Monitor Response Time For Gaming

When it comes to gaming monitors, not many people realise that there’s a little bit of latency between the rendering of the graphics in the computer and the actual displaying of the graphics on the monitor. The lag between your inputs using a mouse and keyboard, the computer’s ability to handle these, and your monitor’s ability to display them is known as the response time, and in the gaming world this is actually a very important factor that can make a considerable difference, especially in competitive play.

At the highest level of gaming, professional players need to make sure that this ‘lag’ or latency, is as minimal as possible to increase the accuracy of their actions and improve their ability to react to what other players are doing.

To the average gamer, or to someone who isn’t particularly competitive, response times are of minimal importance, however, and many gamers won’t be too concerned about the difference between a 1ms response time, and a 5ms response time.

For a long time, players had to make a choice between incredibly fast TN panel monitors with response times of 1ms or less, or IPS panels with 5ms response times but far better contrast and colors than the faster TN panel monitors.

Thankfully, monitor technology is developing as quickly as the gaming industry itself, and as games and players become increasingly competitive, more monitors are capable of fast response times than ever before, making it possible for everyone to benefit from low latency and greater accuracy in the games they love.

Is 5ms usable?

While the best gaming monitors currently try to get a response time of 1ms or less, there are still many options available that are only capable of 5ms response times. Naturally, this means the monitor is a little slower, which will make it a little more difficult for players to react and to aim, however a lot of the time the difference between 1ms and 5ms is barely noticeable and will have a negligible effect on your gameplay, particularly at lower levels of play.

5ms is definitely usable for gaming, and while it may put you at a minute disadvantage, most of the time it won’t be a deciding factor in the outcome of a game as there are so many other things that could affect the outcome of a game, and 4ms is an infinitesimally small amount of time.

Some gamers may notice a difference, particularly if they’ve played on 1ms monitors for most of their lives and are used to the faster response of these monitors, and changing to a slower response time can take some getting used to, but again, for most players this won’t be an issue.

The benefits of 1ms monitors

For those who do want the very best performance from their monitor, 1ms response times offer the absolute fastest performance meaning pixels change quicker and will show information quicker than other monitors.

Naturally this can make it easier to react in games, however there are other concrete benefits too.

Such a fast response time can reduce instances of blur and fractions, and will improve the overall performance of your monitor.

The main response time manufacturers will list is known as the gray to gray response time, and this means that this is a measurement of the time it takes for a pixel to change between different shades of gray. 

The ability for pixels to change between different RGB colors takes a little longer which is why this isn’t listed, however the faster the gray to gray response time is, the faster the RGB response time will be. So a 1ms GtG response time will offer the fastest possible RGB response time also, which can really make your games appear more vibrant and crisp.

Screen Size and Response Times

One really important thing to note is that the size of your screen will undoubtedly affect the speed of the response time, and a lot of the time, resolution can have an effect on this too.

As screens get larger and resolutions get larger, the response time inevitably slows down due to the increased number of pixels that need to be controlled and changed. However technology is constantly being developed to combat this, and manufacturers are striking to keep response times at 1ms or anywhere below 5ms.

Even among the worst monitors available it’s rare to see a response time higher than 5ms, but this is something to look out for, as there are some with 6ms or even 8ms response times, and naturally these will make your gameplay experience a little worse and put you at more of a disadvantage.

If you consider that a 5ms monitor is already 5 times slower than a 1ms monitor, imagine how much more of a difference it would make to be 8 or 10 times slower than a 1ms monitor.

At these speeds, gamers may start to feel the effect of this latency and this will make issues such as blur and fractioning much more likely and start to affect the overall gaming experience much more drastically.