Computer Monitor Recommendations for 2016

[Domino]

For starters I'm not the most knowledgeable when it comes to monitorsl but I was hoping I could get advice on this.

I'm currently using a ASUS VS238H-P 23.6 in with a Neoflex stand for Hori/Vertical games. Due to the viewing angle TATE games do suffer but it is still highly playable. After I move to a different department I'm looking to upgrade my monitor with something that offers better viewing angle for TATE.

I was originally going to do a two monitor setup for Dariusburst but that might be slightly overkill for my setup.

So I want to get members feedback regarding current recommendations on computer monitors. Looking for around $200-$300 unless getting the top of the line 27 in G-SYNC monitor might be the way to go for $600 plus. Hell screen tearing sucks in MAME but I'll deal with that over extra frames. One big thing I must say is that the monitor must pivots out of the box if possible.

FYI my current graphics card is a nvidia GTX 770. Most graphic heavy I will have right now is Street Fighter V.

Is all computer monitors going with 144 hz?

[cicada88]

1080p or what?

[tacoguy64]

They got some interesting new developments coming out later this year
http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/news_archiv ... panels_jan

[Domino]

1080p or what?

I currently use 1080p but if there is a reason to go higher rez ATM I will consider it.

[Ed Oscuro]

I looked at the ASUS VS238H-P, it looks fairly decent with that claimed 2ms, and DisplayLag reports 11ms input lag, but the proof is in the relative performance.

So, I guess the most logical way to break this down is to talk about some of the headline specs.

First off, the size format matters. 27" monitors are great for most everything, but any uniformity, backlight bleed, or viewing angle problems will start to show up more the larger your screen is. It also stands to reason that quality control, in general, should be spottier the larger a monitor gets.

Panel tech also feeds into problems at bigger sizes. Everybody knows TN panels have crappy viewing angles, but in some ways so do many IPS panels. Where TN panels have color shift, IPS - especially poorly designed or built units, or even just those that have been roughly handled - can have a lot of areas that are slightly darker or brighter than the rest of the panel, and as you go to larger screen sizes, "flashlight" spots can show up in the corners. And even if you don't get these build / design flaws, there's still often a heavy glow to the screen in general, when viewed at an angle (which might be a problem in tate). Thankfully, this doesn't change as you rotate the monitor or move it up and down - though some of the lighting issues of IPS can be lessened by moving further away. I don't know how common this is, but the 27" monitor from Asus I recently tried (PG279Q) sure as heck has a lot of this problem; despite being a previously returned item sold as an "open box" it matched reports and a photo of (presumably) another unit. On the other hand, the evenly price-matched direct competition from Acer (XB271HU) has some much better reports (and a direct comparison photo showing no backlight problems) in these areas. But generally, you might find that your IPS monitor looks really weird and bright compared to your current monitor, even if you turn the backlight down. If you think this is likely to be a distraction, especially if you view a lot of dark / mostly black scenes, you might want to mark this as a strike against even the current "top end" IPS monitors.

Panel tech also feeds into better or worse motion blur, but in much content this actually isn't a major problem. On IPS panels you can expect more blur from slow pixel transitions, and with your monitor's claimed 2ms response time, it may well give a much quicker pixel transition than even the current top-of-the-line IPS 27" gaming monitors I tried out, which claim a 5ms pixel transition. The current-gen "5ms" IPS monitors are far and away better than my old (and, at the moment, once again current) Planar IPS from 2009-ish (actually I probably bought it at roughly the same time you bought your monitor), but it's still notable with fast movement. TN panels are found in a lot of cheap monitors and they also should have an edge for speed. But at the same time, it is somewhat rare for games in MAME to really expose this as a flaw. I find that the games that are hardest on pixel response time are typically really fast-scrolling side view games (like modern endless runners) or first person shooters. In terms of raw speed, I wouldn't worry about the slowness of IPS when playing old arcade games or Ultra Street Fighter IV, so long as the monitor is quick enough to display the image without lag. But you might disagree - so load up some of your current games and ask yourself if you could tolerate more motion blur than you already deal with.

Now, about framerates and G-SYNC: Where I can make use of it, 100Hz+ framerates are great and I'm already missing it during my temporary return to 60Hz. Yet from what I read Ultra SF IV is 60fps only, so buying more frames goes to waste. Ditto for MAME - FreeSync or G-Sync are great here, but you don't really need high framerates for most MAME games, just a chance to sync within the 30-75Hz range (or so). Of course, with your Geforce 770, your default choice is going to be a G-SYNC monitor, which is pushing you into pricier monitors by default, unless you want to swap your graphics card to AMD for FreeSync (note that you'll need to be careful about which Radeon you buy, since all their rebrands mean that some old tech lives on in the supply channel alongside newer, fully FreeSync compliant designs).

