Will My computer support this?

Hey everyone,

For those of you who don't know me, I am Matt, and I am mildly retarded when it comes to computers. So, with that in mind I ask a question which I think may cause a flame in my name... So, here goes. Will my computer support this moniter. Now, I am not real sure on what exactly the different contrast ratios and all that stuff mean, all I saw when I was looking around was a $331 moniter down 40 bucks. I am going to be using it to game on, and saw the 2ms repsonse time which I figure is good, but the rest of the specs are Greek to me.

Thanks all.
Matt

Already ordered :) thats right I should be home that soon!

Matt

Lol, I always take those numbers with a grin, simply because I have no idea what they mean. But, I do read the reviews that other have written and this model seems really well liked.

Take care all
Matt

Originally posted by DST4ME Guy please remember, there is no industry standard for measuring GTG or BTB response times. Always take those number with a grain of salt. Those numbers represent the most optimistic ideal conditions. In best case senario I would say 2ms GTG = 10ms BTB. Don't be surprized to find out that some 2ms GTG response time LCDs will be as slow as 10ms GTG in real life.

Look for color saturation over response times. That will tell you more.

Originally posted by DST4ME Guy please remember, there is no industry standard for measuring GTG or BTB response times. Always take those number with a grain of salt. Those numbers represent the most optimistic ideal conditions.

That's a function of screen refresh. You are going to get tearing if you exceed the refresh rate. It may have been less noticeable with a higher refresh like 85Hz on a CRT but it's always present with VSync disabled. What happens, is the next frame starts to render before the current frame can be finished. The further you exceed the refresh rate, the worse the problem becomes as the monitor attempts to display multiple frames at the same time. The monitor starts to draw  frame 1, recievesinformation intended for the next frame (frame 2), continues drawing  frame 1 with the information intended for frame 2, recieves the next frame, continues drawing frame 1 with information intended for drawing frame 3, and so on. What you see on screen is "tearing" or a mismatch in the information used to render a single frame of animation.

Edited by Tyler Lowe - 09 Sep 2008 at 12:36pm

Tearing can occur with any game... and it actually can occur more frequently with better hardware because your hardware is capable of stressing the abilities of your monitor...

Response time on an lcd has little to do with tearing... it has to do with ghosting, and after images as pixels fail to reset from old image values fast enough to fool the human eye...

Thus why you want the fastest possible response time.

60 Hz refresh rate (standard on LCD) caps guaranteed frame rate without tearing at 60 FPS. You might be able to get higher but no promises... it depends on alot of factors none of which is really easily controllable.

But that is ok as the human eye can't actually discern much more than 30-32 FPS before it becomes seamless motion. The reason you want to see high FPs numbers is so your average always stays above 30 FPS and you low never dips below 24 FPS or so (This is the frame rate of a standard move at the cinema or was in the days of actual film movies with digital it is about 30 FPS just like most TV broadcasts.)

So 60 Hz/60 FPS for an LCD monitor is still twice the speed your eye can detect any single frame at (ie detect pause in the seamless video)

Hope this helps.

Dave


Edited by Kliebor2 - 09 Sep 2008 at 10:33pm

So all those 100+ FPS for games that are shown in reviews are actually tearing then?

Edited by Axel Daemon - 11 Sep 2008 at 12:36am

Yes, they are. You'll want to enable V-Sync to stop this from happening, or alternatively just increase your AA and AF settings until your FPS drops closer to 60FPS average (provided that framerate is realatively constant and you minimum framerate doesn't drop under 30-40). In some games, notably first person shooters, a little bit of tearing matters less than seeing updates to information on screen as quickly as possible and absolutely fluid motion. Note that reviews are, IMO, focusing on the wrong thing most of the time. What we should be seeing, is average frames per second, and *minimum* frames per second. Max figures are impressive looking, but largely unimportant.

