What are we talking about?
I'm talking about the most important component of any gaming system: The monitor. Not the television set, the PlayStation 4, or the Xbox One, but the monitor itself.
In the age of YouTube, Twitch, and the promise of playing games on your phone or tablet, the modern gaming monitor has lost its luster, while the TV has clawed its way back to the top of the gaming hardware heap.
At $200 and under, there's no shortage of great 1080p or 1440p gaming monitors on the market. Some of them—but by no means all—come from companies that will be a part of PCWorld's Amazon Basics Prime Day sale later this month.
Why are gaming monitors important?
If you're anything like me, your goal as a gamer is to fill as many of my "needs-to-accommodate" actions per day as I possibly can. That means we play games on our televisions, and we use controllers for the most part. But the one thing I don't do is need a monitor for my PC.
Every single person who has ever bought a full-fledged gaming PC has come up with something to add another monitor to their computer. When we first brought them to our offices, we bought a 24" monitor and an old monochrome monitor that was dusted off, then threw in a USB hub and a wireless keyboard, mouse, and joystick. Just the other day I built my own 30" 1080p monitor for $50, using an old 24" 1080p monitor, a stand, and some cable from the office PC to create the final product.
But what I really need is a 24" 1080p monitor, because a 25" 1440p monitor is going to be too large for my desktop. If I have the option of buying a cheap 1080p monitor that I can put on my desk and set on my desk, I'm going to do it.
How much will the average gamer spend on a monitor?
A lot. For instance, if I'm looking to spend $200 and the manufacturer doesn't skimp on features, I'm going to expect it to have a fast response time (so it shows fast-moving objects on the screen faster than the rest of the screen), a decent 1440p resolution, and support HDMI 2.0 for 4K output. Most $200 gaming monitors will have a 240Hz refresh rate, which will make the screen as smooth as a drum.
Games don't scale down like most games used to. If a game was running at 30 frames per second, it was going to look smooth at 30 frames per second. If the 30 frames per second changed to 24 frames per second, the game still looked good, but you'd start to see individual frames in the corner of the screen (called strobing). It's why watching a strobe-free "speedrun" of a video game (which is when a gamer runs through the game with very little slowdown) can be a powerful visualization tool.
Overclock a 1920x1080 monitor and you'll see individual frames around the display at 240fps (a smooth response time) to showcase your fps in high-end games. This is possible thanks to current gaming hardware, which can stream data to your monitor from the CPU and GPU. But to enable that functionality, you need a high-end processor, as well as a beefy GPU, and plenty of RAM.
What is a fast refresh rate?
In the world of gaming monitors, there are two flavors of response time: 240Hz (which means a display refreshes every single second) and 144Hz (which is refresh rate, in which case the refresh rate is every 32 milliseconds).
An example of this is the fact that if you have a 120Hz display, and you're playing a game that has a frame rate of 30 FPS, the display will refresh in half the time as it would when you're playing a game at a 144 FPS frame rate.
With a 60 FPS game, the 60 FPS display will refresh in the same amount of time it would take to refresh if you were playing at 30 FPS. It's the same process.
In 1080p monitors, 240Hz will show the player that it's going to show them more information, faster. Most games can take advantage of the faster response time, because they don't have to set the frame rate very high.
As I said earlier, in 1080p monitors, 240Hz is a bit much, and you'll get a more stable 30-frames-per-second experience if you aim for 144Hz.
Think of it this way: In games with super-fast response times, the FPS can vary from 60 FPS to 120 FPS, which is a lot. This causes the monitor to lock up and display "frames" instead of "data" on the screen.
This happens in the blink of an eye and often when you're moving between activities, because the machine can't keep up. 144Hz fixed that problem, because the display only refreshes when the monitor needs to.
For example, say you were playing a game and needed to reload a save, or did something that caused the clock to go off, or had to save in a different location. No problem.
You can still continue playing, because the data will always be there, even if your computer doesn't have the CPU power to do much more.
It's also worth noting that while 144Hz is the default refresh rate, some games can switch to 240Hz if you choose to "switch" between refresh rates. Just think of it as letting the display know how fast it needs to refresh the screen. 240Hz also allows for ultra-high-definition gaming (3840x2160), which isn't available with 144Hz.
There are other fancy gaming monitor features out there that do offer a real benefit over 120Hz, such as LED backlighting (all the fancy colors) or G-Sync. But it's important to remember that while it is nice to have this more accurate, fast, and polished picture, it can be expensive.
Realistically, the 1080p standard refresh rate just doesn't work for this exact reason. Don't get me wrong—I appreciate the convenience of the 120Hz refresh rate, but my money goes a lot farther in 1080p.
I don't have a high-end PC and monitor and I don't even spend as much money on games as I did when I was younger.
What is 4K?
4K is a term for the highest resolution you can show to a monitor, and while it refers to "ultra-high-definition" content, a 4K monitor doesn't mean it will be able to display that content at those resolution levels.
The 1080p display will display a 4K image, and you could put one in front of a 1080p display to see the difference. However, it doesn't make much sense for games.
The term 4K is used to refer to the display resolution, and not how fast the pixels will be displayed. I'm also mentioning 4K as a distinct standard, because other screens have 4K resolutions that are not referred to by that name.
There are some monitors that have 1920x1200 or 2560x1600 pixel resolutions that are called 4K, and they usually have a 60Hz refresh rate. This is more or less the same as the resolution in an LCD monitor, but with even better colors, and again, they don't work very well for games.
We've already covered it, so let's move on...
What do you need for a gaming monitor?
In terms of hardware, the vast majority of modern games can handle 144Hz at 1080p with high-resolution textures. High resolution textures can be the difference between the realism of your game and something looking super-duper fake and janky.
In terms of software, most games can either control their framerate through the display's settings, or you can use the game's manual settings. Those settings include things like how the game's engine loads the screen when you turn the monitor on, or how the graphics get generated. If you're running the game on your PC,
it's generally best to switch over to the graphics options and disable adaptive v-sync, which lets the screen refresh at the exact same time as the frame.
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