lcd panel input lag for sale

Input lag is the amount of time it takes for a display to process a button input while gaming. If you value your gaming experience, you want to avoid displays that exhibit high input lag, as it makes your gameplay feel sluggish and unresponsive. Our input lag database below will help you avoid laggy displays, as it is the world’s largest database for input lag data.

Stick to displays marked Excellent for the best user experience, as they provide the lowest input lag when set to Game Mode. All displays are tested at 60hz. Most displays of the same model number share nearly identical input lag across size ranges.

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When you"re using a monitor, you want your actions to appear on the screen almost instantly, whether you"re typing, clicking through websites, or gaming. If you have high input lag, you"ll notice a delay from the time you type something on your keyboard or when you move your mouse to when it appears on the screen, and this can make the monitor almost unusable.

For gamers, low input lag is even more important because it can be the difference between winning and losing in games. A monitor"s input lag isn"t the only factor in the total amount of input lag because there"s also delay caused by your keyboard/mouse, PC, and internet connection. However, having a monitor with low input lag is one of the first steps in ensuring you get a responsive gaming experience.

Any monitor adds at least a few milliseconds of input lag, but most of the time, it"s small enough that you won"t notice it at all. There are some cases where the input lag increases so much to the point where it becomes noticeable, but that"s very rare and may not necessarily only be caused by the monitor. Your peripherals, like keyboards and mice, add more latency than the monitor, so if you notice any delay, it"s likely because of those and not your screen.

There"s no definitive amount of input lag when people will start noticing it because everyone is different. A good estimate of around 30 ms is when it starts to become noticeable, but even a delay of 20 ms can be problematic for reaction-based games. You can try this tool that adds lag to simulate the difference between high and low input lag. You can use it to estimate how much input lag bothers you, but keep in mind this tool is relative and adds lag to the latency you already have.

There are three main reasons why there"s input lag during computer use, and it isn"t just the monitor that has input lag. There"s the acquisition of the image, the processing, and finally actually displaying it.

The acquisition of the image has to do with the source and not with the monitor. The more time it takes for the monitor to receive the source image, the more input lag there"ll be. This has never really been an issue with PCs since previous analog signals were virtually instant, and current digital interfaces like DisplayPort and HDMI have next to no inherent latency. However, some devices like wireless mice or keyboards may add delay. Bluetooth connections especially add latency, so if you want the lowest latency possible in the video acquisition phase, you should use a wired mouse or keyboard or get something wireless with very low latency.

The time this step takes is affected by the speed of the video processor and the total amount of processing. Although you can"t control the processor speed, you can control how many operations it needs to do by enabling and disabling settings. Most picture settings won"t affect the input lag, and monitors rarely have any image processing, which is why the input lag on monitors tends to be lower than on TVs. One of these settings that could add delay is variable refresh rate, but most modern monitors are good enough that the lag doesn"t increase much.

Once the monitor has processed the image, it"s ready to be displayed on the screen. This is the step where the video processor sends the image to the screen. The screen can"t change its state instantly, and there"s a slight delay from when the image is done processing to when it appears on screen. Our input lag measurements consider when the image first appears on the screen and not the time it takes for the image to fully appear (which has to do with our Response Time measurements). Overall, the time it takes to display the image has a big impact on the total input lag.

Using the HDMI input and the Leo Bodnar lag tester, I measure 27.33ms of lag overall in the Monoprice IPS-Glass. This is a bit slower than the Zero-G, which used an HDMI-DVI adapter, but right in the range of most monitors out there today. Changing the mode on the display did not cause a change in the lag. Of course a bit of scaling is introduced, but other monitors have shown that you can add only1-2ms of lag through scaling if done properly so I don"t believe results will be much different at native resolution. Sadly, there are no 2560x1440 (or 4K) equivalents of the Leo Bodnar tester at present.

One of the areas where the A-MVA panel does extremely well is in the areas of display lag and pixel response time. Just to recap, you may have heard complaints about "input lag" on various LCDs, so that"s one area we look at in our LCD reviews. We put input lag in quotation marks because while many people call it "input lag", the reality is that this lag occurs somewhere within the LCD panel circuitry, or perhaps even at the level of the liquid crystals. Where this lag occurs isn"t the concern; instead, we just want to measure the duration of the lag. That"s why we prefer to call it "processing lag" or "display lag".

To test for display lag, we run the Wings of Fury benchmark in 3DMark03, with the output set to the native LCD resolution - in this case 1920x1200. Our test system is a quad-core Q6600 running a Radeon HD 3870 on a Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6 motherboard - we had to disable CrossFire support in order to output the content to both displays. We connect the test LCD and a reference LCD to two outputs from the Radeon 3870 and set the monitors to run in clone mode.

The reference Monitor is an HP LP3065, which we have found to be one of the best LCDs we currently possess in terms of not having display lag. (The lack of a built-in scaler probably has something to do with this.) While we know some of you would like us to compare performance to a CRT, that"s not something we have around our offices anymore. Instead, we are looking at relative performance, and it"s possible that the HP LP3065 has 20ms of lag compared to a good CRT - or maybe not. Either way, the relative lag is constant, so even if a CRT is faster at updating, we can at least see if an LCD is equal to or better than our reference display.