The article I was using as reference for my comments was actually an article on the limits of human perception and subliminal advertising, it went into depth on how the subconscious can detect things we do not actually see (the reason why subliminal ads work)

The human eye on average detects anything under 20-22 FPS as jumpy and individual images even if the frame rate is constant it appears somewhat jumpy to the human eye, like those old cartoon flip books.

Once you hit 24 FPS or so it looks pretty smooth, this is the rate most hollywood motion pictures were shot at when they actually used to use film, like back in the eighties and older. By the nineties a lot of studios were experimenting with higher quality video recording methods, the first of which was Digital Tape that I am aware of which used slightly higher 30-32 FPS which is still standard today for almost all studio movies.

The reason you want good FPS in video games is because your average needs to be really solid so the eye does not detect radical fluctuations in FPS and make the video seem jerky because the frame rate has wild fluctuations in the Maximum and Minimum.

The Human eye according to the articles on physiology I have read tops out on average at 30-32 FPS at that point 'most' people can no longer detect it as anything but seamless video.

Refresh rate and the reason 50 or 60 Hz seems to flicker is different, on old CRTs the gun shooting the stream of electrons would strobe across the raster lines at a certain speed... old TVs and monitors the refresh rate was whatever your electrical cycles were somewhere between 50 and 60 Hz and in those days (early eighties or so and back for both TVs and monitors) you could see the flicker especially in a dark room, the TV would literally pulse in brightness from top to bottom constantly if it was displaying a static lightly colored image.

Over time tech improved and the rate at which the rasters were updated was controlled, for most TVs at 60 Hz... fast enough at the tiny number of Pixels (relative to even crude VGA displays TVs barely have any on screen pixels) that the refresh rate become less noticable no longer pulsing quite so noticably.

Monitors started in the same 60 Hz, but began moving up with resolution as users complained of headaches from the flicker and science responded by up the cycle rate into the seventies and even higher over time as CRTs hit the height of technology in the late nineties to early 2000.

This is when LCD took over as a better monitor technology and due to differences in the way LCD works refresh rate is no longer problematic, 60 Hz on an LCD is crisp, clear and does not flicker.

Last thing, Vertical Synch:

You want this on. It is really that simple. The human eye can not detect individual frames at 32 FPS, which is far lower than the slowest refresh rate most monitors will support which is usually 50 Hz on older CRTs most LCDs support 60 Hz, and some of the really nice ones will support 70 or 75 Hz. (My samsung supports 60 or 70 Hz at 1680x1050 as its two available modes. 60 Hz is the native mode and the one I use)

This setting prevents any screen tearing as it caps FPS at the monitors refresh rate so that it will never 'tear' With good graphics hardware that can achieve FPS in the 100 range and averages in the sixties this generates flawless video at 60 FPS that looks really nice and never has a noticable slow down unless your hardware fails and the FPS drops below the magical 30 or so FPS threshold.

Sorry for the long post but I wanted to put my thoughts on the matter straight in my own head too.

Dave


Edited by Kliebor2 - 11 Sep 2008 at 6:33am

Do not let the only 60 FPS max or 70 FPS max get you down, you can not see it, and the only reason to throw around those huge FPS numbers is to cater to the natural compare penises thing that all men like to do...

if you need that assurance run with V-Synch off and impress everyone with your huge 3 digit penis... then turn it on and play the game with flawless beautiful video with no tearing at 60 FPS :)

You can still have the best of both worlds :)

Dave 

Edited by Kliebor2 - 11 Sep 2008 at 6:41am

This is more or less what i was saying about a lack of minimum frames being listed on most sites when they review a card or SLI pair, and minimum is extremely important as anything past 70FPS is not going to matter, but the minimum FPS is going to seriously impact in game experience. The new Hollywood standard is going to 48 FPS from what I gather, so there must be some perceptable advantage there. I don't discount or even really disagree with what KB2 is saying about individual frames and motion, but still think the perception of motion as an overall phenomena may change as framerates increase. Motion may have that different "feel" I was talking about. The fun thing with this topic (or annoying thing depending on your point of view) is that even the experts don't agree, so it's very open to differing opinions.