Ultimate Gaming Monitor Guide: Find the BEST Screen for Your Setup More often than not I feel like the most overlooked part of anyone’s system is their monitor. So today we’re going to talk about some monitor tech, uh, what some of the specs mean, and some of the nice to have features and features that kind of drive up the price on monitors.
Because I have a feeling going into the beginning of 2025, a lot of people are going to be looking at upgrading their panel. So let’s see what we can do today to kind of educate you, uh, and get you ready to buy your first or maybe your next upgraded panel so that you don’t overspend but get the features that mean the most.
Table of Contents
Understanding Panel Technologies
So when we talk about panels, we have to talk about the main type of technology that it is. Now we’ve sort of, things have sort of changed over the years. For instance, there used to be TN panels which were really common, which stands for twisted, uh, pneumatic, uh. Then we had VA panels which were vertical alignment, and then IPS which stands for inane switching. Now typically in the past, TN panels were the cheapest.
They had the fastest response times, they had the, uh, the, the lowest prices, you could get them in pretty decent size. But fortunately as time has gone on, IPS or the most color accurate, which was typically the type of panel you would see in like, um, you know photo editing, video editing type of environment, cuz they could get as close to lifelike when it came to the actual colors, um.
But fortunately the price of IPS has come down dramatically, so TN panels and VA panels have kind of been slowly disappearing, getting replaced with even very inexpensive IPS panels. Now one of the drop back to IPS panels for years was the fact that they did not have the fast response time and refresh rates that TN panels did. So as the technology is improved, we’re going to really just kind of talk about IPS panels when we talk about LED, um.
But just know that TN panels, VA panels do still exist, and they kind of have their drawbacks. For instance, TN panels have some of the weakest viewing angles.
So that means as you’re sitting there looking at the panel and off viewing angles, it would start to have kind of a foily, uh, sort of an inversion that would sort of happen, and that’s just because of the way that the panel is, is designed, uh. They could give you really good response times, really fast refresh rates, but they also had the weakest color recreation in terms of accuracy. They almost had a very vibrant, um, Reds could sometimes look pinks, I mean there was just the color accuracy of it wasn’t good.
But for gamers who didn’t care, it had a nice Punchy screen and it was really really fast. Um, VA panel tended to have kind of the, the middle ground between IPS and TN, um, also giving fast refresh rates, but they weren’t as fast as TN and they weren’t as accurate as IPS, but they kind of gave that middle ground between the two. But like I said, we’re going to talk about IPS today or inplane switching, uh, when we talk about our LED panels.
Size, Backlighting & Key Specs
Now when it comes to the viewable size of the panel, you’ll see a measurement whether it be 7, 27 in, 32 in, 24 in, that is always measured in a diagonal measurement from corner to corner. So this is, is a 32in panel here from vew Sonic, uh, this is actually one of our test bed panels, so this is an IPS mini LED panel. Now you’re going to see that technology kind of mentioned, you’re going to see potentially EDG lit or LED or mini LED.
So as LED panels have sort of progressed, being able to fit more LEDs in the backlight means that you can get better local dimming, cuz the only way that you through an LED that you can actually get a dark scene to look dark is by turning off the back lighting behind the panel. Otherwise, when the pixel gate closes, there’s still some light bleed that makes its way through, so blacks always look smudged or they look gray, um, and they just don’t look good.
So by many LED panels means that we have thousands of LEDs behind here giving a larger area of light, but also more LEDs that we can dim or turn down in a particular area to give us better contrast ratios. Now it’s kind of hard to get a perfect infinite contrast ratio when you’re talking about something that is being permanently back lit.
Now Edge lit refers to, uh, a panel that has lighting around the corners or around the perimeter of the screen lighting it sideways, then relying on foil to reflect the LED light through the pixel gate. So what you tend to find with EDG lit LED is kind of what’s called flashlighting in the corners, because as you hit this, this corner right here, you’ll have a higher density of LEDs in the corner, so you’ll get what looks like flashlighting in the corners.