While the benchmark is looping, we snap a bunch of pictures of the two LCDs sitting side-by-side (using a relatively fast shutter speed). 3DMark03 shows the runtime with a resolution of 10ms at the bottom of the display, and we can use this to estimate whether a particular LCD has more or less processing lag than our reference LCD. We sort through the images and discard any where the times shown on the LCDs are not clearly legible, until we are left with 10 images for each test LCD. We record the difference in time relative to the HP LP3065 and average the 10 results to come up with an estimated processing lag value, with lower numbers being better. Negative numbers indicate a display is faster than the HP LP3065, while positive numbers mean the HP is faster and has less lag.

It"s important to note that this is merely an estimate - whatever the reference monitor happens to be, there are some inherent limitations. For one, LCDs only refresh their display 60 times per second, so we cannot specifically measure anything less than approximately 17ms with 100% accuracy. Second, the two LCDs can have mismatched vertical synchronizations, so it"s entirely possible to end up with a one frame difference on the time readout because of this. That"s why we average the results of 10 images, and we are confident that our test procedure can at least show when there is a consistent lag/internal processing delay. Here is a summary of our results for the displays we have tested so far.

As you can see, all of the S-PVA panels we have tested to date show a significant amount of input lag, ranging from 20ms up to 40ms. In contrast, the TN and S-IPS panels show little to no processing lag (relative to the HP LP3065). The BenQ FP241VW performs similarly to the TN and IPS panels, with an average display lag of 2ms - not something you would actually notice compared to other LCDs. Obviously, if you"re concerned with display lag at all, you"ll want to avoid S-PVA panels for the time being. That"s unfortunate, considering S-PVA panels perform very well in other areas.

Despite what the manufacturers might advertise as their average pixel response time, we found most of the LCDs are basically equal in this area - they all show roughly a one frame "lag", which equates to a response time of around 16ms. In our experience, processing lag is far more of a concern than pixel response times. Taking a closer look at just the FP241VW, we can see the typical one frame lag in terms of pixel response time. However, the panel does appear to be a little faster in response time than some of the other panels we"ve tested (notice how the "ghost image" isn"t as visible as on the HP LP3065), and we didn"t see parts of three frames in any of the test images.

After the initial article went live, one of our readers who works in the display industry sent me an email. He provides some interesting information about the causes of image lag. Below is an (edited) excerpt from his email. (He wished to remain anonymous.)

PVA and MVA have inherent drawbacks with respect to LCD response time, especially gray-to-gray. To address this shortcoming, companies have invested in ASICs that perform a trick generically referred to as "overshoot." The liquid crystal (LC) material in *VA responds sluggishly to small voltage changes (a change from one gray level to another). To fix this, the ASIC does some image processing and basically applies an overvoltage to the electrodes of the affected pixel to spur the LC material into rapid movement. Eventually the correct settling voltage is applied to hold the pixel at the required level matching the input drive level.

It"s very complicated math taking place in the ASIC in real time. It works well but with an important caveat: it requires a frame buffer. What this means is that as video comes into the panel, there is a memory device that can capture one whole video frame and hold it. After comparing it to the next incoming frame, the required overshoot calculations are made. Only then is the first captured frame released to the panel"s timing controller, which is when the frame is rendered to the screen. As you may have already guessed, that causes at least one frame time worth of lag (17ms).

Some companies discovered some unintended artifacts in their overshoot calculations and the only way they saw to correct these was to allow for their algorithm to look ahead by two frames instead of one. So they had to up the memory of the frame buffer and now they started capturing and holding not one but two frames upon which they make their complex overshoot predictions to apply the corrected pixel drive levels and reduce gray-to-gray response time (at the expense of lag time). Again, it works very well for improving response time, but at the expense of causing lag, which gamers hate. That in a nutshell is the basis of around 33ms of the lag measured with S-PVA.

Not every display uses this approach, but this could account for the increase in display lag between earlier S-PVA and later S-PVA panels. It"s also important to note that I tested the Dell 2408WFP revision A00, and apparently revision A01 does not have as much lag. I have not been able to confirm this personally, however. The above also suggest that displays designed to provide a higher image quality through various signal processing techniques could end up with more display lag caused by the microchip and microcode, which makes sense. Now all we need are better algorithms and technologies in order to reduce the need for all of this extra image processing -- or as we have seen with some displays (particularly HDTVs), the ability to disable the image processing.

For arcades looking to purchase Japanese LCD cabinets to maximize their customers’ experience with exA-Arcadia, please continue reading for our recommendations for an optimal experience that will keep your customer base coming back again and again.

Unlike CRT cabinets, which have a naturally fast response time, modern IO boards and LCD monitors have introduced lag into what your customer feels when they play a game. As an arcade operator, you need to optimize for this so customers feel satisfied when playing intense games, otherwise, they may return to your location.

LCD monitors are very slow to display a video signal, so when a player presses a button or the joystick, the action appears onscreen later than what a player may be expecting; this is Monitor (Display) Lag. This slow response time is especially common with early LCD monitors and large size HD monitors.

Each LCD monitor has a native resolution, such as 720p or 1080p, but when an incoming video signal is not the same resolution, this will also cause the video signal to display even slower since the signal is being converted to the monitor’s resolution. Japanese LCD cabinets come equipped with monitors from when LCD technology was still new and have generally slower response times, as well as an odd native resolution of 768p.

