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?"

Comments

Yes.

[bersl2]

I've got a 17" Sony LCD w/ 16ms response time. I don't notice any problems. It's many times smaller and lighter than the 19" CRT I left at home.

In a vaguely related topic, does anybody know why DVI cables are so freakin' expensive?

Where have you been?

[GrandCow]

This question is about a year too late.

The simple answer is yes, they are and have been ready for gaming.

I play on a 25ms response time Samsung SyncMaster 191t and I see no ghosting at all. It's just like playing in front of a CRT only your eyes don't hurt when you have a somewhat long gaming session. If you are really worried about it, get a 16ms response time CRT and you'll be fine.

Well

[Phosphor3k]

I'm not a die-hard gamer, but I play the latest RTS games with regularity and go on the occasional FPS binge. I have a Dell 2001FP 20" 16ms( or was it 20?) response time LCD. Doesn't bother me any while gameing and I don't notice any tearing or screen door effects. I think they can be had for about 620$ shipped.

My dad has an LCD

[77Punker]

I went home recently and decided to fire up the original Unreal on his machine. The LCD is a cheap one and I would have rather played it on a CRT, but I was really surprised that it wasn't all that bad. The game was thoroughly playable and the contrast was excellent.

Re: Dell 2001FP

[Goyuix]

I have one of these (actually got in on one of the first shipments!) and I must say it is SWEET! At first I had it hooked to a geForce 3 but that wouldn't drive the DVI at 1600x1200 (native res), so I upgraded on the cheap ($20 at the time) to a FX5200 that would. DVI made all the difference at that high of a res, I didn't notice the difference that much below it.

About a month ago I finally scored a 6800GT and I must say that I play UT2004 1600x1200 quite regularly (and some other games) and there is no ghosting at all. Halo, which is notoriously bad for, I don't notice any ghosting. I also watch movies and again, no ghosting. Very, very nice monitor.

The age is here, and the recent Dell deals have had this particular monitor down in the low 600's. If you can afford that chunk of change, as well as a video card powerful enough to drive it, life will be great. A 19" would certainly be a more modest purchase.... but since when have gamers cared about that?

It's About You Too

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It's About You Too

[FoxWing]

I know of one good way to test out the ghosting on a LCD at the store without bringing anything in, if you can get to the desktop that is.

Goto Start>RUN and type dxdiag. Click on the display tab and run the Direct 3D test. (spinning cube with directx on it)

With the good monitors you will be able to read the text on the sides of the cube with no problem (the text will stay sharp and clear), but with the majority of the ones I've seen it'll be hard to read (a blurry streaking mess! ^_^)

Weigh up the benefits

[the_unknown_soldier]

For a regular lan gamer, i think that lcd is the only way to go. with response time getting down to 8ms there really is no excuse to carry that 100kg monstrocity around with you to a lan. I play on a 152x, and it is fine, I don't see any ghosting on a 25ms screen. If people say they can, i think it is just a placebo.

motion blur != ghosting

[mike_sucks]

Come on people, get the terminology right. Ghosting and motion blur are not the same thing!

Ghosting is when you get a faint duplicate of the entire on-screen image, slightly offset from what it should be. I don't think this can even occur on LCDs, I think it is a CRT-only problem, but if you use crappy analogue VGA cables, then who knows?

Motion blur is what you thing ghosting is. It is caused by poor refresh times, more specifically it is caused the amount of time it takes for a pixel to become unlit, or "switch off". So LCD screens that have a poor response time often show a trail after a moving object that looks like a ghost of the object.

Understandable that you could get the two confused, but still wrong.

/mike

Re:motion blur != ghosting

[adolf]

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...]

16 is borderline

[photon317]

1000/60 = 16.66666

Therefore 16ms response time ~= 60 frames/second is the maximum framerate you can expect to acheive without seeing the effects of the LCD lag. That's too close for comfort in my book, especially since that 16ms number might've be kinda whacked (like, taken at a very warm temperature or some crap).

If they advertised 8ms max, and the manufacturer was reputable, I would consider it.

Re:16 is borderline

[moosesocks]

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.

Biggest reasons I haven't switched...

[eviltypeguy]

Biggest reasons I haven't switched?

1) Price vs. CRT tech, a high quality 19" CRT (18.0 viewable) is at least a few hundred dollars cheaper than a really nice 19" LCD

2) Non-native resolutions suck (I play a lot of older games that can't run at resolutions higher than 640x480 or 800x600, don't forget emulators like SNES9X, etc... look best at SNES native res to some people), and forgot about my old dos games (sniff)

Refresh Rates

[ipoverscsi]

Just keep in mind that 16ms is 60Hz refresh (i.e. 1/60 = 0.016). If you're a hard core gamer with whom frames matter, you'd probably want an LCD a 12ms (~75Hz) refresh.

They've been good enough for quite awhile.

[green pizza]

I've played 3D shoot-em-up games on active matrix TFT-LCDs since the high end models hit 40ms (13ms rise, 27ms fall). I noticed some "ghosting" on those LCDs, just as I notice "ghosting" on the latest wiz-bang LCDs. The Apple Studio Display and Silicon Graphics 1600SW were both excellent LCD monitors for DTP, photo, and games back in 1998.