Also, there's resolution. I feared that DPI and text scaling would be really problematic on 1440p, moving there from 1200p (a 1080p monitor with 120 pixels tacked on the vertical) - it represents 70% more pixels in the same size as 1080p. But in practice it was just as fun to read text on as my older 1200p monitor. However, not every game designed for 1080p looks amazing at 1440p. MAME won't be one of these, thankfully. At 1440p I think that uneven scaling of scanlines should be essentially banished given how small each pixel is - though I didn't fully test this out.

In terms of the performance penalty of higher resolution monitors and high framerates, a Geforce 960 (which is roughly equivalent to your Geforce 770) is pretty overpowered for many of the things I play. I assume that it would wipe the floor with Ultra SF IV, which frankly looks like holy hell and only requires a 60fps framerate. I actually don't know what you need hardware that powerful for, unless you're running console ports or FPSes and didn't tell us.

There's a couple tricks about resolution and framerate you should know: If you're running at 144Hz, tearing should be much less noticeable. However, the catch is that people saying this are running their setup at 144Hz - I'm not sure how 144Hz monitors actually display 60Hz games; it could be a bit ugly.

If you're running a higher resolution than 1080p, anti-aliasing can sometimes be less necessary given the additional pixels. Depends on the game and the content, though - I found that this isn't really a hard rule, but it can let you stretch the performance of a graphics card.

One last thing - color reproduction. A lot of people simply swore off TN monitors because of the beauty of IPS. IPS monitors can still look bad if they aren't set up properly, but for all its faults, my old Planar PX2611W looked quite nice after years of TN monitors - of older generations of course - and in turn the new Asus monitor, for all its backlight problems, looks far nicer than my old Planar, to the point where it's almost painful going back

[Xyga]

One 32" 16:9 that finally grabbed my attention: https://pcmonitors.info/acer/acer-xb321 ... th-g-sync/
(need one above-average 32" for a slim/foldable cab project)

Apparently same panel as the Benq BL3201PH, which is a good thing as it's still the best standard 32" 4K IPS.

Now it'd be better if it did at least 120Hz ULMB too, fingers crossed that'll come to existence in the future.

Of course like all G-Sync equipped monitors it is pricey, $1,299 at newegg, £799 on Amazon UK. Ouch.

[ZellSF]

If you're doing PC gaming (not just emulation) then 100hz+ and freesync/gsync are both must haves.

I currently use 1080p but if there is a reason to go higher rez ATM I will consider it.

Better image quality (for both low resolution content scaling and high resolution native content) is pretty much the reason.

[airs]

I have an Acer XB270HU bprz and its incredible. I will never go back to 60hz/no gsync! You can't make meeeeee! *boom*

[Ed Oscuro]

One 32" 16:9 that finally grabbed my attention: https://pcmonitors.info/acer/acer-xb321 ... th-g-sync/
(need one above-average 32" for a slim/foldable cab project)

I'd rather go with a 1440p model with a higher-than-60Hz refresh rate for emulation, because that one tops off at 60Hz, which won't be very helpful for the games that run faster than that. On top of that, the price, ouch. DPI could have its uses, but for a lot of stuff it would start to get unmanageable, and I also suspect that the backlight issues would be even more annoying on that large monitor.

[Xyga]

There are unfortunately no 32" 1440p performing as well as that ACER or the BenQ.
And unlike others I value G-Sync (or FreeSync) more than higher refresh in the case no strobing is available.
Would love a 32" PG279Q or even better but that's not planned for release from any manufacturer yet.

Anyway I won't buy that ACER it's too expensive really.

[bobrocks95]

Are Freesync panels still restricted to just TN if you want a fully-encompassed sync range? The early IPS 144Hz Freesync monitors only had Freesync from like 35-90Hz tops, which I considerd too sizable a gap at the top end. Even if you can hit 144Hz solidly on a game, a dip into the lower hundreds is going to happen on occasion.

[Xyga]

Dunno check the latest Eizo review on tftcentral, it's like it's got two modes or what I heven't really read that part.

[Fudoh]

yeah, for some reason they can't join the two freesync ranges. You get 35-90Hz and 56 to 144Hz and you have to decide on which range to use. I haven't checked into the details why it's like this, but it's the same on all current freesync models (that can sync this high).