Modern arcade boards are generally PC based machines that convert joystick and button input into a USB signal that needs to be decoded by the hardware’s JVS IO board. The amount of time this takes varies and is the cause for Input Lag. If a player presses a button and feels like the game is not responsive, they are unlikely to play this game again. Older JVS IO boards are unable to process commands quickly in succession. A modern compliant JVS IO board is highly recommended.

Display lag is a phenomenon associated with most types of liquid crystal displays (LCDs) like smartphones and computers and nearly all types of high-definition televisions (HDTVs). It refers to latency, or lag between when the signal is sent to the display and when the display starts to show that signal. This lag time has been measured as high as 68 ms,Hz display. Display lag is not to be confused with pixel response time, which is the amount of time it takes for a pixel to change from one brightness value to another. Currently the majority of manufacturers quote the pixel response time, but neglect to report display lag.

For older analog cathode ray tube (CRT) technology, display lag is nearly zero, due to the nature of the technology, which does not have the ability to store image data before display. The picture signal is minimally processed internally, simply for demodulation from a radio-frequency (RF) carrier wave (for televisions), and then splitting into separate signals for the red, green, and blue electron guns, and for the timing of the vertical and horizontal sync. Image adjustments typically involve reshaping the signal waveform but without storage, so the image is written to the screen as fast as it is received, with only nanoseconds of delay for the signal to traverse the wiring inside the device from input to the screen.

For modern digital signals, significant computer processing power and memory storage is needed to prepare an input signal for display. For either over-the-air or cable TV, the same analog demodulation techniques are used, but after that, then the signal is converted to digital data, which must be decompressed using the MPEG codec, and rendered into an image bitmap stored in a frame buffer.

While the pixel response time of the display is usually listed in the monitor"s specifications, no manufacturers advertise the display lag of their displays, likely because the trend has been to increase display lag as manufacturers find more ways to process input at the display level before it is shown. Possible culprits are the processing overhead of HDCP, Digital Rights Management (DRM), and also DSP techniques employed to reduce the effects of ghosting – and the cause may vary depending on the model of display. Investigations have been performed by several technology-related websites, some of which are listed at the bottom of this article.

LCD, plasma, and DLP displays, unlike CRTs, have a native resolution. That is, they have a fixed grid of pixels on the screen that show the image sharpest when running at the native resolution (so nothing has to be scaled full-size which blurs the image). In order to display non-native resolutions, such displays must use video scalers, which are built into most modern monitors. As an example, a display that has a native resolution of 1600x1200 being provided a signal of 640x480 must scale width and height by 2.5x to display the image provided by the computer on the native pixels. In order to do this, while producing as few artifacts as possible, advanced signal processing is required, which can be a source of introduced latency. Interlaced video signals such as 480i and 1080i require a deinterlacing step that adds lag. Anecdotallyprogressive scanning mode. External devices have also been shown to reduce overall latency by providing faster image-space resizing algorithms than those present in the LCD screen.

Many LCDs also use a technology called "overdrive" which buffers several frames ahead and processes the image to reduce blurring and streaks left by ghosting. The effect is that everything is displayed on the screen several frames after it was transmitted by the video source.

Display lag can be measured using a test device such as the Video Signal Input Lag Tester. Despite its name, the device cannot independently measure input lag. It can only measure input lag and response time together.

Lacking a measurement device, measurement can be performed using a test display (the display being measured), a control display (usually a CRT) that would ideally have negligible display lag, a computer capable of mirroring an output to the two displays, stopwatch software, and a high-speed camera pointed at the two displays running the stopwatch program. The lag time is measured by taking a photograph of the displays running the stopwatch software, then subtracting the two times on the displays in the photograph. This method only measures the difference in display lag between two displays and cannot determine the absolute display lag of a single display. CRTs are preferable to use as a control display because their display lag is typically negligible. However, video mirroring does not guarantee that the same image will be sent to each display at the same point in time.

In the past it was seen as common knowledge that the results of this test were exact as they seemed to be easily reproducible, even when the displays were plugged into different ports and different cards, which suggested that the effect is attributable to the display and not the computer system. An in depth analysis that has been released on the German website Prad.de revealed that these assumptions have been wrong. Averaging measurements as described above lead to comparable results because they include the same amount of systematic errors. As seen on different monitor reviews the so determined values for the display lag for the very same monitor model differ by margins up to 16 ms or even more.

Several approaches to measure display lag have been restarted in slightly changed ways but still reintroduced old problems, that have already been solved by the former mentioned SMTT. One such method involves connecting a laptop to an HDTV through a composite connection and run a timecode that shows on the laptop"s screen and the HDTV simultaneously and recording both screens with a separate video recorder. When the video of both screens is paused, the difference in time shown on both displays have been interpreted as an estimation for the display lag.16 ms or even more.

Display lag contributes to the overall latency in the interface chain of the user"s inputs (mouse, keyboard, etc.) to the graphics card to the monitor. Depending on the monitor, display lag times between 10-68 ms have been measured. However, the effects of the delay on the user depend on each user"s own sensitivity to it.

