Big whup. I have an 1440p IPS monitor at 110hz. They are available if you're willing to take the risk of a random maximum overclock and (usually no warranty although mine has 1 year). You'd still need to use unofficial patches for AMD/Nvidia drivers to reach that frequency at that resolution as well.
DC_DarklingJoin Date: 2003-07-10Member: 18068Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver
Personally if you have a good budget for a monitor id go for a gsync monitor instead.
Yes its TN and not IPS.
The TN panels are a guarantee of low input lag with gsync synced frames VS a IPS panel which may or may not have low input lag.
So in short, shooting your enemy in the face in a somewhat bleak world, or dying in a blur of awesome colour a TN can never achieve.
Personally if you have a good budget for a monitor id go for a gsync monitor instead.
Yes its TN and not IPS.
The TN panels are a guarantee of low input lag with gsync synced frames VS a IPS panel which may or may not have low input lag.
So in short, shooting your enemy in the face in a somewhat bleak world, or dying in a blur of awesome colour a TN can never achieve.
Seriously though, gsync is working wondrously.
High refresh IPS is hardly blurry, and G Sync requires playing Nvidia tax on both the GPU and the monitor. No thanks. Wait for Adaptive Sync via DP 1.2a instead.
Free-Sync is AMD's version of Adaptive Sync and only works on AMD.
The main difference is that Nvidia costs the manufacturer extra for G-Sync and AMD doesn't (and that AMD tech has a tendency to be sub-par)
Adaptive-sync is something for display port that will probably work on both GPU brands and won't cost anything but full release on the next-gen DP has not happened yet.
Free-Sync is AMD's version of Adaptive Sync and only works on AMD.
The main difference is that Nvidia costs the manufacturer extra for G-Sync and AMD doesn't (and that AMD tech has a tendency to be sub-par)
Adaptive-sync is something for display port that will probably work on both GPU brands and won't cost anything but full release on the next-gen DP has not happened yet.
There is no specific AMD tech involved though. It simply requires an Adaptive Sync monitor, and its leveraging precisely the same solution as G Sync just without the costs. It's also not next gen DP. It's current 1.2a, not 1.3.
144 Hz is not enough by itself with a standard LCD display. What made CRTs awesome was not just the refresh rate, but the extremely low persistence of the screen. If you took a short exposure photograph, the image is a glowing horisontal band only a few centimeters wide; the rest is black.
Some LCDs can do a bit better. E.g. benq XL2411T (TFT). And they look far better at 120 Hz with light boost / strobing than at 144 Hz without, though the brightness suffers a bit.
When your eyes follow a moving object, your eyes move at the average speed of the object, but the object is really only a series of stationary images, and when these stationary images last for the entire refresh cycle they are smeared out by your eye movement. On a low persistence display the individual images are crystal clear no matter how fast you move your eyes, as they are illuminated only briefly. You might think this effect is really insignificant, but it's not; it's a major reason why LCDs look "muddy" in first person shooters.
This "eye tracking motion blur" is not fixed by freesync, g-sync or adaptive sync. It is not fixed by "<1 ms displays", which is a measure of how fast each pixel transitions from one colour to another. It's solely a function of persistence of a pixel.
The big hope is OLED and quantum dot type displays which switch very fast (sony is also trying to develop tiny, reliable inorganic LEDs for the inorganic equivalent of OLED, which it calls crystal LED displays). I was hoping for FED/SED displays for the longest time as the technology looked very promising, but it has been abandoned by its major proponents as being too expensive to mass produce; it worked like a CRT and had the low persistence, high refresh rate and perfect black levels of a CRT; but instead of one big electron gun that sweeps the screen it used a microscopic electron gun for each subpixel (no steering, electron gun can be as simple as carbon nanotube "stubble" and a mesh electrode; SED used electron tunneling instead of tips), this allowed it to also have most of the benefits of LCD technology without losing the benefits of being a CRT; it was flat, light weight, perfect geometry (no pincussion etc) and didn't weigh as much as a brick shithouse. OLED and quantum dot displays are very low persistence, and what you can then do is push far more amps through the pixels during a shorter period of time, achieving a short, sharp pulse of light. The potential problem with this approach is overheating/overvolting and wearing out the sub-pixels as they need to be very bright during short periods of time to achieve a normal average brightness.
