When buying a monitor, we can throw back the response time of the specifications, especially if we are about to buy one type of panel or another where, in some, speed over the response time of the monitors prevails. All this comes from a series of myths and fallacies that we believe it is important to disprove.
Many people mistakenly think that the human being captures the number of frames, the reality is not like that and this leads to misconceptions that lead to confusion when buying a gaming monitor.
Response time on monitors
First of all we have to define what manufacturers define as monitor response time or input lag. Which is also known as the photon movement time. What does that time correspond to? Well, at the time that happens from when we press a button until we see its action appearing on the screen.
It should be clarified that input lag from our perspective is not the same as input lag from the monitor’s perspective. In our case there are a series of stages that consist of the CPU and the GPU generating the scene and then sending it to the screen so that it changes the value of the pixels. On the other hand, in the case of the monitor, its latency is the combination between the time it takes to receive the image and the time it takes to display it.
Because different panel types are sold with different monitor response time, many wonder if this really affects gaming. The answer is that it depends, keep reading and you will know why this statement is due.
The reaction time of a human being
We capture reality in motion, but it does not have a frame-per-second counter and our brain does not understand it this way. The complexity is such that today we have not achieved a perfect simulation through computer vision and neural networks of the functioning of the human eye and all its complications, but rather very distant approximations that allow machines to see in order to identify objects.
When it comes to playing games, what matters to us is that there is a flow of frames large enough for our brain to capture the smoothness of the movement. This leads many people to believe that our brains can see at a specific frame rate when our brains are not actually counting frames.
What’s more, all of us when we are interacting with the screen in a game are reacting with a considerable latency time and not just one or two frames, depending on the visual reflections of each one, we can speak of response times from 100 ms to 300 ms more about when the information is displayed on the screen.
Does the response time affect monitors?
When we talk, for example, about high-frequency monitors or systems designed for this, such as the NVIDIA Reflex that allows times with a speed of 360 Hz, what is actually being done is not displaying the information on the screen at that speed, but rather shortening the response time total a few milliseconds , which is key in competitive and cooperative games where milliseconds of response can mean that your character takes a bullet in the head or the character of another player who is killed.
So what is important at heart is the speed at which your brain receives the stimulus, but also the speed at which it does so. These two factors are crucial, but we cannot forget that each game is designed to react to different response times from the user.
The answer to the question? It’s not just the response time of the monitor, it’s also the person playing the game and the demands of the game itself. So it is not only the type of panel on your monitor, but there are other factors.
