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Okay, so more often than not, I feel like the most overlooked part of anyone's system is their monitor. So today, we're going to talk about some monitor tech, what some of the specs mean, and some of the nice-to-have features and features
Comprehensive guide on gaming monitors covering panel types, specs, and features to help gamers choose the best screen for their setup.
Key Takeaways
- IPS panels have become the preferred choice for gaming due to improved response times and color accuracy.
- Mini LED backlighting offers better local dimming and contrast compared to edge-lit LED panels.
- High refresh rates combined with low response times significantly reduce motion blur and ghosting in games.
- Adaptive sync technologies like G-Sync and FreeSync enhance gaming experience by preventing screen tearing.
- Monitor size, resolution, and ergonomic adjustments are important factors to consider for an optimal setup.
What the video covers
- Overview of different monitor panel technologies: TN, VA, IPS, and OLED, with their pros and cons.
- Explanation of panel size measurement and the impact of LED backlighting types including edge-lit and mini LED.
- Discussion on refresh rates and response times, and how they affect gaming performance and visual clarity.
- Details on color accuracy, viewing angles, and contrast ratios for different panel types.
- Introduction to advanced features like G-Sync and FreeSync to reduce screen tearing and improve gameplay smoothness.
- Insights into the evolution of IPS panels from slower, less responsive to high refresh rate, fast response time displays.
- Comparison of motion blur and ghosting effects related to pixel response times.
- Explanation of resolution standards such as 1080p and 4K and their impact on image quality.
- Consideration of ergonomic features like tilt and rotation adjustments for better user comfort.
- Mention of additional features that can increase monitor cost, including RGB lighting and build quality.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Importance of Monitors
- 01:22Panel Types: TN, VA, and IPS Overview
- 02:51Comparison of TN and VA Panels
- 04:21LED Backlighting: Edge-lit vs Mini LED
- 05:57Refresh Rate Explained
- 07:42Response Time and Its Impact on Gaming
- 09:18Resolution and Screen Door Effect
- 10:54Ultrawide and Aspect Ratios
- 12:34OLED Panel Technology
- 14:43Adaptive Sync Technologies: G-Sync and FreeSync
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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that kind of drive up the price on monitors because I have a feeling going into the beginning of 2025, a lot of people are going to be looking at upgrading their panel. So let's see what we can do today to kind of educate you
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and get you ready to buy your first or maybe your next upgraded panel so that you don't overspend but get the features that mean the most. For those looking for a high-end custom gaming experience, look no further than
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performing at their best through thermal imaging and rigorous lab testing designed and overseen by the Falcon Northwest founder himself. With a complete lineup of systems ranging from small to large, every Falcon Northwest system includes a three-year warranty policy and a year of two-way overnight
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shipping coverage, providing the ultimate peace of mind. To see all that Falcon Northwest has to offer, follow the sponsored link in the description below. So when we talk about panels, we have to talk about the main type of technology
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that it is. Now, we've sort of things have sort of changed over the years. For instance, there used to be TN panels, which were really common, which stands for twisted nematic. Then we had VA panels, which were vertical alignment,
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and then IPS, which stands for in-plane switching. Now, typically in the past, TN panels were the cheapest. They had the fastest response times. They had the lowest prices. You could get them in pretty decent size, but fortunately, as
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time has gone on, IPS are the most color accurate, which was typically the type of panel you would see in, like, you know, photo editing, video editing type of environment because they could get as close to lifelike when it came to the actual
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colors. But fortunately, the price of IPS has come down dramatically, so TN panels and VA panels have kind of been slowly disappearing, getting replaced with even very inexpensive IPS panels. Now, one of the drawbacks to IPS panels
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for years was the fact that they did not have the fast response time and refresh rates that TN panels did. So as the technology has improved, we're going to really just kind of talk about IPS panels when we talk about LED. But
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just know that TN panels and VA panels do still exist, and they kind of have their drawbacks. For instance, TN panels have some of the weakest viewing angles, so that means as you're sitting there looking at the panel and off viewing
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angles, it would start to have kind of a foily sort of an inversion that would sort of happen, and that's just because of the way that the panel is designed. They could give you really good
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response times, really fast refresh rates, but they also had the weakest color recreation in terms of accuracy. They almost had a very vibrant red. It could sometimes look pink. I mean, the color accuracy of it wasn't
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good, but for gamers who didn't care, it had a nice punchy screen and it was really, really fast. VA panels tended to have kind of the middle ground between IPS and TN, also giving fast
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refresh rates, but they weren't as fast as TN and they weren't as accurate as IPS, but they kind of gave that middle ground between the two. But like I said, we're going to talk about IPS today or in-plane switching when we talk about
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our LED panels. Now, when it comes to the viewable size of the panel, you'll see a measurement, whether it be 27, 32, or 24 inches. That is always measured in a diagonal measurement from corner to corner. So this is a 32-inch panel here
