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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?"
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 kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
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.
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 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.
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
-- "So, what's the deal with Auntie Gerschwitz et all?"
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)
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
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.
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.
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.