Things to Look for When Selecting a Gaming Monitor

Monitors play a very crucial role when it comes to good gaming experience. No matter how fast your processor and GPU are, if you can’t feel it in front of your screen, it’s all a waste. You can’t get a good experience if you can’t enjoy the high-level details that the game offers to the players. And in order to feel that, you need a good gaming monitor.

However, if you are new to gaming, picking the best gaming monitor for you could be a little tough job. But, here we will try to solve that problem for you.

There are few crucial things that you should keep in mind before getting a gaming monitor for you, and below you will know why they are important to consider and how these things affect your gaming experience.

Things to Consider While Selecting a Gaming Monitor

The Type of Monitor

If you go out looking for monitors, you will come back confused with so many options to pick from. There are business monitors, general screens and gaming monitors that might serve you different needs, but it is you who needs to decide which one among them all fulfils your requirements efficiently. The normal entertainment monitors are for those who are looking for a lot of features in one piece. They are handy as well and offer a lot of connectivity options like HDMI port etc. so that one can use it for other purposes as well apart from work.

On the other hand, Gaming monitors should be a lot more responsive when compared to business screens. They should be able to pick up the high frame rates and display it with very high detail without any tearing. Pixel Response Rate is something you should check here. A pixel response rate is the amount of time that a single pixel on the screen takes from changing its colour from black to white. Pick the one with the least pixel response rate. Also, don’t forget to make sure that the monitor you choose should have an option to connect it to various devices as well as consoles.

Screen Resolution

Screen resolution is the second thing to consider while buying a gaming screen or gaming monitor. You do not know what screen resolution means, it is the count of pixels that a monitor is capable of displaying to the user. In simple terms, it is the number of small dots that you see on any monitor vertically in horizontally. For example, a 1024 x 768 monitor has 1024 pixels in horizontal and 768 pixels in vertical.

No doubt, more pixel or more resolution the screen offers, better is the picture you see on the screen. Right now there are a lot of monitors that offer you 4K display. So if you want a good gaming experience, try to go for a 4K monitor or full HD screens at least.

The size of the Screen

Large screens are perfect for gaming, but not every large screen might give you the same experience as the ones specially designed for gaming. The size of a gaming monitor may vary from 15 inches to 30 inches and it’s totally upon you, the size you want to go with.

If you are planning to go for a huge monitor, you might also like the idea of having two medium high-performance monitors instead of having a huge one. But if you are also going to use the screen for other purposes as well like movies, a 25 inch or 27-inch monitor will be able to provide you everything you are looking for. Also, these monitors are available at reasonable price and warranty. Also, if you buy a huge screen, it is possible that your GPU or CPU might underperform due to huge stress.

Refresh Rate and Technology

A good gaming monitor must possess a high refresh rate. You need to check the GtG specification of the monitor and make sure it is lowest as possible. A high response rate will result in motion blur as well as frame breaking.

Try to get a monitor with GtG response less than at least 4ms. Also, there are many technologies used in manufacturing a screen, it might be Twisted Nematic or TN panel, an IPS or VA. TN panels are affordable and offer a very fast response as well as refresh rate when compared to other panels. However, they offer poor colour variation as well as not so good viewing angles resulting in ghosting effects.

VA panels or Vertical Alignment panels offer you good colour brightness, good contrast ratio but possess the same ghosting effect which we are not going to recommend for good gaming experience. Last but not the least comes the In-Panel Switching or IPS panels which are the best among all the three. You get the best accuracy in terms of colour and excellent viewing angles as well. The performance is good as well but they do not have very good GtG time causing motion blur. So it is you who have to decide the type of technology to pick for your gaming.

Budget

There is no limit to what you can spend on Gaming monitors. But you can get a good one for around $200 to $400. In case you do not wish to spend much on it, a TN monitor will be good for all your gaming and business needs. But a high-end monitor with 144Hz refresh rate and FreeSync and G-Sync features could cost you above $1000.

A lot of monitors are going to offer you a lot of features to you which you might not even use during gaming. So, it is important to determine your requirements and then spend on the one which suits you the best.