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from ViewSonic. This is actually one of our test bed panels, so this is an IPS mini LED panel. Now, you're going to see that technology kind of mentioned. You're going to see potentially edge-lit or LED
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or mini LED. So as LED panels have sort of progressed, being able to fit more LEDs in the backlight means that you can get better local dimming because the only way that you, through an LED, can
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actually get a dark scene to look dark is by turning off the backlighting behind the panel. Otherwise, when the pixel gate closes, there's still some light bleed that makes its way through, so blacks always look smudged or they
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look gray, and they just don't look good. So by mini LED panels, that means that we have thousands of LEDs behind here, giving a larger area of light but also more LEDs that we can dim or turn down
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in a particular area to give us better contrast ratios. Now, it's kind of hard to get a perfect infinite contrast ratio when you're talking about something that is being permanently backlit. Now, edge-lit refers to a panel that has
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lighting around the corners or around the perimeter of the screen, lighting it sideways, then relying on foil to reflect the LED light through the pixel gate. So what you tend to find with edge-lit LED is kind of what's called flashlighting
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in the corners because as you hit this corner right here, you'll have a higher density of LEDs in the corner, so you'll get what looks like flashlighting in the corners. Fortunately, as mini LED has become less expensive to manufacture,
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that becomes less of a problem because the LED array is very uniform behind the panel rather than being on the edges. Now, before we move into some of the other technologies here, we're going to talk about some of the main
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specs. We're going to talk about refresh rate and response time. Now, one of the things that IPS kind of lacked in the past, as we talked about, was IPS didn't always have the fastest response time and refresh rate. They were 60 Hz
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panels, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 to 10 millisecond response time, which was fine because if you were sitting there editing video at 24 FPS or even 30 FPS, and you're playing games at 60 Hz, that was just, that was
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fine. But as gamers sort of demanded faster and faster panels, IPS wasn't able to keep up. Fortunately, as time has gone on, we now have high refresh rate, fast response time panels. So the refresh rate is usually referred to as a hertz
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rating or how many times the picture can refresh itself in one second. So a 60 Hz panel would mean that the image can refresh itself 60 times per second. As panels progress, that number started getting higher and higher: 100 hertz, 120
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Hz, 144 hertz, 165, 175, 240, 360, even 400 Hz panels exist now. Now, that brings us to the other equation of the formula. You might be able to refresh the image itself in terms of data and presenting that image X amount of times
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per second, but the actual pixel itself also has a speed rating, and that's referred to as response time. That's how fast the pixel itself can refresh based on the information that's being sent to it. So let's say, for instance, we have an 8
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ms response time gray to gray. That means it takes the pixel 8 milliseconds to change colors from gray to white and back to gray. So that number itself specifically refers to ghosting and motion blur. So let's kind of put that
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into perspective. So let's say we have this panel that could do 240 Hz or it can refresh the image 240 times per second. If it doesn't have a fast response time or the pixel is slow, that means you're going to have an image that's previously
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been drawn still sort of fading out as the next image is showing up. That leads to motion blur or ghosting. Ghosting is actually way worse than motion blur. We all are used to motion blur. Look around right now, just move your head,
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you're going to see motion blur. Ghosting is terrible because that's where you actually will get trails of images left behind, and you can see clear cuts between those trails, and that's actually a very gross, almost a nauseating experience. So w
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response time gaming panels typically land anywhere between 1 to 5 milliseconds in fact we even have panels going as fast as .5 milliseconds now as the response time gets faster and faster so if you're going to get a fast refresh
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rate panel you want to make sure it's paired with a fast re response time otherwise you can start leading to a lot of ghosting now we talked about the diagonal viewing size 32 in in this instance now it doesn't matter if it's a
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24-in panel or a 32-in panel if it's 4K or 1440p also known as QHD uh or full HD which is 1080p just because the panel is bigger does not mean it has more pixels the pixels are just larger to fill the
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space so for instance this is a 4K panel at 32 uh inches if we were to look at the same 4K resolution in a smaller panel it would actually look sharper that's because there's less space between the pixels and the pixels are
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smaller now space between pixels is also referred to as a screen door effect not something that's really too noticeable until you start going large format and anything in the like the 32 in and above is that is really considered large