[Ed Oscuro]

The XG270HU has a range from 40-144Hz, which is pretty respectable.

The Eizo FS2735 has dual ranges again:

144Hz native
FreeSync range 56 - 144Hz
or 35 - 90Hz

My understanding is that this isn't going to go away as long as we have LCDs - G-SYNC modules inside a monitor seem to have a profile to set panel drive voltage (including "overdrive") appropriately for all refresh rates, but with FreeSync it's as if the monitors have static framerates, with one drive voltage setting, hence you get these very rough-and-ready overdrive settings for huge ranges, which can give worse visual performance than G-SYNC as well. Although I'm not sure what panel is used, TFT Central's FS2735 review seems to bear this out; response times are worse than the Asus PG279Q and users need to mess with the overdrive control depending on whether they are running 60Hz (where "standard" is best) or 100Hz+ (where "enhanced" is better).

Perhaps in the future there will be some adjustment to monitor / displayport standards to allow dynamic overdrive setting, and with OLED it shouldn't be necessary at all, I hope.

[Xyga]

I'm curious about the Eizo's strobing feature though, does it work with external sources on HDMI ? (I know that's far-fetched but you know hat I have in mind)

[bobrocks95]

Dunno check the latest Eizo review on tftcentral, it's like it's got two modes or what I heven't really read that part.

I had been waiting to hear about that Eizo actually, I'll give it a look.

The XG270HU has a range from 40-144Hz, which is pretty respectable.

Yes, it is... But it's a TN panel, so that's par from the course. From what I can tell IPS is what has the problem syncing the full range- maybe VA too but I don't think I've seen any VA Freesync monitors.

[Ed Oscuro]

I imagine that they could get similar % improvement rates on TN using multiple overdrive settings, but the absolute improvements would be relatively small compared to IPS, which starts out with much worse response times.

I've quoted the Eizo's response times above. TFT Central says something or other about "extra value" but I don't see it. With the PG279Q they gave the backlight bleed complaints little attention, and now we have a panel that looks to be a worse performer than the G-Sync panels in terms of response time and even in input lag. Build quality should be fine and QC even better than the Asus / Acer but I'm resigned to play the panel lottery a bit in order to get a better monitor for less money.

[Domino]

I have a lot to read that for sure.

Keep in mind the most graphic heavy game I'm going to play is SFV. The rest is either shmups ported to PC or MAME.

Since I already have the GTX 770 I'll stick go G-SYNC. Might as well since I like my Graphics Card. Then again, the price jump is high on the G-SYNC.

[mikejmoffitt]

The only monitor that matters is the EV2730Q.



1920x1920. I am loudly an evangelist for the only 1:1 monitor on the market.

[ryu]

Is that picture for real rotfl

[Ed Oscuro]

Hey, that's some fancy MAME frontend there.

Yeah, that's a real picture. Wasn't it Fudoh who first mentioned it? 1920x1920 square.

[mikejmoffitt]

I've got one on my desk. I can verify it's real.

[ryu]

I didn't mean the monitor, but the image you posted. Do they actually use it to advertise that monitor?

[mikejmoffitt]

Yep, it's straight from their website. The advertising is tacky, but Eizo is top-notch stuff.

[Xyga]

Ha ha nice a shmupper actually bought that one. Interesting though quite expensive, I bet the exclusive panel explains the price.

[ryu]

I'm not sure if I'd feel comfortable with that vertical size. Just got a 24" 16:10 monitor and that one feels pretty big already.

Is that one even good for gaming, considering sync range and stuff? Although the dimensions themselves speak alot in favor of MAME use I guess.

[Pasky]

I've got one on my desk. I can verify it's real.

5ms gray to gray...

[ZellSF]

I've got one on my desk. I can verify it's real.
http://i.imgur.com/0xTIc9M.jpg

5ms gray to gray...

That's a fairly meaningless number. Different manufacturers measure it differently and overdrive methods matter a lot for how good the image actually ends up.

Not that I doubt that monitor is a bit blurry in motion, just saying you shouldn't go by those numbers.

[Ed Oscuro]

Just as importantly, nothing about that figure points to a particularly bad response time for the technology (or a good one, just like ZellSF said).

It's basically just another way of saying that it's a fairly standard recent IPS type technology, with all the benefits and drawbacks that implies. It's probably a bit "slow" compared to TN but perfectly fine for most 2D games.

@ mikejmoffit: Wow, I'm on (a square) TV! I never saw that happening, I feel honored.

[bobrocks95]

Are my eyes playing tricks on me, or is it totally taller than it is wide?