LCD monitors, and playing games at less than the recommended resolution of monitor

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve started shopping for a new monitor, it’ll be my first LCD. I’m leaning towards a 24 inch at this point.

  1. They list a recommended resolution, but most games I play will not play well at that resolution, so I’ll run them at lower non-recommended resolution. Is this a problem? Does it look crappy? Is it noticeably worse than the same resolution on a CRT?

  2. What contrast ratio should I be looking for?

  3. What response time?

  4. What other factors should be looking for?

  5. Any brand or model recommendations?

Thanks.

2

  1. Yes, it looks very poor. Depending on the game, some text may be more or less illegible, and everything will be very, very blurry. Headache inducing blurry.*

  2. 1000:1 is pretty standard, and good enough for most people

  3. 5ms or less for gaming

  4. Try to view one in person before buying. There can be large difference in models that are similarily priced

  5. Samsung, and oddly enough, Dell.

*ETA - this assumes you can’t run these games windowed for one reason or another.

3

My Viewsonic LCD is 1680x1050 native, and I play games all the time at 1280x1024 or 1280x960. Many games don’t support widescreen. It doesn’t look bad at all to me. I don’t know if the video card or the monitor handles the upscaling, FWIW I have an EVGA GeForce 8600 GT PCI-E card.

4

Have you compared it to playing the game at native resolution?

I find that some monitors do a better job at upscaling than others (Video cards don’t upscale, they render at the defined resolution). But even the best job I’ve seen is just not anywhere near as good as when playing at native res. It tends to look very blurry.

5

Simple solution: get two monitors! Just about all video cards have two outputs anyway, so get yourself a cheap 1280x1024 monitor as well as your 24" 1920x1200.

6

Yes I have, and while there is a difference it isn’t huge. For example, I patched Battlefield 2142 on Sunday, and it defaulted back to 1280x1024, IIRC. I noticed a difference compared to 1650x1080, but it wasn’t huge.

7

You may have a monitor that handles this well.

My first LCD didn’t. It was a blurry, head-ache inducing mess. My current one, a Gateway 2400 HD does a much better job, but it still looks better at native resolution.

8

My 24" LG will display lower-than-native resolutions pixel for pixel in the centre of the screen if I tell it to. My graphics card can keep up with any game I’ve got at 1920x1200, but there are some games I still like playing that don’t have that as an option, so it can be nice to run them at 1280x1024 or whatever without losing any quality. I drew the line at Master of Orion II, though…it was very very tiny, so I just let it scale.

9

Yes! Monitor brands (or models) vary a lot by how well they upscale. Sonys upscale very well, for example. LCD TVs, especially, upscale incredibly well. I have a Samsung 1386x768, and I love playing games at 800x600 (not RTS…those like resolution). They look excellent, especially if I can turn on supersampling. I can’t give you more specific advice, but definately try to investigate this either through reviews or in real life.

About contrast… the ratio itself is important, but there’s also the glare coating that gets used on laptops that really enhances apparent contrast. It works only when there’s ambient light but it also reflect ambient light. It’s a real trade-off, but see if you like it. Such desktop monitors, tho, are hard to find. (But all laptop monitors are like that.)