How To Choose The Right Gaming Monitor
Choosing the right gaming monitor for your rig can be a real pain as the market is flooded with them. Questions like what is the optimal screen size to get, what resolution is best suited for a best gaming experience, or what type of display panel at what refresh rates, always popup and for the right reasons too. In this article we will try to answer these questions and give you a starting point in your quest for choosing the right gaming monitor.
What Screen Size and Aspect Ratio to Look For in a Gaming Monitor?
The first aspect, when looking for a new gaming monitor is its size. 24 to 27-inches screens dominate today’s market, and the bigger the screen the better as pixel density has a huge impact on the display quality of the monitor. A larger monitor with a low resolution will have a low pixel density and that is one thing you should avoid. We therefore advise you to start looking for screens with a minimum of 24 inches and a maximum of 34 inches.
A perfect sized monitor, in our opinion, would be between 27 and 32 inch, and a 32 inch one is pretty big. If you know where to look it is actually easy to find really good quality 32-inch 4K gaming monitors at 120Hz that come with excellent specs and attractive prices.
The cheaper option would be a 22 inch gaming monitor but the price difference between a 22 and 24-inch or even a 27-inch screen is generally only about $15-$30, and for a serious gamer this investment is completely justified.
Aspect ratio is another factor you’ll have to take into consideration when choosing a new gaming monitor. The most popular aspect ratios nowadays are 16:9 and 21:9. We recommend a screen aspect ratio of 16:9 as it is the most suitable for video playback and especially video games due to the fact that most AAA games are optimized for this aspect ratio by default, and very few for 21:9.
What Resolutions Should You Consider For a Gaming Monitor?
Here a golden rule applies: the higher the resolution, the better the picture quality will be. The screen resolution tells you how many pixels a gaming monitor has in with and height. For a gaming monitor, a minimum screen resolution to consider is 1920×1080 (Full HD – 1080p), and depending on the hardware your gaming rig has you can go as high as 4K (UHD – 3840×2160).
2K resolutions (QHD – 2048×1440) are gaining popularity due to graphics cards advancements and we consider a 2K resolution a perfect balance between image quality and performance when it comes to gaming. So if your rig has a good graphics card like an RTX 2070 or the newer released RTX 3060 Ti and and bove, you can skip the 1080p monitors from the start and aim higher.
What Type of Display Panel a Gaming Monitor Should Have? TN, VA or IPS?
To choose a screen suitable for gaming the panel should absolutely be responsive, offer a good viewing angle, excellent contrast and high colorimetry.
For gaming, you can choose either an IPS (In-Plane Switching) or TN (Twisted Nematic) panel . Just pay attention to the IPS response time which should be less than 5 ms to play fast FPS type games. IPS panels are gradually taking over the market, technology has evolved and response times are now close to TN panels.
As for OLED technology for gaming monitors, the technology is currently overpriced, and it is simply not worth the money at this time.
What About Refresh Rates?
What does Refresh rate mean: This is the number of images per second that your screen can generate, it is expressed in Hz.
This value generally varies between 60 and 144 Hz, it can go up to 240Hz. The higher this frequency, the better the visual comfort. For epileptics a minimum frequency of 100 Hz is recommended.
With a high refresh rate, the game is smoother, more comfortable so necessarily, it’s better. This can increase your responsiveness very slightly.
High refresh rate screens are especially useful with fast games, especially for first person shooters. The advantages of 144 Hz or 240 Hz are:
- Strong reduction of motion blur
- Latency reduction (Input lag)
- Ghosting reduction
- Reduced Image Tearing Effect
It is also important to know that it is necessary for your graphics card to be able to send the same number of frames per second. It is therefore totally unnecessary to invest in a 144Hz screen if you have a low power graphics card (like a GTX 1050) only if you plan on upgrading your graphics card on a later date.
You might have heard about G-Sync or FreeSync technologies that come incorporated with most gaming monitors available on today’s market.
G-Sync (Nvidia) – FreeSync (AMD) technology combats image distortion (Tearing). It all comes from the lack of synchronization between the graphics card and the monitor. A problem that the V-Sync option can partially correct, but not convincingly since it generates significant + or – tears.
The G-Sync / FreeSync chip is integrated into the monitor to manage the refresh rate of the latter so that it is more in line with the animation speed of the game.
On paper, the idea is quite simple: rather than operating at a fixed frequency, the monitor adjusts the image distribution to the GPU’s compute speed. As a result, the synchronization between the two is perfect and the tearing effect is eliminated.
G-Sync (Nvidia) – FreeSync (AMD) are therefore here to provide you with a smooth, fast and sublime gaming experience. They synchronize the refresh rate of the monitor with that of the graphics processor of your computer to avoid the tearing effect of the image.
Final Advices for choosing the right gaming monitor
There is a lot of information to process, so to sum things up here are the main things to look for when buying your new gaming monitor:
- Many gaming LCD monitors are available in several models in order to be able to charge you for each option. (Height-adjustable screen, speaker, USB hub, etc.) So you have to think carefully about what you want and need.
- For FPS players, always favor the lowest response rates (1ms or 2ms)
- For FPS players, use the highest refresh rates as much as possible (144Hz and more)
- 3D is still a bit of a “gadget” option, you won’t be using it on a daily basis. The main advantage of 3D screens is the refresh rate at 144Hz.