Interesting. I have 144Hz screen but I'd like to have IPS colour too. Hopefully OLED or IPS or something will bring that.
A cool thing you can do with OLED, quantum dot or LED display of the type Sony is trying to develop (not LED backlighting, individual LEDs for each subpixel like OLED) is to create a curved display.
The reason I still think abandoning 4:3 was a bad idea is that it provides a larger field of view without too much distortion. Curved displays (cylindrical) could change that. People liked to imagine widescreen as a 4:3 screen that has been extended on the sides so you can see even more; but it's really equally valid to see it as a 4:3 screen that has been lopped off at the top and bottom so you can see less. If the FOV of the display is too large in comparison to the angle the display actually occupies in your field of view you get the fish-eye effect. That means if you're willing to sit with your nose almost touching the screen you could have 150 degrees horizontal field of view or something ridiculous and there wouldn't be much noticable fisheye at all. At a reasonable arms-length distance I find that about 100-110 degrees FOV is the sweet spot for a 16:9 display. For a 4:3 display it is perhaps 5 degrees less to avoid fisheying in the corners, but that actually still gives a lot more vertical FOV on a 4:3 display which I just find nicer.
With a cylindrical display with you at the center of the cylinder you can have up to 360 degrees of horizontal FOV without any fish-eyeing at all. A 360 degree display would be kind of impractical, but say 140 degrees shouldn't get in the way. That allows you a LOT more vertical FOV. Such a display would not be great when viewed from odd angles, but for a single person it would be great. Graphics hardware and software would have to be designed to support this.
There are some LCDs with LED backlighting where the LEDs can be strobed in frequency with the refresh rate, assuming its 100hz or above. This kind of mimics the low persistence that CRTs had, as the LED backlight is off for the tiny moment it takes the pixels to update, the result is almost no blurriness, there are DIY projects to do this too, the catch is it only really works with TN panel technology, which of course has issues with colors.. IPS is simply too slow for that to work for now.. if it will ever be fast enough.
So we're kinda forced to choose, deal with TNs color issues or suffer motion blur..
I have a few monitors and one of them is an ASUS VG248QE, theres a program someone wrote which uses the nvidia lightboost system to achieve that strobing, the catch here is that for it to really work optimally, the game you are playing has to be running at 100 fps for above, same as the refresh rate, for it to really work as expected, if your FPS fluctuates or dips, it becomes almost painfully obvious; so you obviously need to overkill on your graphics card if you plan to go that route. The only side effect is using lightboost like this washes out colors a little, and it starts to hurt my eyes a bit after a while (2hr+ continuous use usually)
The VG248QE is also pretty fast in its own right in response time, so even without using this strobe method, there is less ghosting and motion blur than every other monitor I have, if you are willing to deal with the color limitations of a TN panel, it is probably your best bet.. For now.
There may be some more high refresh rate "IPS" panels comming. IPS is a specific technology and is often sloppily used more generally to include technologies with similar characteristics like AHVA. All these panels seem to actually be AHVA panels, including the one in the OP.
To make the confusion worse, there are now 8-bit TN panels and 6-bit AHVA panels. Normal TN-panels have 6 bits of colour per channel and use dithering patterns to create the appearance of having more than 256 k colours. Dithering is the application of a rapidly varying colour pattern such that the colour appears to be one that the display is not actually capable of generating. E.g. if every other pixel is blue and every other pixels is red and you sit far away and squint a bit, it will appear magenta. Same trick, except you are using e.g. {96,96,96} and {100, 100, 100} to create the apperance of {98,98,98}. True 8-bit TN-panels promise better colours but still funky viewing angles. 6-bit AHVA panels promise crummier colours and still excellent viewing angles.
