What is the best monitor response time for gaming?

Response time is one of the most important factors when gaming. Hence, it is important to learn when is the best monitor response time. In this article, we shall feature this topic and at the same time we shall provide its pros and cons.
When measuring monitor response time, it has always been said that the lower the response time the better. As of the moment, the lowest response time is 1ms. However, it is only TN panels that could achieve it and IPS could go as low as 4 ms only. As mentioned 1 ms is better when it comes with competitive gaming and for non competitive gamers, IPS could provide visual quality.
What is Response Time?
Response time is the pixel response time or in simple terms it is how quickly it takes for pixel to change from black to white or from one shade of gray to another. You will have to keep in mind that black to white is to be regarded as true response time and gray to gray response time is for marketing strategy. Hence, if you see an advertisement about response time as gray to gray, you will have to keep in mind the the black to white response time is actually in reality a little higher.
What Does Response Time Affect?
Since response time determines how fast pixel change color, it could affect a lot of things such as clarity and accuracy in the moving object. In addition to that, response time could lead to:
- Motion blur
- Ghosting
Motion Blur
Motion blur is an effect of having a high response time. This happens as the pixels do not have sufficient time to change color, hence, instead of seeing a clear picture or object, you would see a blurred image.
Ghosting
This happens when camera movements become very fast. This means the pixels do not have enough time to change color while the object moves on the screen which would create fading silhouette.
What is the best response time for gaming?
For gaming, naturally lower would always be better. However, monitors are created in two types of panels and they are TN and IPS and both types come with advantages and disadvantages and it includes response time.
As mentioned earlier, TN panels have lower response time while IPS could go only as low as 4ms.
Differences
One thing that is important to do is considering the gamers’ feel about in-game FPS. Some games would find 30 FPS is unplayable, however, other would not find anything different between 30 FPS and 60 FPS. If you wish to learn more about FPS, check our article on about FPS on gaming.
Response time is similar to FPS. This means that yes, we understand it is difficult to settle for a 30 FPS if you have been used to a higher framerate. As for with response time, if you are used to having 1 ms, 4ms could be too high.
How to check?
This task is easy to do. You could do this even without having to leave your house. All you need to have is a little help from your TV. Usually, TVs come with high response time and manufacturers rarely include the exact response time in its specification sheets but usually it ranges fro 8 to 15.
Another way is before purchasing your monitor, you would usually find huge hardware stores having monitors display for customers to test.
Conclusion
We hope that through this article, you were able to learn a lot about response time and which one you should use and get.