How to Choose a New Monitor For Dummies, please?
By
Father Xmas,
Posted on: 2009-06-29 17:16 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs
Strangely enough it depends on your video card.
What has happen to people in the past is they get a new LCD widescreen monitor, and LCD monitors look best if a game is running in the monitor's native resolution, and find that there performance has dropped through the floor because that nice $200 monitor has twice the number of pixels that you were running before.
Here is some rough guidelines. Note originally wide screen monitors had a ratio of 16 wide by 10 high. I've noticed newer monitors stick with the HDTV ratio of 16 by 9.
If you use to have a 1280x1024 monitor, 1440x900 is about the same number of pixels.
If you use to run the game at 1600x1200, then a 1680x1050 monitor is fine.
Father Xmas - Level 50 Ice/Ice Tanker - Victory
$725 and $1350 parts lists --- My guide to computer components
Tempus unum hominem manet
First off, IMO, widescreen = yes. Very yes.
After that... The higher in resolution you go, the more dots, the better everything will look. But all those dots will cost you in terms of performance if your machine isn't up to the task. You don't *need* to run more than 1440x900...
I currently run in 1680x1050x32, windowed, and I have no issues, love the wideness (shove stuff to the sides) and it has no issues rendering it. On my current C2D, 4G of ram, 9600GT system. My previous P4HT, 2G, 6800GS would not have had a fun time at all with this size screen, and I wouldn't have made the switch because of it.
The main problems are refresh rate, color rendering, resolution, size, and price.
So I picked out a list of 19-22 inch wide screen monitors with low refresh rates (8ms or less), and nothing less than 16.7 million colors... *I* can tell the 16.2M monitors, and they suck. For me, anyway. Here ya go:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLis...alue=3106:21400
Oh, and I sorted to lowest price first, so that'll help.
Now, if you look down about halfway, you'll see some Hanns-G 22" monitors. They're very similar, not very pricey, and plenty of people like them. The second one is a higher contrast ratio (which is a measure of black vs white, the higher the more contrast between the two... and that's a subjective measurement... some don't like the higher contrast, some do.)
You get other options which you can find... you can also modify the power search to include bigger monitors, but I dunno why. You can also usually go with the reviews as to whether it's a good thing or not. More eggs the better, and more reviews the better.
For the record, this is mine:
http://www.kdsusa.com/K2237mdwb.asp
And I love it. It was a pretty decent buy when I got it, it still looks great, gives me no issues, smooth, good colors. No speakers, but I don't need them.
Hope that helps ya in some way...
August 31, 2012. A Day that will Live in Infamy. Or Information. Possibly Influence. Well, Inf, anyway. Thank you, Paragon Studios, for what you did, and the enjoyment and camaraderie you brought.
This is houtex, aka Mike, signing off the forums. G'night all. - 10/26/2012
Well... perhaps I was premature about that whole 'signing off' thing... - 11-9-2012
Fantastic advice and help, thank you so much.
I ended up ordering the Asus 19" widescreen, 5th on houtex's list.
Again, thanks so much for your input, it's much appreciated.
One more question, if you don't mind.
If I end up playing at a resolution *lower* than the native res, what kind of effect will that have on framerates?
I went with the 1680x1050, but now I'm a bit worried that my CPU and gfx card won't be up to the task.
Can I step it down if I need to, and take less of a hit on frame-rates?
There will be an "approximation" of lines and columns. Basically, the monitor itself has to 'guess' where the pixels go. The resolutions aren't 2:1 or other friendly ratio in relation to each other. It's more like 1.34:1 or some such. Which means, if it *logically* lands in between two *physical* lines or columns, it'll double the pixel's width or height. Or sometimes it'll take them out. It makes characters look really funny... double wide 'l's and slightly taller bottoms of 't's and such like that.
In game, you probably won't notice. It's where single pixels (like an 'l') are being displayed you might see it. This is the one flaw, if you can call it that, of a fixed resolution display device: Not flexible. CRTs had it over flat panels in spades in this regard.
You can step it down, and depending on how much you're growing the resolution from what you gamed on before, you might not notice the frames lost in the new information being drawn. There's only one way to find out, of course. 
August 31, 2012. A Day that will Live in Infamy. Or Information. Possibly Influence. Well, Inf, anyway. Thank you, Paragon Studios, for what you did, and the enjoyment and camaraderie you brought.
This is houtex, aka Mike, signing off the forums. G'night all. - 10/26/2012
Well... perhaps I was premature about that whole 'signing off' thing... - 11-9-2012
Well performance has more to do with game resolution and your video card. So at a lower resolution, you should see an improved performance as long as the game isn't being bottlenecked by a slow/overworked CPU, lack of ram, slow hard drive, etc.
What happens on the screen is the monitor tries to scale the image to fit the native resolution. Depending how good of a job it does, the resulting image may look a little blurry.
Father Xmas - Level 50 Ice/Ice Tanker - Victory
$725 and $1350 parts lists --- My guide to computer components
Tempus unum hominem manet
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If I end up playing at a resolution *lower* than the native res, what kind of effect will that have on framerates?
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What you would want to do for CoH is to still set it (and your desktop) at the native resolution of your LCD, but adjust the render scale in CoH down to something less than 100% of that. This will leave the 2D elements such as text and power icons looking sharp, but reduce the amount of 3D work your card needs to do.
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[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
If I end up playing at a resolution *lower* than the native res, what kind of effect will that have on framerates?
[/ QUOTE ]
What you would want to do for CoH is to still set it (and your desktop) at the native resolution of your LCD, but adjust the render scale in CoH down to something less than 100% of that. This will leave the 2D elements such as text and power icons looking sharp, but reduce the amount of 3D work your card needs to do.
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Great advice, I'll do just that.
Thanks everyone for your help.
I'm bouncing all over the webz trying to select a new monitor.
But beyond knowing that higher max resolution = Better, I'm pretty lost.
Do I want a Widescreen? Most of the 19" ones I'm looking at are 1440x900. Is that acceptable? Do I need to go higher for really pretty gaming?
Looking to not spend a bundle and get a solid, middle-of-the-road monitor, primarily for gaming.
The monitor I have now is a shabby Dell hand-me-down, so anything will be an improvement, but how much do I need to spend? Any help or suggestions?