Asus MG279Q - 2560x1440, 120 Hz IPS (probably real IPS and not tweaked AHVA as it is 5 ms GtG), display port 1.2a adaptive-sync (works with freesync capable AMD cards, not supported by nvidia as this part of the standard is optional and nvidia prefers to stick with g-sync). http://techreport.com/news/27614/asus-mg279q-display-melds-ips-panel-variable-refresh
Lightboost and ULMB are low persistence technologies. I.e. the display is not lit for the full refresh cycle, and it strobes like a CRT instead. Displays with both freesync or g-sync and lightboost or ULMB cannot enable both at the same time. In theory it ought to be a good idea to combine these technologies but it would require a lot of testing and tweaking. What you could do is this: at e.g.75 Hz or below you run full persistence to avoid flicker, as the FPS goes up you gradually transition to low persistence at e.g. 100 Hz; the display would have to do this on the fly, dynamically adjusting the duration and brightness of the strobe according to the time between refreshes without affecting the apparent brightness of the display. All kinds of issues need to be solved during development; e.g. the brightness of a diode depends on how much current is going through it, but it also depends on the temperature, which depends on the power output as a function of time (e.g. how long it has been turned on and at what power setting); it may also depend on the colour of the diode if red, green and blue are independent as in an OLED; you'd need to very carefully adjust for this so the brightness or hue doesn't wander around as the framerate changes.
I think ultimately LCD must die. Something like strobed OLED, LED (each pixel is a LED triad, tetrad or more), quantum dot, scanning laser projector or similar with an infinite black level and infinitesimal response time will become cheap and well developed enough to just eat LCDs lunch in the high end and then eventually replace even cheap LCDs.
The reason you may want to use more than 3 colours to represent a single pixel is that there is no such thing as pure green, but there is such a thing as pure red and pure blue. Green light invariably activates either red or blue cones in the eye quite a bit. (it would be interesting to see what would happen if you could stimulate green cones without stimulating any other cones in the eye artificially some how; would it be this alien green colour much more vivid than anything you can normally see?). E.g. 520 nm green will activate both red and blue cones quite a lot and is close to the purest green you can see, 500 nm green will activate blue cones but very little red and look a bit aquamarine, 540 nm green will activate red cones but very little blue and will look a bit chartreuse. If we only use one colour of green light for our display there are many shades of green we cannot reach as a combination of our red blue and green; but which can and do exist in nature. Most displays opt for a slightly yellow green because this is most cost efficient (watts to lumens), as such purer green and deep, slightly blue green is impossible.
The major draw back of such wider colour gamut displays is that content is designed for sRGB and just stretching content to fill the wider gamut could make things look cartoonish like nVidias "digital vibrance" crap they were pushing way back in the days of riva TNT (I don't think it is entirely evil; it might have a niché in turning your bog-standard grayish-brown FPS into something a little less depressing).
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Hey buddy, the link is not working for me. there is error in opening the page.. well, either it is my internet connection error.. So please check it.
Yes its TN and not IPS.
The TN panels are a guarantee of low input lag with gsync synced frames VS a IPS panel which may or may not have low input lag.
So in short, shooting your enemy in the face in a somewhat bleak world, or dying in a blur of awesome colour a TN can never achieve.
Seriously though, gsync is working wondrously.
As for the blur. Blur is not the same as input lag.
The main difference is that Nvidia costs the manufacturer extra for G-Sync and AMD doesn't (and that AMD tech has a tendency to be sub-par)
Adaptive-sync is something for display port that will probably work on both GPU brands and won't cost anything but full release on the next-gen DP has not happened yet.
Never said it was. It still isn't a blurry experience. Also, you're wrong on the refresh rates. It supports a wider range than G Sync does.
Some LCDs can do a bit better. E.g. benq XL2411T (TFT). And they look far better at 120 Hz with light boost / strobing than at 144 Hz without, though the brightness suffers a bit.
