PC gaming is quite big in India. As games become more intense and compelling, gamers find themselves wanting the latest and greatest hardware to run these games smoothly. That being said, the majority of gamers wanting to build or upgrade their machines don’t have much of a clue, and are often at the mercy of vendors and salesmen, due to which, more often than not, they end up making the wrong decisions. This is an attempt to address this lack of information, and help all PC gamers make the best of their resources. This is PC GAMING 101.

If you own and regularly use a PC, you know what a minitor is. However, when it comes to gaming, not all monitors are built equally. So, what makes a monitor "good for gaming" ? (Well for starters it should connect to a device that runs videogames.) Let's have a look at the things you should look out for, while choosing a monitor for your gaming setup: 

1. Inputs 

Most gaming monitors these days have DisplayPort, HDMI and DVI input ports, or a combination of the three. (You can read more about display technologies and standards in Part 4, here). If you're gaming on a PC, and you want to keep things as simple as possible, you should go with DVI and DisplayPort with confidence. HDMI will work fine, unless you want the resolution to be higher than 1080P, or a refresh rate over 60Hz. HDMI 2.0 is coming out soon to address these issues. Not that HDMI inputs are totally useless though, you can use them to connect secondary gaming devices such as gaming consoles and switch between your devices as you choose. 

2. Size Matters 

Yes, a monitor's size does matter, but not for the reasons most people think it does. A larger monitor just puts a larger image in front of you, and isn't any more difficult for your graphics card to power. So you should pick a size that's comfortable for you, for the distance you want to sit from it. The spec that determines how hard it is to power the monitor, is the resolution. A 24 inch 4K monitor will be about 4 times more difficult to drive than even an 80 inch 1080P "Full HD" TV, because of the sheer number of pixels. Higher resolution monitors deliver a clearer, more "retina-like" display so resolution isn't a problem, in and of itself. It's just a factor you need to consider in your overall build/upgrade budget. 

Now that we've gone through the basics of monitors and displays, let's look at what makes a monitor "good for gaming". 

Response Time  

The rendering process of pixels on an LCD/LED display is very different from the old, tube style CRT monitors, and when the image updates, the pixels gradually shift from one colour to another. So, the slower the pixels of the monitor, the more "motion blur" or ugly streaking that you'll see behind moving objects on the screen. 

So, while buying a monitor for gaming, look for a monitor with a "Grey to Grey" response time of

8-16 milliseconds for  casual use

1-2 ms for competitive use.  

Refresh Rate 

Expressed in Hertz, the refresh rate is the number of times an image is sent to the display, every second. If your eyes are getting more updates per second, you're getting information slightly faster than your opponent. It's a definite advantage, and the fastest monitors these days can run at upto 144 Hz, at 1080P. That means you can get screen updates upto 10 milliseconds faster than your opponent using a 60 Hz display. 

Input Lag

Now, this is a spec that most manufacturerd don't report, but is really quite important. When the CPU sends signals to the monitor, the monotor needs to translate that information into a format that the panel can understand. This processing introduces a delay which means that you could be seeing an individial frame that is anywhere from a few milliseconds later than it was output by your graphics card, all the way upto 50 milliseconds later, or more. For competitive use, look for a monitor that has an input lag of less than 10 milliseconds. But don't just take the manufacturer's word for it, LCD manufacturers are notorious for inventing completely new specifications to suit their marketing purposes. So, be sure to check out sites like Blur Busters to get the latest info and specs on gaming displays. 

Other Features

Apart from the factirs mentioned above, there are other factors to look out for as well, such as 

• 3D vision for stereoscopic gaming
• Wider, cinematic aspect ratios (like this 21:9 monitor LG came out with recently)
• Display persistence modes and Backlight Strobing 
• And last but not the least, upcoming technologies like G-Sync 

Now, if this guide raised more questions than it answered, or you'd just like to go hands-on and choose which specs matter for you, just check out online forums, they might really help out. 

Prev>> Part 4: Display Technologies

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