REPORTS
Panels for gamers
With panels, being the heart of an LCD monitor, there are basically three fundamentally different types of technologies to be distinguished: Twisted Nematic (TN), In Plane Switching (IPS) and Vertical Alignment (VA). Furthermore, there are various advancements of the techs above, i.e. S-IPS, S-PVA or S-MVA.
It can sometimes be difficult to find out which type of panel is incorporated in a display just by looking at its data sheet. Some of the manufacturers are not too specific in providing info about the way the incorporated panel works. If you don’t know which panel is used in your favorite display, maybe our database can be of help, and if you are still left clueless, don’t hesitate to ask in our message board..
Displays with TN panel, IPS panel, or monitors sporting a VA panel accelerated by Overdrive are particularly fast and therefore well suited for gamers. VA panel models without Overdrive are generally too slow.
TN panels can mostly be found in 17 and 19 inch devices since this technology is rather inexpensive which made it gain ground in the lower budget area. The disadvantages compared to IPS and VA is the narrower viewing angles as well as the significantly lower amount of reproducible colors. Being capable of 6 Bits per RGB color only, their palette spans 262,144 colors. A little trick called dithering helps them expanding the amount of reproducible colors to 16.2 millions. In contrast, IPS and VA panels are able to display “true” 16.7 million colors and can therefore be regarded as being clearly superior to TN panels in terms of color reproduction.
IPS panels are mostly used in monitors sized 19 inches and above. Apart from a few exceptions, the same can be said about displays with VA panel.
Quoting our most recent Buyer’s Guide, we can recommend the following displays for gamers:
Resolution and Interpolation
As opposed to CRT monitors, LC displays consist of a fixed pixel structure, which can not be altered and corresponds to the so called native resolution of an LCD.
The native resolution of 17 and 19 inch displays is 1280 x 1024, and that of 20 and 21 inch displays is 1600 x 1200. Displays that are even bigger at sizes of 23 or 24 inches are mostly widescreen LCDs in 16:9 format whose native resolution is 1920 x 1200 pixels. LCD monitors are incapable of depicting resolutions higher than their respective native resolution!
Only if the device is set to use its native resolution, the picture’s quality can live up to its potential. In case of the graphics card being too weak for this high resolution or if a specific game title doesn’t support the native resolution, the display needs to recalculate the smaller resolution to the larger screen area using a designated chip in order to show the content full-screen. This process is called interpolation, and the smaller of a resolution is chosen compared to the native resolution, the more it results in the picture loosing focus. For this reason, we recommend to always use a display’s native resolution.
In order to avoid interpolation, with some displays you are given the possibility to select an aspect true mode for lower resolutions via the On Screen Display (OSD, menu). The chosen resolution is then displayed pixel by pixel in its original format with black bars at the sides and/or at the top/bottom of the picture.
With displays that don’t offer aspect true or 1:1 display modes, one can still mostly set it by software, namely using the driver menu of the graphics card. In this case, the display needs to have a DVI input.
| The editorial staff's most recent recommendations - Sunday, 26 May 2013 : | Advertisement |
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