When your eyes follow a moving object, your eyes move at the average speed of the object, but the object is really only a series of stationary images, and when these stationary images last for the entire refresh cycle they are smeared out by your eye movement. On a low persistence display the individual images are crystal clear no matter how fast you move your eyes, as they are illuminated only briefly. You might think this effect is really insignificant, but it's not; it's a major reason why LCDs look "muddy" in first person shooters.
This effect is really obvious with e.g. http://www.testufo.com/#test=eyetracking
This "eye tracking motion blur" is not fixed by freesync, g-sync or adaptive sync. It is not fixed by "<1 ms displays", which is a measure of how fast each pixel transitions from one colour to another. It's solely a function of persistence of a pixel.
The big hope is OLED and quantum dot type displays which switch very fast (sony is also trying to develop tiny, reliable inorganic LEDs for the inorganic equivalent of OLED, which it calls crystal LED displays). I was hoping for FED/SED displays for the longest time as the technology looked very promising, but it has been abandoned by its major proponents as being too expensive to mass produce; it worked like a CRT and had the low persistence, high refresh rate and perfect black levels of a CRT; but instead of one big electron gun that sweeps the screen it used a microscopic electron gun for each subpixel (no steering, electron gun can be as simple as carbon nanotube "stubble" and a mesh electrode; SED used electron tunneling instead of tips), this allowed it to also have most of the benefits of LCD technology without losing the benefits of being a CRT; it was flat, light weight, perfect geometry (no pincussion etc) and didn't weigh as much as a brick shithouse. OLED and quantum dot displays are very low persistence, and what you can then do is push far more amps through the pixels during a shorter period of time, achieving a short, sharp pulse of light. The potential problem with this approach is overheating/overvolting and wearing out the sub-pixels as they need to be very bright during short periods of time to achieve a normal average brightness.
A cool thing you can do with OLED, quantum dot or LED display of the type Sony is trying to develop (not LED backlighting, individual LEDs for each subpixel like OLED) is to create a curved display.
The reason I still think abandoning 4:3 was a bad idea is that it provides a larger field of view without too much distortion. Curved displays (cylindrical) could change that. People liked to imagine widescreen as a 4:3 screen that has been extended on the sides so you can see even more; but it's really equally valid to see it as a 4:3 screen that has been lopped off at the top and bottom so you can see less. If the FOV of the display is too large in comparison to the angle the display actually occupies in your field of view you get the fish-eye effect. That means if you're willing to sit with your nose almost touching the screen you could have 150 degrees horizontal field of view or something ridiculous and there wouldn't be much noticable fisheye at all. At a reasonable arms-length distance I find that about 100-110 degrees FOV is the sweet spot for a 16:9 display. For a 4:3 display it is perhaps 5 degrees less to avoid fisheying in the corners, but that actually still gives a lot more vertical FOV on a 4:3 display which I just find nicer.
With a cylindrical display with you at the center of the cylinder you can have up to 360 degrees of horizontal FOV without any fish-eyeing at all. A 360 degree display would be kind of impractical, but say 140 degrees shouldn't get in the way. That allows you a LOT more vertical FOV. Such a display would not be great when viewed from odd angles, but for a single person it would be great. Graphics hardware and software would have to be designed to support this.
So we're kinda forced to choose, deal with TNs color issues or suffer motion blur..
I have a few monitors and one of them is an ASUS VG248QE, theres a program someone wrote which uses the nvidia lightboost system to achieve that strobing, the catch here is that for it to really work optimally, the game you are playing has to be running at 100 fps for above, same as the refresh rate, for it to really work as expected, if your FPS fluctuates or dips, it becomes almost painfully obvious; so you obviously need to overkill on your graphics card if you plan to go that route. The only side effect is using lightboost like this washes out colors a little, and it starts to hurt my eyes a bit after a while (2hr+ continuous use usually)
The VG248QE is also pretty fast in its own right in response time, so even without using this strobe method, there is less ghosting and motion blur than every other monitor I have, if you are willing to deal with the color limitations of a TN panel, it is probably your best bet.. For now.