Display lag is most noticeable in games (especially older video-game consoles), with different games affecting the perception of delay. For instance, in PvE, a slight input delay is not as critical compared to PvP, or to other games favoring quick reflexes like

If the game"s controller produces additional feedback (rumble, the Wii Remote"s speaker, etc.), then the display lag will cause this feedback to not accurately match up with the visuals on-screen, possibly causing extra disorientation (e.g. feeling the controller rumble a split second before a crash into a wall).

TV viewers can be affected as well. If a home theater receiver with external speakers is used, then the display lag causes the audio to be heard earlier than the picture is seen. "Early" audio is more jarring than "late" audio. Many home-theater receivers have a manual audio-delay adjustment which can be set to compensate for display latency.

Many televisions, scalers and other consumer-display devices now offer what is often called a "game mode" in which the extensive preprocessing responsible for additional lag is specifically sacrificed to decrease, but not eliminate, latency. While typically intended for videogame consoles, this feature is also useful for other interactive applications. Similar options have long been available on home audio hardware and modems for the same reason. Connection through VGA cable or component should eliminate perceivable input lag on many TVs even if they already have a game mode. Advanced post-processing is non existent on analog connection and the signal traverses without delay.

A television may have a picture mode that reduces display lag for computers. Some Samsung and LG televisions automatically reduce lag for a specific input port if the user renames the port to "PC".

LCD screens with a high response-time value often do not give satisfactory experience when viewing fast-moving images (they often leave streaks or blur; called ghosting). But an LCD screen with both high response time and significant display lag is unsuitable for playing fast-paced computer games or performing fast high-accuracy operations on the screen, due to the mouse cursor lagging behind.

Gaming is certainly not this monitor’s forte, but one could play less frenetic titles on it and have a good time. I ran my response and lag tests and got results typical of a 60 Hz enterprise monitor.

The DualUp is a quality IPS panel with excellent viewing angles. At 45 degrees to the sides, the picture takes on a slight green tint with only around a 10% reduction in brightness. Detail remains clear with no apparent change to gamma. The top view washes out a bit with a 40% brightness drop. You’d have to be tall indeed to look down on one of these screens.

It’s not fair to compare the Zion Pro to gaming monitors as it lacks Adaptive Sync and runs at 60 Hz. But I’ll include my response and lag tests, so you’ll know what to expect when gaming on this portable panel. And as you already read above, I was pleasantly surprised by its performance in practice.

16ms is a typical draw time for a 60 Hz LCD, but the Acer is a bit slower than that. The Zion Pro shows soft edges around moving objects with a slight black ghosting artifact. But it is smoother than a 60 Hz LCD panel in that motion does not stutter. Overall control lag is 69ms, which means you won’t be winning any frag contests unless your opponents are casually skilled like me. Exploring first-person environments is best done at a walking pace so you can enjoy the incredible color and contrast. Rapid movement is not the Zion Pro’s forte.

While OLED panels typically have better viewing angles than LCDs, the Zion Pro’s AMOLED screen looks more like a premium IPS monitor. You can see a slight red and green color shift with a 20% drop in brightness. Detail remains clear with no apparent change in gamma. The vertical plane is where OLED’s advantage is clear. Brightness is reduced by around 20% and there’s a barely visible color shift, but gamma remains accurate, preserving image detail.

The Zion Pro couldn’t quite keep up with the other two OLEDs in the screen uniformity test. Like those monitors, I had to measure a 10% gray field since blacks are too low for my meter to register. I observed slight hotspots on the left side of my sample panel. These were not visible in content. It seems that OLED’s greater contrast makes flaws like this harder to spot. Color uniformity was visually perfect at all brightness levels.

For PC monitors and smart TVs, speed largely comes down to pixel response and input lag. They’re both measured in milliseconds, and they’re at least a little interrelated – but they’re not the same thing at all.

As for input lag, that’s a measure of the delay between signal output from a source device, such as a games console, set top box or PC, and the video image being shown on the display. And it’s all about feel. Does the screen respond quickly to your control inputs in a game? If it does, it has low lag or latency. If there’s a noticeable delay between wiggling a mouse or control pad and on-screen movement, then it probably suffers from significant lag.

Anyway, response and lag don’t apply in quite the same way to all display and panel types, be that OLED vs LCD or TVs and PC monitors (note that TVs and other screens marketed as ‘LED’ are typically LCD panels with LED backlights, not actually LED panels).

Shown on a graph, the pixel response of an LCD panel follows an ‘S’ curve, with a slightly sluggish immediate response, followed by that rapid middle phase, before response tails off dramatically towards the end of the transition. The net result is the time taken to fully transition from one color to another can be dramatically longer than the quoted GtG response.

In theory, MPRT response is a direct function of refresh rate. So, a refresh rate of 1000Hz is required to achieve a 1ms MPRT pixel response. However, mitigating measures including black-frame insertion or strobing backlights can improve MPRT response to below the refresh rate of the panel and to the point where it’s typically faster than a screen’s GtG response, at least in terms of quoted specifications.

The fastest current LCD panels are quoted at 1ms for GtG response and 0.5ms for MPRT response. But independent testing shows a whole different ballgame. Sources including Rtings.com and Linus Tech Tips peg full-transition pixel response from speedy OLED sets like LG C1 and CX panels at around two to three milliseconds, with the bulk of the transition (and thus the GtG equivalent performance) completed in a fraction of a millisecond.