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format but 4K when you start to look at say a 65in TV versus 4K when you look at a 32-in monitor text is where you really start to notice um the pixel density or the pixels getting larger so it's kind
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of a rule of thumb that if you're going to go larger than say 27 in on a panel you really want to go with 4K otherwise 1440p the text starts to look very blocky uh and you start to actually
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notice the screen door effect between the pixels the larger the panel gets now we talked about resolution obviously 4K um we're talking about a measurement of horizontal versus vertical so let's say 1080 P so we would have 1,920 pixels wide by 1 180 pixels High
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giving us a 16x9 aspect ratio now 16x9 is pretty common but I feel like more and more gamers are starting to make their way towards Ultra wide so this is actually the view the view Sonic XG 341c this is their Ultra wide panel um
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as you can see it's obviously much wider and this is actually referred to as a 21 by9 aspect ratio now you can get these much wider now where essentially they're just 216 by 's um put side by side which
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actually was 32 by 9 so you can get them in some pretty crazy uh widths now now you'll notice that this panel is actually curved now this curved is referred to as an R rating so you might see 800 R 1,000 R the higher the number
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in the R rating means the more aggressive the curve is now those even panels that exist now that are bendable that falls in the OLED category we'll talk about that in a second um but the panel can actually be bent to the curve
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rating that you you want so that's kind of a nice feature to have as you might imagine vendable oleds are not cheap so there's some price associated with that but Ultra wide has actually started to gain a popularity even if you look at
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the steam survey um because of the fact that they give you extra wide viewable angle so this would allow you in games to actually increase your fov so you could see more around the sides um while maintaining you know basically
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non-distortion so the wider panel will actually allow you to have a wider viewable angle without the weird stretched out looks on the side which you'd get by 16x9 if you went with like an ultra wide fov so I personally have
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been using Ultra wides now for probably the last 10 years um in fulltime typically you'll refer to you'll see them in a um 3440 by 1440 resolution that's usually the most common that means we have 3,440 pixels wide and then 1,440 pixels tall so
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giving us a higher pixel density it's going to make us have cleaner sharper text it's also going to give us like I said more pixel um on the width in terms of our viewable angles the price does obviously go up because we're talking
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about a larger panel more pixels so there is more cost involved U but you'll see these resolutions also referred to as wqhd or W added to whatever moniker that they're putting in the letters and that just basically denotes that it's wide or
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an ultra wide now 21 by9 aspect ratio is also fairly close to kind of like the cinema aspect ratios once you remove the black bars so there actually a multimedia viewing experience benefit too to using an ultrawide because often
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times if it detects that you're uh running a wqhd or an ultrawide uh panel there's actually options in a lot of players to actually fill out the screen and remove the black bars you might have a small black bar on the side um but
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it's actually makes it a nicer viewing experience cuz it fills out the screen but when we talk about the the specs the refresh rate the response time uh the panel technology whether it be tnva or IPS or even OLED all of the other specs
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that we talked about apply in the same manner it's just the format itself is wider okay so this brings us to OLED now this is the vonic XG 272 D2K D OLED the the numbers mean stuff I swear so XG is
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the category of their panel which is their gaming panels um 27 is the viewable which is 27 in 2K refers to the fact that is a 1440p yeah I know trust me we all know that the numbers kind of
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get confusing but it means it's a 1440p so it means 2560 by 1440 and then the Das OLED obviously means that it's an organic LED display this is kind of like the latest integration of technology to make its way into gaming panels which
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started as large format TVs as oleds now shrunk down into uh gaming size now OLED or organic LEDs are very different than LCD screens so liquid crystal display relies on light shining through pixel Gates and those Gates either open or
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close red green or blue to determine what colors they're going to be showing and then obviously that array creates your image oleds however emit their own light so instead of having a solid back light behind them it actually has uh the
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capability of each LED emitting its own light in the specific color at which it wants to emit now where this really shows its benefit is in dark scenes low lights the fact that it has perfect in Black because a black OLED is just an
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OLED that is not illuminated and you can see just how dark the screen is with no light coming through right now that's exactly how dark it is when you're in a dark scene and the cool thing is if you
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have a a darker scene let's say you're in a cave or something like you're playing like Tomb Raider or Indiana Jones or whatever and you've got very faint like rock formation or maybe something in the shadows instead of
