, with the numbers relating to peak brightness of HDR content in cd/m 2 , and that’s where HDR material has the most dramatic effect. It’s a nice-to-have, in our view, not a must-have.
Adaptive sync
Every gaming monitor on test supports VESA’s Adaptive Sync technology. This synchronises the data signal from your graphics card to what appears onscreen to avoid “tearing”, which used to happen when a monitor’s refresh rate fell out of sync with the graphics card signal. Both AMD and Nvidia naturally want to take control rather than use someone else’s standard; we’ve summarised the levels in the table below.
IPS or VA?
Can we be controversial and say this doesn’t really matter? Instead, look at our comments about image quality in the reviews. Vertical alignment panels used to have quicker response times to the detriment of image quality, but that generalisation doesn’t stand any more. The only rule of thumb that we’re still happy to repeat is that VA panels are far better suited to curvature. Which brings us to...
Curved or not?
If you want a monitor that stretches wider than 30 inches, you should give serious consideration to a curved screen. In fact, while that’s particularly true for playing games, we think larger screens should generally be curved for non-gamers too. Curved screens also lend themselves to multi-monitor setups.
The input question
Every gaming monitor on test includes at least one DisplayPort and two HDMI ports, and naturally they come with numerous different standards. HDMI 2.1 is particularly notable because it brings 4K at high refresh rates into the realm of consoles as well as PCs.