Results for LCD technology vary a little more, probably due to methodology. But the best case scenario for an ultra-fast-IPS LCD monitor, such as the Asus ROG Swift 360Hz PG259QN, by comparison, is around 3ms for the bulk of the transition and 6ms for the full color change while other results push those two metrics out to 6ms and 10ms or more respectively. Either way, OLED is clearly faster.

The refresh rate of a screen puts a hard limit on the minimum latency or input lag it can achieve. To put some numbers on that, most mainstream monitors and TVs refresh at 60Hz or once every 16.67ms. Increase the refresh rate to 120Hz and the screen updates every 8.33ms.

Now, 16.67ms might not sound like a long time to wait – but should the screen require any time at all to process the signal, that latency will only increase, as those 16.67ms are also just the latency generated by your display. A PC or games console needs time to process a control input, feed it through the game engine and kick out frames in response. It all adds up.

Happily, some TVs now offer a dedicated low-latency game mode with minimal processing. Such TVs tend to be comparable to monitors running at the same refresh rate in terms of lag. The LG C1 OLED TV has been measured as low as 5ms at 120Hz. Intriguingly, running outside of game mode, the C1 is tragically slow at nearly 90ms, which neatly demonstrates just how much impact image processing can have.

In terms of refresh rate, the fastest current PC monitors can hit 360Hz, while the highest refresh TV sets accept an input signal of 120Hz. Some TVs have higher internal refresh rates of 240Hz or more, but in terms of latency or input lag, it’s the signal refresh from the source device that matters.

Long story short, the fastest OLED TVs deliver as little as 5ms of lag, while the quickest PC monitors including the aforementioned Asus panel along with other 360Hz monitors such as the Alienware AW2521H have been clocked at well under 2ms. So while OLED wins out on pixel response, certain LCD monitors have an advantage with input lag.

Apart from the differences discussed between GtG response and MPRT, IPS and VA panel types tend not to be entirely comparable. By that we mean that the subjective experience of a 1ms IPS panel is usually that little bit crisper, clearer and cleaner in terms of response than a VA panel. IPS, in short, tends to be faster.

What’s more, pretty much all gaming monitors offer user-configurable overdrive which can accelerate response but also introduce unwanted image quality issues such as overshoot and inverse ghosting. All those caveats aside, the latest 1ms IPS panels deliver the best performance with very low levels of blur, while 1ms VA monitors are just a little behind. The next rung down and probably the slowest you should consider for gaming is 4ms. Depending on the monitor in question, the panel type and the settings used, such screens may not differ that greatly in terms of the subjective experience. But the worst of them will have noticeably more blur than a 1ms display.

Beyond that, you’re into 7ms and beyond territory. On paper, that ought to be fine. But as we’ve seen, even the fastest LCD panels rated at 1ms can be measured at 10 times that long for real-world response. So quoted specifications should be viewed more as a tool with which to categorize screens than set expectations for actual performance.

But what of lag or latency? Most gamers will find a PC monitor with 144Hz refresh offers no noticeable lag and feels seriously slick and super quick. For really competitive esports competition there are small gains to be had from 240Hz and 360Hz displays. But for us? We’d be very happy with either a 120Hz OLED TV or a 144Hz 1ms monitor.Just want a good low-lag screen? Check out the best gaming monitors and best 120Hz TVsToday"s best gaming monitors and 120Hz TVs

Input lag (or display lag) is the delay between your GPU sending a frame to your monitor and the monitor actually displaying that frame. This is an essential aspect of gaming, where an input lag of 16ms or less is preferred on a 60Hz display.

Input or display lag is the time (measured in milliseconds) it takes for a TV or monitor to react and display the commands you’ve inputted via a device such as a keyboard, a controller, or a mouse.

However, neither TV nor monitor manufacturers state the input lag in the display specifications, which is why doing detailed research before getting a new display is highly recommended.

When looking for a TV for console gaming, it’s of utmost importance to check whether it has this feature. Although some may be more sensitive to high input lag than others, lower is always better.

If you’re looking for a monitor for gaming, there’s usually nothing to worry about as most high refresh rate gaming monitors have low input lag as well as a quick response time speed.

If you’re looking to get a new gaming monitor, whether 60Hz, 144Hz, 165hz or even 240Hz, then you’re most likely considering two very important specs. We don’t mean resolution as that’s a given and the first item on the list right next to screen size. We’re referring to input lag and response time. While most prospective gaming monitor shoppers know what refresh (or frame) rate means, quite a few people remain confused about the distinction between response time and input lag.

Additionally, while almost every gaming monitor has a response time listed in the spec section, input lag rarely makes an appearance. That’s because while the confusion exists, the two terms are very different. Manufacturers can easily calculate and test monitor response times at the factory, but input lag (or input latency) presents a much more complex issue. Many factors that go into input lag have nothing to do with the monitor or the production process used to make the display, and so manufacturers would be remiss if they made bold input lag claims.

Despite that, as someone interested in gaming and gaming monitors you should definitely educate yourself on these two related but distinct terms. That’s because if you opt for a cheap monitor that ends up having slow response or lots of lag then your gaming may well be ruined. Even monitors with high refresh rates can be slow in this regard. If they suffer from sluggish response time and high latency your games will present with problems like motion blur and ghosting. Additionally, controlling in-game actions will feel “off” and unresponsive. That’s why gamers really should learn more about response time and input lag plus how the two differ.