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having everything else around it dim and then have what light is coming through to portray the dark scene everything is off and then only the dark scenes are actually emitting their own light at the luminance at which they're intended to
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basically portray that so it the technology is pretty awesome when we talk about panel displays if you've ever looked at an OLED TV in like a home theater setup or whatever uh then you'll know that it's pretty impressive what
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you can create in terms of its Vibrance its luminance cuz we haven't even talked about HDR yet as well as um it's its low light capabilities in terms of dark scenes the drawback though is most OLED panels have a glossier screen so that means any
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sort of ambient light behind you when you're gaming if you have a window behind you the reflection can actually get pretty intense fortunately the vonic panels um they kind of fit in the middle of a full glossy screen and a matte
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screen giving you better rejection at Reflections however in order to get the bright Punchy colors that you find with OLED they're typically coupled with a more glossy screen so that's one thing to point out there now as oleds have
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improved they have some of the best response times on the market uh you can see them get down as low as under 1 millisecond because the LED itself can respond much fast faster than the actual physical motion of an LCD pixel gate
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they can respond much faster just through their own luminance so you actually get very good refresh rates with OLED as well as very fast response times unfortunately OLED is the most expensive panel type currently on the market because it cost the most to
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manufacture now they have come down in price quite a bit but uh that's one of those things where let's say you've got a maxed out Tower you've got a high-end GPU you know you're running a 490 or 7900 XTX something crazy like that
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you've got your x3d CPU everything is maxed out you don't have any sort of upgrades you could really make to your Tower this is where upgrading your panel can really start to show its benefit because if you've got a maxed out Tower
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hooked up to I don't know 1440p LED tan panel you have no idea what you're missing out on until you start to look at things like HDR um High dynamic range uh when it comes to its brightness and its and its contrast
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ratios and such um one other thing that we haven't talked about yet either um specifically is going to be panel sync technology now it's a little less important today than it used to be because almost every single free sync
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panel is also g-sync certified but there was a while there where g-sync panels only worked with Nvidia graphics cards freesync panels only worked with AMD graphics cards and Nvidia wasn't taking the time to really validate freesync panels to fit within their g-sync uh I
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guess parameters we we we'll put it that way but the cool thing is just about every single freesync panel on the market now does actually work with Nvidia um gsync or Nvidia gpus now you might ask yourself why would I even need
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a sync technology well freesync and g-sync are Technologies that reduce tearing uh if your frame rate drops below the native refresh rate of the panel so what that means is the panel itself uh is actually able to draw
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scenes faster than the GPU is sending information to it at that point and you might start to see tearing where a scene isn't aligned because believe it or not your screen draws horizontally and not all at one time it does it kind of in
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Stripes right and they alternate often times so what happens is you'll start to see that image desync so that's why you hear freesync and gsync and so if you're refresh rate uh is faster than the FPS that's being sent to it you can start to
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get tearing so what the technology does is it actually forces the sync of the image prior before it being drawn so that's something that tends to to matter most if you're running let's say a graphics card that can't keep up with
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the refresh rate of your panel let's say you paired it with a 240 HZ panel and you've got I don't know a 1660 in your system you're not going to be running 240 HZ so you could get all kinds of
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fluctuating FPS which can lead to those tearing situations that's where the panel itself will actually handle making sure that the scene is synced before it actually draws the image now on the flip side you could also be running a
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something like an RTX 490 but you're running Indiana Jones which we all know is a very difficult title to run currently because of the fact that it's very forward facing in its technology and R tracing is required and you could
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have all the bells and whistles turned up now your 490 is definitely not going to keep up with your high refresh rate monitor so that's where the g-sync uh and freesync monitor technology really comes in to make sure that those frames
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stay nice and fluid so yeah it's a nice thing to have it used to actually be a kind of a premium sort of option on monitors but every single gaming monitor on the market today uh either has free
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sync or g-sync you'll probably find more freesync monitors these days than you do g-sync simply because it's open source and it's actually very inexpensive to implement it because it's done on a software level whereas g-sync does it on
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a module level and it cost more to put the g-sync module in a panel so you'll find a lot more freesync panels these days than g-sync okay so you've got the fastest response time you got the highest refresh rate you know you're