Fortunately as many LED has become less expensive to manufacture, uh, that becomes less of a problem because the LED array is very uniform behind the panel rather than being on the edges.
Now before we move into some of the other Technologies here, we’re going to talk about some of the main specs. We’re going to talk about refresh rate and response time. Now one of the things that IPS kind of lacked in the past, as we talked about, was, uh, IPS didn’t always have the fastest response time and refresh rate.
They were 60 HZ panels, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 to 10 millisecond response time, which was fine. Cuz if you sitting there editing video at 24 FPS or even 30 FPS, uh, and you’re playing games at 60 Htz, that was just, that was, that was fine. But as Gamers sort of demanded faster and faster panels, uh, IPS wasn’t able to keep up.
Fortunately as time has gone on, we now have high refresh rate, fast response time panels. So the refresh rate is usually referred to as a Hertz rating, or how many times the picture can refresh it itself in 1 second. So a 60 HZ panel would mean that the image can refresh itself 60 times per second.
As per panels progress, that number started getting higher and higher: 100 Herz, 120 HZ, 144 Herz, 165, 175, 240, 360, even 400 HZ panels exist now. Now that brings us to the other equation of the formula: you might be able to refresh the image itself in terms of data and Pres presenting that image x amount of times per second, but the actual pixel itself also has a speed rating.
Understanding Response Time
And that’s referred to as response time, that’s how fast the pixel itself can refresh based on the information that’s being sent to it. So let’s say for instance we have a 8 MC response time gray to gray, that means it takes the pixel 8 milliseconds to change colors from Gray to White and back to gray.
So that number itself specifically refers to ghosting and motion blur. So let’s kind of put that into perspective. So let’s say we have this panel could do 240 HZ or it can refresh the image 240 times per second, if it doesn’t have a fast response time or the pixel is slow, that means you’re going to have an image that’s previously been drawn still sort of fading out as the next image is showing up.
That leads to motion blur or ghosting, uh, ghosting is actually way worse than motion blur. We all are used to motion blur, look around right now just move your head, you’re going to see motion blur. Ghosting is terrible because that’s where you actually will get Trails of images left behind, and you can see clear Cuts between those trails, and that’s actually a very gross almost a nauseating experience.
Refresh Rate and Response Time Balance
So when we talk about the response time, gaming panels typically land anywhere between 1 to 5 milliseconds. In fact, we even have panels going as fast as .5 milliseconds now. As the response time gets faster and faster, so if you’re going to get a fast refresh rate panel, you want to make sure it’s paired with a fast response time, otherwise you can start leading to a lot of ghosting.
Size vs. Resolution Dynamics
Now we talked about the diagonal viewing size 32 in in this instance. Now it doesn’t matter if it’s a 24-in panel or a 32-in panel if it’s 4K or 1440p also known as QHD, uh, or full HD which is 1080p. Just because the panel is bigger does not mean it has more pixels, the pixels are just larger to fill the space. So for instance, this is a 4K panel at 32 uh inches.
If we were to look at the same 4K resolution in a smaller panel, it would actually look sharper. That’s because there’s less space between the pixels and the pixels are smaller. Now space between pixels is also referred to as a screen door effect, not something that’s really too noticeable until you start going large format, and anything in the like the 32 in and above is that is really considered large format.
But 4K, when you start to look at say a 65in TV versus 4K when you look at a 32-in monitor, text is where you really start to notice, um, the pixel density or the pixels getting larger. So it’s kind of a rule of thumb that if you’re going to go larger than say 27 in on a panel, you really want to go with 4K. Otherwise 1440p, the text starts to look very blocky, uh, and you start to actually notice the screen door effect between the pixels the larger the panel gets.
Ultra-Wide Monitors Explained
Now we talked about resolution, obviously 4K, um, we’re talking about a measurement of horizontal versus vertical. So let’s say 1080 P, so we would have 1,920 pixels wide by 1,080 pixels High, giving us a 16×9 aspect ratio. Now 16×9 is pretty common, but I feel like more and more gamers are starting to make their way towards Ultra wide.
