LCD monitor a good or bad choice for PC gaming??

[SoulBlazer]

I may have to buy a new monitor pretty soon.

What are good national chains that sell monitors? Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Circuit City, Target, what?

[Jorpho]

Actually, I saw a pretty tempting 15" Acer at Radio Shack recently for $250 CDN.

[K3V]

I grabbed this one today:

http://www.compusa.com/adproducts/pr...pfp=ADPRODUCTS

Pretty happy with it so far, played some Halo and some web-surfing on it. No complaints!

[njiska]

njiska wrote:
When buying an LCD make sure it's one with DVI input and make sure your card can out put DVI. DVI is a far supior interface to what your CRT uses.


I actually don't totally agree. While my monitor is a DVI monitor, the difference, unless you're looking at a 19" or bigger monitor, isn't that noticable on a 17" monitor. VGA works just about as good, and it is usually a lot cheaper.

Well i'm afraid i'll have to disagree with you. While you may not notice the difference there is a difference.

First of all DVI is a digital interface which means it either works or it doesn't. VGA is analog which means 2 things. First it means that it is susceptable to interference and there are a very large number of complaints by people using vga connections that they experience ghosting on their LCD's, especially if they use a longer cable. Second since the LCD interface is Digital anyways, it makes more sense to just pump it through in DVI.

Anyway you look at it the fact is that DVI is quickly becoming the default head on a graphics card and at the rate PC's evlove soon you won't get a DVI to CRT adapter with you're graphics cards. So looking to the future, buying a DVI supported LCD is a good idea and it is better tech.

I stand firm in my beleif that you should use DVI over VGA if you get an LCD, but in the end it's your money. Don't wanna cough up the extra Bucks for a DVI connector? Fine. It's your choice. All i'm saying is that DVI is a better techknowlogy, and it is the way the graphics card industry is headed.

[goatdan]

njiska wrote:
When buying an LCD make sure it's one with DVI input and make sure your card can out put DVI. DVI is a far supior interface to what your CRT uses.


I actually don't totally agree. While my monitor is a DVI monitor, the difference, unless you're looking at a 19" or bigger monitor, isn't that noticable on a 17" monitor. VGA works just about as good, and it is usually a lot cheaper.

Well i'm afraid i'll have to disagree with you. While you may not notice the difference there is a difference.

...

Trust me, I know all about DVI technology, and I'm not even the one you're trying to convince. I have an LCD monitor hooked up with DVI. It isn't that noticable.

The ghosting effect, while it can be impacted a little from VGA cables is a LOT more dependant on the refresh rate of your monitor than the interferance. I run my computer with the monitor at home with the amazing refresh rate in DVI, and it looks great. I also run my Dreamcast on it using VGA, and there has never been any ghosting.

The reason why I plunked down the cash for a DVI monitor a few years ago was to get a refresh rate that would always keep things from ghosting. A few years ago, almost all LCD monitors had a much slower refresh rate. Now, that isn't the case.

DVI will catch on more when computers start coming with DVI as their built in video output. Once that happens, companies will start selling monitors with only DVI ins. Until that happens though, you'll be just fine with a VGA monitor, and it will take a long time. I bought my DVI monitor three years ago now, and DVI was already standard on graphics cards. It has been three years, and DVI is still not standard on monitors. I'm guessing it will be at least another five to ten years before it is...

[robotriot]

My TFT has a refresh rate of 16ms, that's already enough, there's no ghosting noticeable.

Concerning lowres, I have to say TFTs aren't really recommendable - the pic will get very blury. Some people like that, but I don't, doing pixel graphics myself, I always want to see a sharp picture :) Also, some TFTs can't even display resolutions of 320x240 and below properly. Some highend TFTs have the option though to not stretch the lowres image to fullscreen, which leaves you with a small pic in the middle of the screen and lots of black around, that's imo still better than a blury fullscreen image. Modern PC games on the other hand are no problem though, if you use a lower resultion than your monitor's maximum, the bluring doesn't seem to be that bad.

Another solution to get a pixel-perfect lowres pic is to try and see if the app (like MAME) has a 2x or 4x mode that stretches the pixels proportionaly, while maintaining the current (maximum and ideal) resolution.