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Are LCD Displays Ready For Gaming?
Player issues this query: "Since the holiday season is rolling around, I've been contemplating shelling out the big bucks for a nice LCD display. I'm a die-hard gamer, with several choices of monitors in the market today, it can get a little confusing. Ghosting seemed to be a problem with intense games, but with displays reaching 8ms-16ms response time, is it really an issue anymore? Is it time for this gamer to move on to greener pastures, or stay the course with my trusty CRT?"
It isn't just about the response time bla bla bla, but also you. Depending on your eyes, your brain, etc you may see ghosting where others do not, just like some people see the rainbow effect with certain projectors.
Your best bet is to go into a store and try them out. If the store doesn't have some games to test them with, take a demo cd or something. Additionally, buying in a store is one of the few ways to guarantee you don't get a bad pixel or ten.
You're right. 60hz is pretty bad for a CRT. It hurts the eyes.
However, you've got to consider a few facts: The time it takes each pixel to begin to change is near-instantaneous with DVI. It just take 20ish ms to fully and completely change. Since it's also rare for every single pixel to be dramatically changing each and every frame -- while a higher latency will cause ghosting, motion on an lcd today looks quite fluid and natural.
Also, the reason why 60hz is awful for a crt. The screen redraws itself 60 times. In between the times the screen is redrawn, it is blank (though you would never notice it with your own eyes). This is because of flicker which is the main reason why 60hz just sucks so much on a CRT. I've read that in double-blind tests, most humans couldn't distinguish framerates once they went over 30fps, and virtually nobody could distinguish over 45
The only departments which LCDs can't match a CRT for is Brightness and Contrast. Right now, most LCDs can perform equally to a decent CRT, but nowhere nearly as good as a professional-level one. This is a fundamental problem with LCDs which is never likely to be solved completely. Still, I find it adequate.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Good points.
I'd like to add that ghosting is usually due to bad or damaged cabling, and that all high-frequency analog signals (including those used by LCD monitors with VGA inputs) are susceptible to it.
It's easy to demonstrate, too: Just take a length of VGA cable, and bend it in half, hard, as if you were a secretary busily rearranging "all those ugly wires". After that, bundle it up with a bread tie, and place the corner of your desk on it.
Or just pretend you're a gamer, strung out from seventeen consecutive hours of cheap beer, bad coffee, and Counterstrike. You're loading the PC into the car, and slam the trunklid on the monitor cable, crimping it something nasty.
Ghosting? You betcha. We expect these cables to run up to about 350MHz. If you thought Ethernet over Cat5 was finicky, you haven't pissed off a VGA cable lately.
[/me patiently awaits the return of monitors with replacable, BNC-equipped cables...]
Kid-proof tablet..