So this is actually the view the view Sonic XG 341c, this is their Ultra wide panel, um, as you can see it’s obviously much wider, and this is actually referred to as a 21 by9 aspect ratio. Now you can get these much wider now, where essentially they’re just 2160’s um put side by side which actually was 32 by 9, so you can get them in some pretty crazy uh widths now.
Now you’ll notice that this panel is actually curved. Now this curved is referred to as an R rating, so you might see 800 R, 1,000 R. The higher the number in the R rating means the more aggressive the curve is. Now those even panels that exist now that are bendable, that falls in the OLED category, we’ll talk about that in a second, um, but the panel can actually be bent to the curve rating that you you want. So that’s kind of a nice feature to have.
As you might imagine, bendable oleds are not cheap, so there’s some price associated with that. But Ultra wide has actually started to gain a popularity, even if you look at the steam survey, um, because of the fact that they give you extra wide viewable angle.
So this would allow you in games to actually increase your fov, so you could see more around the sides, um, while maintaining you know basically non-distortion. So the wider panel will actually allow you to have a wider viewable angle without the weird stretched out looks on the side which you’d get by 16×9 if you went with like an ultra wide fov.
Personal Experience with Ultra-Wides
So I personally have been using Ultra wides now for probably the last 10 years, um, in fulltime. Typically you’ll refer to, you’ll see them in a um 3440 by 1440 resolution, that’s usually the most common. That means we have 3,440 pixels wide and then 1,440 pixels tall, so giving us a higher pixel density.
It’s going to make us have cleaner sharper text, it’s also going to give us like I said more pixel um on the width in terms of our viewable angles. The price does obviously go up because we’re talking about a larger panel more pixels, so there is more cost involved, uh, but you’ll see these resolutions also referred to as wqhd or W added to whatever moniker that they’re putting in the letters, and that just basically denotes that it’s wide or an ultra wide.
Now 21 by9 aspect ratio is also fairly close to kind of like the cinema aspect ratios once you remove the black bars, so there actually a multimedia viewing experience benefit too to using an ultrawide. Because often times if it detects that you’re uh running a wqhd or an ultrawide uh panel, there’s actually options in a lot of players to actually fill out the screen and remove the black bars.
You might have a small black bar on the side, um, but it’s actually makes it a nicer viewing experience cuz it fills out the screen.
OLED Technology Breakdown
But when we talk about the the specs, the refresh rate, the response time, uh, the panel technology whether it be tnva or IPS or even OLED, all of the other specs that we talked about apply in the same manner, it’s just the format itself is wider. Okay, so this brings us to OLED now.
This is the vonic XG 272 D2K D OLED, the the numbers mean stuff I swear. So XG is the category of their panel which is their gaming panels, um, 27 is the viewable which is 27 in, 2K refers to the fact that is a 1440p, yeah I know trust me we all know that the numbers kind of get confusing, but it means it’s a 1440p.
So it means 2560 by 1440, and then the Das OLED obviously means that it’s an organic LED display. This is kind of like the latest.
OLED Gaming Monitors: Technology Explained
Integration of technology to make its way into gaming panels, which started as large format TVs as oleds, now shrunk down into uh, gaming size. Now OLED or organic LEDs are very different than LCD screens, so liquid crystal display relies on light shining through pixel Gates, and those Gates either open or close red, green or blue to determine what colors they’re going to be showing, and then obviously that array creates your image.
OLED vs. LCD: Light Emission Differences
Oleds however emit their own light, so instead of having a solid back light behind them, it actually has uh, the capability of each LED emitting its own light in the specific color at which it wants to emit. Now where this really shows its benefit is in dark scenes, low lights, the fact that it has perfect in Black, because a black OLED is just an OLED that is not illuminated, and you can see just how dark the screen is with no light coming through right now, that’s exactly how dark it is when you’re in a dark scene.
Dark Scene Performance
And the cool thing is, if you have a a darker scene, let’s say you’re in a cave or something like you’re playing like Tomb Raider or Indiana Jones or whatever, and you’ve got very faint like rock formation or maybe something in the shadows.