Quite a simple answer to that one. Response time forms a part of overall input latency. That most likely explains why so many people misunderstand that the two specs describe different but connected aspects of a gaming monitor. Another cause for confusion may originate in the fact that both refer to speed and have become part of the popular discussion around gaming monitors as things to consider for optimal monitor performance. Often mentioned in the same sentence, response time and input latency sometimes become conflated with each other.

Sure, both tell us important things about a gaming monitor’s speed, but from very different angles. Response time is entirely native to the monitor proper, while input lag or latency include the whole process from you pressing a button to a corresponding action occurring onscreen.

Distilled to their bare essence, both terms detail the speed with which images change on a display and react to your input. But that’s a very simplistic description that doesn’t do the topic justice, so let’s look at them up close.

Response describes the length of time a given monitor or panel needs to change the properties of each pixel. Since TFT LCDs consist of millions of pixels (or transistors), for example 8.3 million in a 4K monitor, speed is understandably of the essence. Response time tells us how long a monitor needs to turn a pixel from red to green, as an example. The faster, the more responsive the image updates. Faster means smoother display and allows for higher refresh rates.

Think of response time like this. You’re playing a first person game and decide to turn left, down an alley. Your monitor gets the data from your PC or console and needs to update the image you see to reflect the new graphics being loaded in. A monitor with 5ms technically does this five times slower than a 1ms screen. Of course, we’re talking about milliseconds so the difference may not be perceptible. But every little bit counts as games by nature need to be responsive, and like we said response time contributes to overall lag or delay.

Different gaming monitor panel types support slightly diverse response times, although advancing technology has helped narrow down gaps. The fastest response occurs on TN panels, which generally are the best for reflex-based gaming. Essentially all TN panels do 1ms these days, which is why they’re the only ones capable of 240Hz refresh rates, as well. VA and IPS panels usually come in at 2ms-5ms but provide better colors and viewing angles. We’ve discussed panel technologies if you want to know more.

TN panels carry out the least pixel processing of the three main panel types, explaining their high speeds. VA and IPS panels have been designed to ensure better colors, but that requires more processing – meaning delays. As the simplest mainstream panel type, TN manages the fastest response times by getting straight to the pixel, so to speak.

The total time required to show an action on the screen amounts to what is known as input lag. The word input mostly refers to you, the user. You press a key or click a button on a keyboard or controller and then expect a corresponding action on your gaming monitor (or TV). The time needed to show you that action equals input lag.

Input lag rises from a host of factors. From your controller or keyboard the signal moves to your PC or console. If you’re using wireless input devices that movement takes a little longer than with wired versions. Then your PC or console take time to process the data you gave them, then more time to send graphics info via a cable to your display. Generally, HDMI and DisplayPort have the same speed: light speed. So cables aren’t a major issue, but they’re a step. Then every monitor has processing units that accept signals and work to update the screen. Thus, the monitor’s internal circuitry introduces lag. Response time factors into latency as we mentioned above. That means the time a monitor needs to get a signal, process that signal, then change its pixels to depict visuals obviously adds latency.

Any image processing done on your monitor increases latency. Even if base response time is 1ms, should the monitor then add refinements like HDR, dynamic brightness/contrast, edge sharpening, local dimming and so forth – well, latency increases. Remember the basic rule: image processing means lag.

That’s why for gaming we recommend using PC mode or game mode. Those switch off most image processing to keep you close to raw response time on the monitor. How do we measure input lag? Also in milliseconds, but it’s a lot more than response time. Really good monitors like the BenQ EL2870U,  the 4K HDR monitor EW3270U, and 144hz gaming monitor EX2780Q with speakers clock in at 9ms-10ms based on third party reviews, but the average hovers somewhere between 15ms and 22ms for typical gaming monitors and gaming-minded TVs. You should not detect any negative effects with those latency figures, and your games will feel very responsive. It’s only when latency exceeds 40ms or so that people begin to notice sync issues. Anything over 50ms would be basically unplayable. Don’t laugh, lots of cheap monitors and TVs even now deliver performance slower than that, resulting in completely ruined gaming experiences.

When shopping for a gaming monitor do some research, read reviews, and check out the spec sheets. You’ll likely find out about each model’s response time easily enough, but reviews and forum posts will shed more light on input lag. Stay with reputable, established brands. Get monitors that specifically mention gaming, as good manufacturers won’t claim gaming-grade performance for slow monitors, it’s simple as that.

Also simple is the difference between response time and input latency. The former is local to the monitor and helps you understand how fast the panel is on its own. The latter refers to a much more comprehensive and useful number because it includes response time and illustrates the actual gaming experience you’ll have with a monitor or TV.

There are many things that can ruin a gaming experience—low framerates, high network latency, a squeaky chair—but perhaps one of the most common (and most annoying) problems is input lag.

While input lag might not bother you if you’re sitting a few feet from your screen with a gamepad in hand, if you’re playing first person shooters with a mouse and keyboard, it can become a pain very quickly.

When you’re lining up the perfect headshot only to miss because the game registers your mouse click a second too late, input lag can mean the difference between winning and losing a match.

Perhaps even more frustratingly, there are several things that can cause input lag, making it hard to diagnose. But it’s possible to fix input lag and doing so doesn’t always have to cost an arm and a leg.