To make the confusion worse, there are now 8-bit TN panels and 6-bit AHVA panels. Normal TN-panels have 6 bits of colour per channel and use dithering patterns to create the appearance of having more than 256 k colours. Dithering is the application of a rapidly varying colour pattern such that the colour appears to be one that the display is not actually capable of generating. E.g. if every other pixel is blue and every other pixels is red and you sit far away and squint a bit, it will appear magenta. Same trick, except you are using e.g. {96,96,96} and {100, 100, 100} to create the apperance of {98,98,98}. True 8-bit TN-panels promise better colours but still funky viewing angles. 6-bit AHVA panels promise crummier colours and still excellent viewing angles.
Some of these:
Acer XB270HU - 2560x1440, 144 Hz IPS (probably AHVA), G-sync and possibly ULMB (some sites say yes, some say no) http://www.prweb.com/releases/2015/01/prweb12421775.htm
BENQ 2730Z - 2560x1440, 144 Hz ??? (reported varyingly as IPS and as 8-bit TN), freesync and benq blur reduction 2 (lightboost variant) http://www.blurbusters.com/benq-confirms-144hz-freesync/
Asus MG279Q - 2560x1440, 120 Hz IPS (probably real IPS and not tweaked AHVA as it is 5 ms GtG), display port 1.2a adaptive-sync (works with freesync capable AMD cards, not supported by nvidia as this part of the standard is optional and nvidia prefers to stick with g-sync). http://techreport.com/news/27614/asus-mg279q-display-melds-ips-panel-variable-refresh
Lightboost and ULMB are low persistence technologies. I.e. the display is not lit for the full refresh cycle, and it strobes like a CRT instead. Displays with both freesync or g-sync and lightboost or ULMB cannot enable both at the same time. In theory it ought to be a good idea to combine these technologies but it would require a lot of testing and tweaking. What you could do is this: at e.g.75 Hz or below you run full persistence to avoid flicker, as the FPS goes up you gradually transition to low persistence at e.g. 100 Hz; the display would have to do this on the fly, dynamically adjusting the duration and brightness of the strobe according to the time between refreshes without affecting the apparent brightness of the display. All kinds of issues need to be solved during development; e.g. the brightness of a diode depends on how much current is going through it, but it also depends on the temperature, which depends on the power output as a function of time (e.g. how long it has been turned on and at what power setting); it may also depend on the colour of the diode if red, green and blue are independent as in an OLED; you'd need to very carefully adjust for this so the brightness or hue doesn't wander around as the framerate changes.
I think ultimately LCD must die. Something like strobed OLED, LED (each pixel is a LED triad, tetrad or more), quantum dot, scanning laser projector or similar with an infinite black level and infinitesimal response time will become cheap and well developed enough to just eat LCDs lunch in the high end and then eventually replace even cheap LCDs.
The reason you may want to use more than 3 colours to represent a single pixel is that there is no such thing as pure green, but there is such a thing as pure red and pure blue. Green light invariably activates either red or blue cones in the eye quite a bit. (it would be interesting to see what would happen if you could stimulate green cones without stimulating any other cones in the eye artificially some how; would it be this alien green colour much more vivid than anything you can normally see?). E.g. 520 nm green will activate both red and blue cones quite a lot and is close to the purest green you can see, 500 nm green will activate blue cones but very little red and look a bit aquamarine, 540 nm green will activate red cones but very little blue and will look a bit chartreuse. If we only use one colour of green light for our display there are many shades of green we cannot reach as a combination of our red blue and green; but which can and do exist in nature. Most displays opt for a slightly yellow green because this is most cost efficient (watts to lumens), as such purer green and deep, slightly blue green is impossible.
The major draw back of such wider colour gamut displays is that content is designed for sRGB and just stretching content to fill the wider gamut could make things look cartoonish like nVidias "digital vibrance" crap they were pushing way back in the days of riva TNT (I don't think it is entirely evil; it might have a niché in turning your bog-standard grayish-brown FPS into something a little less depressing).