Instead of having everything else around it dim and then have what light is coming through to portray the dark scene, everything is off, and then only the dark scenes are actually emitting their own light at the luminance at which they’re intended to basically portray that.
OLED Advantages and Drawbacks
So it the technology is pretty awesome when we talk about panel displays. If you’ve ever looked at an OLED TV in like a home theater setup or whatever, uh, then you’ll know that it’s pretty impressive what you can create in terms of its Vibrance, its luminance, cuz we haven’t even talked about HDR yet as well as um, it’s its low light capabilities in terms of dark scenes.
The drawback though is most OLED panels have a glossier screen, so that means any sort of ambient light behind you when you’re gaming, if you have a window behind you, the reflection can actually get pretty intense.
Vonic’s Approach to Reflections
Fortunately the vonic panels, um, they kind of fit in the middle of a full glossy screen and a matte screen, giving you better rejection at Reflections. However in order to get the bright Punchy colors that you find with OLED, they’re typically coupled with a more glossy screen, so that’s one thing to point out there.
OLED Performance and Cost
Now as oleds have improved, they have some of the best response times on the market, uh, you can see them get down as low as under 1 millisecond, because the LED itself can respond much fast faster than the actual physical motion of an LCD pixel gate.
They can respond much faster just through their own luminance, so you actually get very good refresh rates with OLED as well as very fast response times. Unfortunately OLED is the most expensive panel type currently on the market because it cost the most to manufacture.
Now they have come down in price quite a bit, but uh, that’s one of those things where let’s say you’ve got a maxed out Tower, you’ve got a high-end GPU, you know you’re running a 490 or 7900 XTX, something crazy like that, you’ve got your x3d CPU, everything is maxed out, you don’t have any sort of upgrades you could really make to your Tower.
The Monitor Upgrade Advantage
This is where upgrading your panel can really start to show its benefit, because if you’ve got a maxed out Tower hooked up to I don’t know, 1440p LED tan panel, you have no idea what you’re missing out on until you start to look at things like HDR, um, High dynamic range, uh, when it comes to its brightness and its and its contrast ratios and such.
Panel Sync Technology Explained
Um, one other thing that we haven’t talked about yet either, um, specifically is going to be panel sync technology. Now it’s a little less important today than it used to be, because almost every single free sync panel is also g-sync certified.
But there was a while there where g-sync panels only worked with Nvidia graphics cards, freesync panels only worked with AMD graphics cards, and Nvidia wasn’t taking the time to really validate freesync panels to fit within their g-sync, uh, I guess parameters, we we we’ll put it that way. But the cool thing is just about every single freesync panel on the market now does actually work with Nvidia, um, gsync or Nvidia gpus.
Why Sync Technology Matters
Now you might ask yourself why would I even need a sync technology, well freesync and g-sync are Technologies that reduce tearing, uh, if your frame rate drops below the native refresh rate of the panel.
So what that means is the panel itself, uh, is actually able to draw scenes faster than the GPU is sending information to it at that point, and you might start to see tearing where a scene isn’t aligned, because believe it or not your screen draws horizontally and not all at one time, it does it kind of in Stripes right and they alternate often times.
So what happens is you’ll start to see that image desync, so that’s why you hear freesync and gsync.
Sync Technology in Practice
And so if you’re refresh rate, uh, is faster than the FPS that’s being sent to it, you can start to get tearing. So what the technology does is it actually forces the sync of the image prior before it being drawn, so that’s something that tends to to matter most if you’re running let’s say a graphics card that can’t keep up with the refresh rate of your panel.
Let’s say you paired it with a 240 HZ panel and you’ve got I don’t know a 1660 in your system, you’re not going to be running 240 HZ, so you could get all kinds of fluctuating FPS which can lead to those tearing situations. That’s where the panel itself will actually handle making sure that the scene is synced before it actually draws the image.
High-End GPU Use Cases
Now on the flip side, you could also be running a something like an RTX 490, but you’re running Indiana Jones which we all know is a very difficult title to run currently because of the fact that it’s very forward facing in its technology and R tracing is required.
