5 ms·
TL;DR: For gaming, because ‘input lag’. [In a CRT] the electron-to-photon exchange happens instantly. While CRTs do have some sources of lag —namely, the time
by Terretta 6y ago
TL;DR: For gaming, because ‘input lag’.
[In a CRT] the electron-to-photon exchange happens instantly. While CRTs do have some sources of lag —namely, the time spent buffering each video frame and scanning each line of the frame from top to bottom on the screen —those delays are on the order of microseconds. When you move your mouse or press a button on the keyboard, the response time is imperceptible...
By contrast, an LCD requires physical movement on the part of every pixel. On an LCD, the back of the display emits a constant stream of white light, which passes through a polarizer and onto an array of liquid crystals. Applying voltage to each crystal causes them to twist, altering the amount of light that comes through the screen's front polarizer.
Compared to electron-photon conversion, the physical movement of liquid crystals inside an LCD display takes a lot more time, introducing input lag. It also creates blurriness when there's a lot of motion happening across the screen.
Also TL;DR: CRTs to look for.
Sony FW900 16:10 CRT [also sold as] HP A7217A, SGI GDM-FW9011, and Sun GDM-FW9010 ... 16:9 CRT monitors including the Intergraph InterView 28HD96 and 24HD96... [and] you'll need a graphics card with an analog output, such as Nvidia's 900 series and AMD's 300 series cards, or a digital-to-analog converter.
- gruez 6y ago> a digital-to-analog converter. How much latency would that typically add?
- labawi 6y agoIf you're using DVI-D -> VGA or HDMI -> VGA, probably a couple of pixels worth on a simple converter, as it would be expensive and unnecessary to cache a whole frame. DP has incompatible timings so I would expect a frame or so on a cheap (though significantly more expensive) converter.
- Grazester 6y agoFor eternal analogy to digital converts/upscalers, with good ones you can have zero lag since they would be no frame buffer. I have an OSSC that I use to upscale my the VGA signal from my Dreamcast to HDMI output and there is zero lag.
- Matthias247 6y agoThe description is actually not very good. Input lag doesn't purely exist because of liquid movement and pixels changing colors. If it would, then an input lag of 50-100ms (which where common with older generation LCDs) - would also mean the screens response time (the time to change color) would be that high. Which would mean your picture would be a blurry mess. The majority of input lag came from additional signal processing algorithms which were built into LCDs, which buffered the full picture for 1-2 frames. E.g. to apply overdrive algorithms, color correction, scaling, etc. Those are all running before the signal gets towards the crystals. I think a lot of that was actually just bad design in the earlier generation of LCDs. And it was really bad, I had a screen with 100ms input lag and neither working nor gaming on it was really fun. But it seems like manufacturers now understand the problem better and try to minimize the delay through signal processing.
- 0-_-0 6y ago>those delays are on the order of microseconds That's wrong, on a 60Hz CRT it takes the beam 1/120th of a second to reach the center of the screen, which is an average lag of 8.3 milliseconds. There are LCDs with 9ms lag.
- IshKebab 6y agoThis whole article is nonsense. A 60 Hz CRT is going to have more input lag than a 144 Hz LCD (with a decent response time), purely because of the lower frame rate. Why is nobody calling this out?