I think there are other issues that make LCDs a turn-off to some:

Not used to LCDs. If you've been a CRT user for more than a solid year, an LCD will seem strange at first. It's hard to describe, but the image just looks a bit different, a bit, "strange".

Pixel density & fixed pixels vs multisync CRT phosphors. While there is really no perfect display for using a variety of resolutions, CRTs are still better than LCDs in this respect. A high quality 19" CRT will display 1024x768 just as nice as it will display 1280x1024 and 1600x1200. Most modern LCDs have very good interpolation circuitry to display non-native resolutions, but you can still spot the fuzzyness.

Adapting to a poor video signal. If you're using an LCD, use DVI, period. LCDs tend to be much less tolerant of a poor analog video signal (typically from a cheap gamer card and/or a poor vga cable). What looks nearly perfect on a CRT might be blurry or even flicker little "sparks" of dropped pixels on a LCD, even at native resolution.

Pixel density. I've noticed this most often on 18.1" LCDs. At 1280x1024, the native resolution for most 18" LCDs, I can usually notice the "screendoor" grid that outlines the pixels. Even with subpixel rendering (which to my eyes reminds me of the awful Apple II "almost-white" text on a color monitor days) and/or various amounts of anti-aliasing, the onscreen text just doesn't look right at first.

That said, I think monitor preference is generally based on one's time with a certain tech, be it LCD or CRT. Both can produce good quality images, both can be adjusted for color correctness. Buy whatever fits best on your desk (and/or budget) and spend a month with it.

ISO refresh rate problems

[TheSacrificialFly]

I recently bought a Sony SDM-S204/B 20.1" LCD and while pretty pricey, it looks amazing both playing games and on the desktop. I did quite a bit of research on these and it seems like the response time stats given by manufacturers are pretty meaningless - they vary widely in the specification measurements.

Basically, the ISO standard measures the time taken to move a pixel from totally black to totally white (actually to within a small percentage). This ISO standard for response times is not very good and needs to be replaced - mostly because this is not a typical scenario, pixels are much more likely to be moving from some percentage on to some percentage off, or vice versa. If you have a major colour change, the voltage differential is going to be much greater so the movement will be faster. Panels are being created that manipulate the standard measurements to only improve the black to white transitions, totally ignoring the common case scenario for benchmarking performance. This anandtech article gives a pretty good (and brief) explanation on why these times are basically completely meaningless.

One other thing to be wary of is the interpolation methods some of the cheaper monitors use when not displaying in native resolutions. Try setting the desktop to 800x600 and even 640x480 in the store just to see how fuzzy things get. The sony has a native resolution of 1600x1200, but I don't often get to play games in that res - but running 3d and 2d games in 1024x768 and 800x600 even both still look fantastic. This wasn't the case with my previous (cheap) lcd, and it certainly wasn't the case with a lot of the monitors I checked out in the store.

Contrast Ratio

[swat_r2]

I'm suprised no one's mentioned on of the big drawbacks of LCD - Contrast Ratio. You just won't get the true deep, rich black levels that you would on a CRT. What's an average CR for an LCD display, 500:1 or so? Maybe 750:1 for a high end display? Even with my 1500:1 CR DLP Projector the blacks appear a bit washed out and greyish as compared to my CRT's. CRT's are still the king of displays, eventually digital will catch up, but they are tried and true. Of course the bigger they are, the more chance you have of putting out your back ;) You can't beat the sleekness and modern styling of the flat panels though, they do look wonderful.

Response times = marketing gimmick

[keilun]

Figured I'd say my bit here since most of the posts keep referring to how they have a 16ms response time or 25ms response time and there is no ghosting.

First off, I own two LCD monitors, a VG175 and a VP171b. The former was from back in the day when ghosting was prevalent and the VP171b is newer and definitely nice for gaming. The VG175 was ok for gaming, but would ghost now and then.

Before I went and purchased the second LCD I did a lot more research on the area. What I found surprised me. The specification for 'Response Time' is a marketing gimmick. It has no bearing on how well the monitor performs for playing back DVDs and games. That's the kicker...

Response time is measured as the time for the monitor to goto *full black* to *full white* and back to *full black*. Which you would guess is the proper way to do it. Unfortunately, many LCDs out there optimize the hell out of the black to white switching and leave the switching between colors incredibly slow. This can lead to ghosting.

So how do you figure out which is best? Research opinions on the net, but most of all, insist that you see the monitor in action before purchasing it. It's the only way to tell. There was a tech site that I went to that detailed the spectrum analysis of the VP171b and that's what got me to buy into it. Seeing it action made it real and so I bought it. There were a few others in contention that claimed to have lower or equivalent response times, but they couldn't handle the picture as well as the VP171b.

Granted, I purchased the VP171b almost a year ago now. So it's quite likely that there's something better out there. But my advice to you is to try before you buy.

Hope this helps.