And you could have all the bells and whistles turned up. Now your 490 is definitely not going to keep up with your high refresh rate monitor, so that’s where the g-sync, uh, and freesync monitor technology really comes in to make sure that those frames stay nice and fluid.
Market Availability of Sync Tech
So yeah, it’s a nice thing to have, it used to actually be a kind of a premium sort of option on monitors, but every single gaming monitor on the market today, uh, either has free sync or g-sync. You’ll probably find more freesync monitors these days than you do g-sync.
Simply because it’s open source and it’s actually very inexpensive to implement it because it’s done on a software level, whereas g-sync does it on a module level and it cost more to put the g-sync module in a panel, so you’ll find a lot more freesync panels these days than g-sync.
MPRT: Next-Gen Response Tech
Okay, so you’ve got the fastest response time, you got the highest refresh rate, you know you’re running a a high-end gaming panel, you start to think to yourself how what else could there be to talk about. Well some of the newest Tech that we’re starting to see in the last few years, mprt, our moving picture response time.
We talked about the fact that if a response time is too slow for the refresh rate of the panel, you start to get ghosting. Well one of the ways they’ve started to combat that is actually by flickering the panel or either severely reducing the backlight or even turning it off entirely in the background.
How MPRT Works
So what I mean by that is it’s starting to strobe very very very fast, faster than you can see with the human eye. In fact, we had to use a high-speed camera to even notice the fact, uh, that our V our vsync nprt panels were actually dimming, uh, down to red color actually, cuz red is probably easier for it to to have that response time in terms of turning off and back on, but it dimmed to a very very low red and back up basically every other frame.
So you can’t ghost an image, you can’t see. So the idea between nprt is just the next evolution of response time where you get much crisper cleaner images simply because of the fact that every other frame is actually being dimmed, but you don’t even notice it with the human eye, it’s kind it’s kind of nuts, it’s happening thousands of times per second.
Physical Features: VESA Mounts
Okay, so let’s talk about a couple other things that could drive the cost of a panel up that you may or may not be interested in, um, we’re going to talk about things like vase amount. So vase amount Mount basically refers to whether or not you can put the monitor on an arm.
So as you can see right here, um, we’ve got some screws that we would be able to mount a monitor arm to, and those are measured in millimeters. And the two most common sizes you’re going to see actually the most common size you’re going to see is 100 by 100, I mean it’s 100 mm Square between each of these holes, or maybe 80 by 80. 80x 80 is not nearly as common, um, but it does exist. Other things too, if we look at the bottom of the panel here we can talk about.
Connectivity & Ports
Do we have multiple DisplayPort inputs? Do we have HDMI as well? Do we have a USB hub built-in? Do we have maybe a headphone pass-through built-in? You know, there’s a lot of little features that can start to add up and bring the cost of a monitor up.
RGB Lighting: Is It Worth It?
Does it have RGB? Personally for me, RGB on a panel—especially panels that have it on the back—unless it’s really bright and it’s like bouncing off your wall, I don’t think RGB should be something anyone should be that concerned with when it comes to gaming panels.
Gaming Panels vs. General Use
That’s the thing: “gaming panel” actually might be the one time “gaming” is an appropriate term to use because the specs for a gaming panel are very different than a multimedia panel. So, like a “gaming computer case”—that’s just a buzz term.
I mean, does it have enough fan slots? Yes? Okay, it’s “gaming” now. But a gaming panel? High response or fast response time, high refresh rate, what is the panel technology behind the backlighting? If it had LED on the front, I guess for RGB, that’s cool and all, but not something I think you should care about, to be honest.
Physical Adjustments
But does it have a rotatable base? Right? So, a lot of people go to their Discord channels and such—and I put a big finger smudge on there, so I’m sure that’s triggering some people—but a lot of people like to have a panel vertical like this. Let’s say they have Discord channels always going, or they’re constantly on like Reddit or whatever.
