Many people mistakenly think that the human being captures the number of images, the reality is not like that and this leads to misconceptions that sow confusion when buying a gaming monitor.
Response time on monitors
First, we need to define what manufacturers define as monitor response time or input lag. What is also known as the time of movement of photons. What does this time correspond to? Well, the moment that happens from the moment we press a button until we see its action appear on the screen.
It should be clarified that the input delay from our point of view is not the same as the input delay from the monitor point of view. In our case, there is a series of steps which consist of the CPU and GPU generating the scene and then sending it to the screen so that it changes the pixel value. 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.
Since different types of panels are sold with different monitor response times, many wonder if this really affects gaming. The answer is it depends, keep reading and you will know what this claim is due to.
The reaction time of a human being
We capture reality in motion, but it doesn’t have a frames per second counter and our brains don’t understand it that 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 to identify objects.
When it comes to playing games, what matters to us is that there is a flow of images large enough for our brains to pick up the fluidity of movement. This leads many people to believe that our brains can see at a specific frame rate when our brain is not actually counting the pictures.
In addition, when we all interact with the screen in a game, we react with considerable latency and not just one or two images, depending on the visual reflections of each one, we can speak of response time of 100 ms to 300 ms more for when information is displayed on the screen.
Does response time affect monitors?
When we talk, for example, of high frequency monitors or systems designed for this, like the NVIDIA Reflex which allows times with a speed of 360 Hz, what are we really doing? This is not to display information on the screen at this speed, but to shorten the total response time by a few milliseconds., which is essential in competitive and co-op games where milliseconds of response can mean your character gets shot in the head or is another player’s character being killed.
So what is important at heart is how quickly your brain receives the stimulus, but also how fast it does. These two factors are crucial, but we can’t forget that every game is designed to react to different user response times.
The answer to the question? It’s not just the monitor’s response time, it’s also the person playing the game and the demands of the game itself. So it’s not just the type of panel your monitor has, but there are other factors.
