LCD monitors refresh rates

Robb

Robb

Robb

Associate
Joined
5 Apr 2006
Posts
2
Hello all, I'm hoping some monitor experts can help me here.

After scratching the surface of my 17" Iiyama CRT with a kitchen towel I'm looking to buy a new monitor. My primary use is playing First Person Shooter games to a competitive level, which includes the need for a high refresh rate (100hz or more).

There seems to be conflicting information on the internet about how fast LCDs can refresh. I know they don't refresh static images but there must be a maximum rate at which they can display movement. I've always assumed this was the horizontal/vertical frequency (as it is with CRTs), while the ms is the delay it takes for the pixels to change to what they should be displaying. However, this article states that there is a correlation between the ms latency on an LCD and the Hz on a CRT with no mention of the frequency on LCDs. Have they got this wrong?

What I'm ultimately trying to work out is should I get the Viewsonic VX922 with a horizontal frequency of 30–82kHz or a CRT with a much higher one. Does anyone have any experience of playing FPSs on this monitor?

Thanks
 
it's been discussed before here, and it's a confusing situation when moving from CRT to TFT. Firstly, there are certainly lots of people who play FPS on TFT's with many modern screens now offering the kind of performance which people want from their monitor. However, there are still some people who prefer CRT's, it depends on the person and level of gaming really.

I think you need to seperate response times and refresh rates here though. The refresh rate on a TFT bares no relevance to a CRT's refresh rate. While a CRT refreshes the image at a certain rate using a cathode ray gun, the TFT does not, and instead pixels are changed individually when they need to be. A TFT's recommended and optimum refresh rate is 60Hz and this is what it should be run at. More important on a TFT is the response time which tells you how fast a pixel can respond to a change request (for all intents and purposes). If this is too slow, it can lead to trailing and ghosting of fast moving images which is the gamer's main concern with a TFT screen really. Modern screens offer decent response times and on the most part, for the majority of users, issues like ghosting are not present any more.

The problem which some gamers face with a TFT is that running at 60Hz refresh rate will often require you to run with vsync on to avoid tearing. This can cap your frame rate to 60fps. However, this may or may not be an issue, depending on whether you can really see a difference between a steady and reliable 60fps (with a decent GFX card) and perhaps 100fps, where it can fluctuate with the same card....you see what i mean? Anyway, this vsync +60hz is an issue to some people, but with modern technologies like tripple buffering you can increase frame rates as well.

I hope that helps explain it a bit, if you are worried, perhaps it would be best to see if you can try a TFT out to see if it is right for YOU. Refresh rate is explained in more information for TFT's here as well: http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/specs.htm :)
 
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