Input lag, also known as ‘system latency’, refers to the time between your peripheral inputs and the corresponding game actions being outputted on-screen.

For instance, if you press your mouse button to make your in-game character shoot their weapon, input lag would be the time taken between the mouse press and your character visibly shooting on-screen.

Everyone has some level of input lag, it’s just that hopefully the latency is so low that it’s imperceptible. It occurs because there’s a whole chain of things that must happen between your mouse click and your character shooting their weapon. First, your peripherals must process your input and send this data to your motherboard and then to your CPU.

Your CPU must then process this input and instruct the graphics card to render a certain game state based on this new information, which means transmitting the instruction via the motherboard to the graphics card.

Any one of these steps can cause high input lag. Especially egregious input lag usually has peripherals or the monitor as the culprit, but GPU and CPU processing capabilities and the motherboard’s data transport capabilities can play a part.

Sometimes network lag can be mistaken for input lag, and vice versa. Network lag is when data takes a long time to be sent or received over your network and the internet.

When gaming online, this might mean that your inputs take a while to translate into game actions, because there’s a delay between these inputs and the server registering and processing them or sending the resulting game state back to you for your PC to display.

Online games have some things happening ‘client side’ (on your end) and other things happening ‘server side’ (on the game server’s end). If the action you’re trying to perform is one that requires interaction with the server for it to register—say, opening a loot box that exists for everyone on the server—then network lag might be the culprit of any visible delay.

If you’re suffering from network lag, then likely only some game actions will be delayed. Maybe you’ll be able to move and shoot without any visible delay, but opening doors will be delayed. Or, as is most common with network lag, your gun will shoot with no delay but there will be delay between these shots and when they register as having hit the enemy.

If you’re suffering from input lag, on the other hand, every game action caused by an input from the peripheral in question will be delayed—for example, your character around, shooting, and interacting with in-game objects.

If you still can’t tell, online games should tell you your ‘ping’, which is how much network latency there is between your system and the game server. If your ping is high, the delay you see is most likely due to network latency, not input lag.

Input lag can be caused by any part of the chain leading from your key or mouse press to the corresponding game action being displayed on-screen. It’s most often caused by the peripherals or display, but it can also be caused by the CPU or GPU, or the transporting of data between all these things.

If you have input lag, the culprit might be your mouse or keyboard. Apart from your monitor, your peripherals are most likely to be what’s causing delay.

If you have an old wireless mouse or keyboard, or a cheap one that’s not designed for gaming, then this might be the cause of your input lag, because it can take a long time for inputs to travel wirelessly to your PC if the wireless technology in question isn’t very good.

But even some wired peripherals can suffer from input delay. One thing that can cause both wired and wireless mouse delay is a low polling rate, which is how many times per second your mouse communicates with your PC. Grabbing a gaming mouse capable of 1,000Hz polling should help eliminate input lag if your mouse is the culprit.

Inputs from your peripherals are sent via the motherboard to your CPU. Your CPU then takes these inputs and decides what to instruct your GPU to render.

The longer it takes your CPU to compute all this, the longer the delay between your input and the corresponding game action being displayed on-screen.

However, even most budget gaming CPUs these days shouldn’t cause noticeable input lag in most games. But if your CPU is particularly slow, it might cause input lag in CPU-intensive games like simulation games or 4X games like Civilisation VI.

After your CPU receives peripheral input data, it tells your GPU what new game state it should render based on this input. The GPU in your graphics card must then render this game state and send the render data out for your monitor to display.

The longer your graphics card takes to render each frame, the bigger the delay between your input and the corresponding game action being displayed on-screen.

As such, if your graphics card is slow—or if the game is poorly optimised for quick rendering—the more likely you are to suffer input lag because of this. In other words, higher FPS should reduce input lag, providing your monitor’s refresh rate is high enough to keep up with it.

Your peripherals’ inputs travel via USB to your motherboard, and then via your motherboard’s PCIe lanes to the CPU and graphics card, so if your motherboard is particularly slow at transmitting data this can cause input lag.

While USB and PCIe lane generations can affect the speed of large data transfers—such as to and from SSDs—it’s unlikely to directly affect input latency. This is because mouse and keyboard inputs use such little data bandwidth that wider USB and PCIe bus bandwidths likely won’t speed up transfers. And USB 2.0 allows for over 1,000Hz polling, so polling frequency shouldn’t be an issue either.

The only way that a modern motherboard is likely to be the direct culprit of input lag is if it’s faulty—if it has a faulty USB port or PCIe lane, for instance.

If the motherboard isn’t faulty, it might still indirectly cause input lag, however, by bottlenecking the data transfer between the CPU and GPU. If your peripheral input data is bundled in with other game instructions, then a slower motherboard data bus (PCIe) speed might impact how long it takes this data to reach the GPU for rendering, thereby increasing input lag.

Apart from your peripherals, your display is probably the most likely culprit of input lag. After your monitor receives render data from your GPU, it must turn this data into the visible pixels on your screen.

Your monitor displays a new frame with each ‘refresh cycle’, and how many cycles it performs per second is called its ‘refresh rate’. Many monitors still have a 60Hz refresh rate, but these days they are increasingly defaulting to 75Hz at the budget end, and extend all the way up to 360Hz at the high end. The higher your refresh rate, the less likely you are to suffer input lag.

