Gaming on a TV. Is it viable?

Cleisthenes · 27 Dec 2013 at 01:16

Considering getting myself a relatively nice tv, circa £250 for blu rays, 32 inch. Was wondering whether you would consider playing games on this? How good would the picture need to be to make is viable?

Jumper118 · 27 Dec 2013 at 01:36

Cleisthenes said:
Considering getting myself a relatively nice tv, circa £250 for blu rays, 32 inch. Was wondering whether you would consider playing games on this? How good would the picture need to be to make is viable?

You can use a tv as a monitor, but monitors tend to be better in terms of speed and picture quality for the same price because they don't have tv tuners and speakers built in. Another thing is that sometime the resolution and refresh rate can be strange with a tv so it might take a bit of time to get it looking right. I know when i put my pc on the tv it cut off the bottom and had a black bar at the top.

troops · 27 Dec 2013 at 01:47

Samsung smart led TVs look nice on the PC, but strangely i find them bit to big for my liking.

ValiantUK91 · 27 Dec 2013 at 09:02

I was using a logic tv as my monitor for a while picture and everything was okay but i couldnt get into the bios while i was using the tv (something to do with res + refresh rate) it just wasnt able to show the bios i just got a blank screen soon as i hooked up to a monitor i could access it.

It could have just been a compatibility issue with that particular tv as hardly anyone i spoke to had heared of the issue.

Make · 27 Dec 2013 at 09:21

I game on a Samsung F5000 series 32". No smart features or any of that stuff, but the quality is simply awesome; Great colors, and I don't notice any input lag at all.

It only goes up to 60hz though. You can force it to 72hz, but mouse gets jumpy.

I would recommend it if you like huge screens.

si_mats · 27 Dec 2013 at 10:56

+1 for the Samsung F5000s - have mine hooked up to a media PC with an A10-5800K and it works and looks great. Have to whack the details down a bit but BF4 is deffo playable.

zyzzyzus · 27 Dec 2013 at 11:55

I used to use my TV and it certainly is doable. But when I switched to a monitor I really noticed the difference so if you went from a monitor to a TV it'd probably not look too great. Though my TV was old so a newer one would look better.

I also had a problem with not being able to use the BIOS. For me it'd look like I had 'zoomed' in to part of it and the rest would be off the screen. But once windows was loaded it'd be fine at any resolution.

Though I would have to set the desktop resolution to 800x600 before loading an older game or it wouldn't load for some reason.

Personally I'd only use a TV for gaming as a temporary measure. I actually decided to get a good quality monitor and use that as my TV too (with a digibox). It works great for all my needs and looks better than my old TV.
Edit:
The graphics options on Civilization V wouldn't work on my TV either. That was the only game I had the problem with but there could be others too.

mark2410 · 27 Dec 2013 at 17:45

console users manage it just fine using a TV so it so should work fine aslong as you turn off things like overscan if the tv does it (i dont think any do by default anymore)