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running a a high-end gaming panel you start to think to yourself how what else could there be to talk about well some of the newest Tech that we're starting to see in the last few years mprt our moving picture response time we talked
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about the fact that if a response time is too slow for the refresh rate of the panel you start to get ghosting well one of the ways they've started to combat that is actually by flickering the panel or either severely reducing the
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backlight or even turning it off entirely in the background so what I mean by that is it's starting to strobe very very very fast faster than you can see with the human eye in fact we had to use a high-speed camera to even notice
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the fact uh that our V our vsync nprt panels were actually dimming uh down to red color actually cuz red is probably easier for it to to have that response time in terms of turning off and back on
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but it dimmed to a very very low red and back up basically every other frame so you can't ghost an image you can't see so the idea between nprt is just the next evolution of response time where you get much crisper cleaner images
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simply because of the fact that every other frame is actually being dimmed but you don't even notice it with the human eye it's kind it's kind of nuts it's happening thousands of times per second okay so let's talk about a couple other
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things that could drive the cost of a panel up that you may or may not be interested in um we're going to talk about things like vase amount so vase amount Mount basically refers to whether or not you can put the monitor on an arm
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so as you can see right here um we've got some screws that we would be able to mount a monitor arm to and those are measured in millimeters and the two most common sizes you're going to see actually the most common size you're
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going to see is 100 by 100 I mean it's 100 mm Square between each of these holes or maybe 80 by 80 80x 80 is not nearly as common um but it does exist other things too if we look at the
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bottom of the panel here we can talk about connectivity do we have multiple display port inputs do we have HDMI as well do we have a USB hub built in do we have maybe a headphone pass through built-in you know there's a lot of
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little features that can start to add up um and bring the cost of a monitor up does it have RGB personally for me RGB on a panel especially panels that have it on the back unless it's really bright
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and it's like bouncing off your wall I don't think RGB should be something anyone should be that concerned with when it comes to um gaming p pels that's the thing gaming panel actually might be the one time gaming is an appropriate
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term to use because the specs for a gaming panel are very different than a multimedia panel so like a gaming computer case that's just buzz term I mean does it have enough fan slots yes okay it's gaming now but a gaming panel
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high response or fast response time high refresh rate uh what is the the the panel technology behind the back lighting um if it had led on the front I guess for RGB that's cool and all but not something I think you should care
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about to be honest but does it have a rotatable base right so a lot of people go to their Discord channels and such and I put a big finger smudge on there so I'm sure that's triggering some people but a lot of people like to have
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a panel vertical like this let's say they have Discord channels always going or they're constantly on like Reddit or whatever so people like to have it portrait mode like this because it allow allows them to have more that they can
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read before they have to scroll programmers for sure definitely like to have multiples usually like this I've when I worked in software development most of our guys had two verticals and then a normal uh possibly even an ultra
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wide in the middle but not all bases have this sort of adjustability so I can rotate it either way sometimes they only rotate one way do we have tilt adjustment you know this one gives us about 15° up about 5° down which is
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pretty standard and then we have our height adjustable um built in so all things to consider when you're buying a panel anyway I hope this has given some food for thought on features and panels that can matter to you or may not matter
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to you fortunately though panel Tech as a as a whole has been driving itself down in terms of cost over the the last 5 years we have seen some major changes in pricing uh when it comes to panels I
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think right now the perfect sweet spot if you're trying to buy a gaming panel for someone would be a uh mini LED LC CD panel possibly 27 in 1440p resolution 144 HZ refresh rate with a 1 millisecond response time that would
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probably cost it under 300 bucks these days and that would get you a huge huge visual improvement over anyone running a 1080p 60 HZ panel it would be night and day in fact most people have no idea what they're missing until they
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experience it and then try and go back so sound off down below in the comments what your what Your Sweet Spot gaming panel is uh and what you think absolute musthaves are for someone buying their first gaming panel thanks for watching
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guys and as always we'll see you in the next one
Topics:gaming monitorIPS panelTN panelVA panelOLED monitorrefresh rateresponse timemini LEDG-SyncFreeSync