Apart from its refresh rate, a monitor’s internal hardware can influence how much input delay you experience. How a monitor is built can affect its response time, for instance, which is how quickly your monitor can make pixels change from one colour to another.

Even if you have a high refresh rate, if your monitor’s response time is slow it can give the appearance of input lag, as it’ll take more time for your game state to visibly change because of the delay between pixels changing colour. This causes a ‘ghosting’ effect on-screen, but if it’s particularly bad it can feel akin to input lag.

If you don’t have the correct drivers installed—for instance, your motherboard chipset and gaming mouse drivers—then your operating system might not make full and effective use of your peripherals, leading to input lag.

Driver conflicts can also cause input lag. If another driver is interfering with your gaming mouse’s driver, this can sometimes cause problems, including input lag.

But because it limits your framerate and prevents rendered frames from being drawn to your screen until the monitor has fully displayed the previous one, VSync can delay the time between when a frame is ready to be drawn and when the monitor draws it. This can increase overall system latency and cause input lag.

This is more of a problem with VSync than other technologies used to combat screen tearing. Gsync and FreeSync, for example, shouldn’t cause as much input delay as VSync, but not all monitors support these technologies.

One way to test input lag is to point a high-speed camera at both your mouse and monitor, with an LED hooked up to your mouse button switch. This way, you can measure the video frames between your mouse press LED and your gun firing in game.

While these latency tests aren’t the simplest to perform, you shouldn’t need to use them to diagnose bad input lag. If you’re suffering from bad input lag, you should be able to see and feel it while gaming.

While fixing input lag might sometimes require upgrading your hardware—usually your peripherals or your monitor—there are often ways to fix it that don’t require spending any money.

If you have input lag, probably the first thing you should try is updating your drivers. Occasionally Windows or other updates can roll out that mess with mouse drivers, and manufacturers will scramble to create new drivers that fix these issues. So, keeping on top of your driver updates can sometimes resolve high input lag.

If just updating your drivers doesn’t solve it, you should try reinstalling all your drivers, ensuring that you only install drivers that you need. Sometimes input lag is caused by one driver conflicting with another—perhaps at some point you accidentally installed another mouse driver that you don’t need. Removing all your drivers and reinstalling only those that you need should fix this.

VSync can cause input lag because, to fix screen tearing, it adds delay between your GPU rendering frames and these frames being displayed on the screen. If you have a GSync or FreeSync monitor, try enabling these instead of VSync.

If you don’t have a GSync or FreeSync monitor, you might have to choose between either no screen tearing and input lag, or screen tearing and no input lag. In my experience, however, screen tearing is far less annoying than input lag, so disabling VSync might be a good solution.

One thing that can cause input lag is your GPU’s render queue, which is where your GPU stores instructions for what frames to render. The bigger the queue, the more frames it has waiting to render and the longer you have to wait before your input translates to on-screen action.

NVIDIA Reflex is a technology that attempts to reduce input lag by eliminating the render queue, allowing the GPU to render frames as soon as the CPU tells it to. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 900-series cards and above can use Reflex in supported games, and it can be enabled in these games’ settings menus.

If the game you’re playing doesn’t support NVIDIA Reflex, you can go to your NVIDIA control panel and toggle ‘Low Latency Mode’ to ‘Ultra’ under the ‘Manage 3D Settings’ tab. This attempts to eliminate the render queue on the driver (rather than game engine) level and should work almost as well as NVIDIA Reflex.

If you have an AMD card, you can enable AMD Anti-Lag for individual games via the Radeon control panel. This works in a similar way to NVIDIA’s Low Latency Mode, reducing the number of instructions queued and thereby reducing delay.

If your GPU is under 100% utilisation while gaming, capping your framerate to a little lower than your GPU is capable of outputting should reduce GPU load and allow it to process and render frames more quickly. If your GPU is handling things at lower than max utilisation, however, capping your FPS probably won’t reduce input delay very much.

Also bear in mind that setting your frame cap too low can have a negative impact on input latency. Lower FPS means more time between each frame being displayed on screen, which means more input lag.

Providing it doesn’t max out your GPU utilisation, increasing your framerate should reduce input lag, because more frames being rendered each second means less potential time between each frame—and the game actions—being displayed on screen.

As such, lowering your game’s graphics settings—especially your resolution—can help increase your FPS and reduce input lag. If you don’t know which settings to change, you can check out some of our game settings guides, such as this one that shows you the best settings for Fortnite.

While it isn’t a likely cause, it could be that your input lag is being caused by a faulty or poorly performing USB port. If your USB port isn’t working as intended, it might be delaying the input from your peripheral to your system.

Try plugging your peripherals into different USB ports, preferably ones on the back of the tower, connecting directly to the motherboard, rather than via the tower’s front panel ports.

If you’re still suffering from input lag and you’ve tried all the above, one of your components might be the culprit. Most likely, if your input delay is very noticeable, it will be a problem with your mouse or keyboard or your monitor.

Finally, while this is rarely the culprit, if you have exceptionally old and slow hardware—motherboard, CPU, GPU—then this could be causing input lag, as frames likely aren’t being churned out and drawn to the screen fast enough to keep up with your inputs. In which case, upgrading to any modern, midrange gaming CPU and GPU should improve your input latency.