So, people like to have it in portrait mode like this because it allows them to have more that they can read before they have to scroll. Programmers, for sure, definitely like to have multiples, usually like this. When I worked in software development, most of our guys had two verticals and then a normal—possibly even an ultrawide—in the middle.
But not all bases have this sort of adjustability. Can I rotate it either way? Sometimes they only rotate one way. Do we have tilt adjustment? You know, this one gives us about 15° up, about 5° down, which is pretty standard. And then we have our height adjustable built-in. So, all things to consider when you’re buying a panel.
The Current Monitor Sweet Spot
Anyway, I hope this has given some food for thought on features and panels that can matter to you or may not matter to you. Fortunately, though, panel tech as a whole has been driving itself down in terms of cost over the last 5 years.
We have seen some major changes in pricing when it comes to panels. I think right now, the perfect sweet spot—if you’re trying to buy a gaming panel for someone—would be a Mini LED LCD panel, possibly 27-inch, 1440p resolution, 144 Hz refresh rate, with a 1-millisecond response time. That would probably cost under 300 bucks these days, and that would get you a huge, huge visual improvement over anyone running a 1080p 60 Hz panel.
It would be night and day. In fact, most people have no idea what they’re missing until they experience it and then try to go back.
Gaming Monitor FAQ: Demystifying Panel Tech
Q1: Why should I care about panel type (TN/VA/IPS/OLED)?
A: TN panels are fading out – they’re fast but have awful viewing angles and color inaccuracy (reds look pink!). VA is a middle ground. IPS dominates now: color-accurate for photo work and affordable with improved response times. OLED? King of contrast (true blacks!) but pricier and glossy.
Q2: Is a 240Hz monitor overkill if my GPU can’t hit 240 FPS?
A: Not if you enable FreeSync/G-Sync! These sync techs prevent tearing when your FPS dips below the refresh rate (e.g., your RTX 4090 struggling with ray-traced Indiana Jones). Even a 1660 paired with a 240Hz panel benefits from sync.
Q3: Why does text look “blocky” on my 32-inch 1440p monitor?
A: Pixel density! At 27+ inches, 1440p spreads pixels too thin. Rule of thumb: Go 4K for 32-inch+, stick to 1440p for 27-inch. Otherwise, you’ll see the “screen door effect” (gaps between pixels).
Q4: Are ultra-wide monitors worth the extra cost?
A: Yes if: You play immersion-heavy games (wider FOV without distortion) or multitask (Discord + game + browser). 3440×1440 (WQHD) is the sweet spot. Bonus: Movies fill the screen without black bars!
Q5: OLED sounds perfect – what’s the catch?
A:*
- Glossy screens: Reflections can be brutal if you’ve got windows behind you.
- Burn-in risk: Static HUDs (health bars, minimaps) could cause issues long-term.
- Price: Still premium (but dropping!). Save it for when your PC is already maxed out.
Q6: Is “1ms response time” just marketing hype?
A: Not entirely – but prioritize pairing it with high refresh rates. A 240Hz panel with 5ms response will ghost badly. Look for both fast refresh (144Hz+) and low response (1-5ms).
Q7: Do I need G-Sync if I have an AMD GPU?
A: Nope! FreeSync works with NVIDIA too now. G-Sync modules cost more; FreeSync is 95% as good and open-source. Ignore the branding – just ensure it’s “G-Sync Compatible.”
Q8: What’s the best budget gaming monitor in 2025?
A: Your own reco hits hard: 27-inch Mini LED IPS, 1440p, 144Hz, 1ms response. Under $300, crushes 1080p/60Hz panels with “night and day” clarity and motion. Skip RGB – invest in specs.
Q9: Should I get a curved or flat panel?
A: Curved shines on ultra-wides (21:9 or 32:9) for reduced eye strain. Aggressiveness is measured in “R” (lower number = more curve). For standard 16:9, flat’s fine.
Q10: Is VESA mounting important?
A: Critical for flexibility! 100x100mm is standard. Lets you rotate to portrait (perfect for Discord/Reddit), adjust height/tilt, or mount on arms. Non-VESA monitors limit your setup.
