A 240Hzmonitorisfantasticforfirst-personshooters,
butnotessentialfor othergamegenres
AOC’sG2460VQ6isa greatbudgetbuyforjust£126incVATMONITORS
If CPUs and GPUs are the heart of gaming performance inside your PC, it’s
your monitor that’s the next most important consideration when weighing
up your gaming priorities. The wrong display may make games look worse,
perform badly or limit the potential of your powerful PC. The first factor to
consider is resolution. The resolution at which you play is intrinsically
tied to the frame rate you’ll get from any given PC: the higher the
resolution, the lower the frame rate. Conversely, the higher the
resolution, the better your game will look (to a point).
The next criteria is the speed of the monitor, or more precisely, its
maximum refresh rate and average response time. The faster the refresh
rate and the lower the response time, the snappier and more responsive
a game feels. However, if your system isn’t fast enough to deliver over
200fps, or you tend to play games that aren’t so reliant on having
lightning-fast reactions, there’s no point buying the latest 240Hz displays.
It’s also well worth considering a monitor with active sync tech here.
As standard, a monitor will have a fixed refresh rate – a hangover from
the days of CRT monitors. That’s fine if your graphics card is churning
out frame rates at the same frequency as the monitor, but it results in
horrible tearing artefacts and stuttering on LCD monitors if the refresh
rate and frame rate ever go out of sync.
If a monitor supports G-Sync then it will dynamically synchronise its
refresh rate with the frame rate from an Nvidia GPU, while monitors that
support ‘active sync’ or FreeSync will do the same on AMD GPUs. There
are also now some monitors that support both technologies. It’s well
worth making active sync a priority for gaming.
Finally, there’s the image quality of a screen. There’s a very rough rule
of thumb that the more extreme a monitor’s gaming performance, the
lower its image quality (both in terms of resolution and other image
quality criteria like colour accuracy), so you ideally want to find a display
that balances the two.
In our testing, we compared the Acer XB252Q (240Hz, 1080p, 1ms
TN), the Asus PG279Q (165Hz, 1440p, 4ms IPS) and the MSI
MAG321CURV (60Hz, 4K, 4ms VA), and we found that the competitive
fps games, such as CS:GO and PUBG, benefited from the fastest refresh
rate possible, so we recommend an absolute minimum of a 100Hz refresh
rate, and ideally at least 144Hz, for these competitive first-person shooters.
A proper 1ms response time is crucial for these games too. By proper, we
mean TN displays that actually feel like they have a response time that
quick. Some monitors that use VA or IPS type LCD panels claim to have a
1ms response time on the packaging, but they don’t feel like it in action.
At the other end of the scale are cinematic games, where the whole
experience is greatly elevated by playing on the largest, highest resolution
display possible, even if it’s locked to 60Hz. These sorts of single-player,
graphically intensive games are all about immersing yourself in the game
world, so as long as the frame rate of your game is high enough to feel
smooth, you can accept some compromise on performance.
These games are also where you care most about image quality.
There’s no point having a high resolution, if the image looks washed out
or has poor viewing angles. The MSI monitor we tested was good here.
Then there’s the category into which most of us fall, where we want
a little of both. Can we have good image quality, a higher resolution and
good gaming performance? Well, yes, you can. The Asus PG279Q
excelled in all of our games, providing enough performance for
competitive, fast-paced titles but still looking fantastic in cinematic
games. It’s not the best for either extreme end of the scale but if you can
only buy one monitor, it’s this type of display we’d recommend.ESSENTIAL
Pretty much any 144Hz, 1ms TN monitor with a 1080p resolution will
provide you the speedy feel you need for competitive gaming. The AOC
G2460VQ6, at just £126 inc VAT, is our current budget choice.MIDRANGE
A 2,560 x 1,440 screen with an IPS panel type is a great mid-range screen
option. Games look great, while you still have plenty of speed too, without
the huge performance hit of a 4K screen. The Asus PG279Q or Acer
XB271HU are a bit pricey, at £600 inc VAT, but they’re great all-rounders.TOP DOG
For 4K and HDR visuals, the Asus PG27UQ is dazzlingly good, while the
MSI MAG321CURV is a great entry-level 4K option. Acer’s ultra-wide,
120Hz, 3440 x 1440 X34P is also a great option that will set you back
£900 inc VAT.