How do I choose a good 4k gaming monitor?

[brat02]

Hi All,

I want to get a 4k gaming monitor 27"-28"to play latest games on high/ultra settings on my PC and PS5( when it will be possible to get one).

I have AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT 8GB which I will be upgrading to RTX 3060 TI 8GB / RTX 3070 8GB / RX 6800 XT 16GB / RTX 3080 10GB just cannot decide which one is better to go for.

So my question is how do I choose a good gaming monitor? What do I need to make sure it has?

Any help and suggestions welcome.

Thanks in advance

[Norphy]

RGB. All gaming stuff needs RGB. It seems to be the law these days. More RGB means more FPS, apparently.

 

In all seriousness, like so many things in life it's a balancing act.

 

A feature like GSync (Nvidia) or FreeSync (AMD) may be useful, with this the monitor only updates when the graphics card sends a frame. It reduces tearing and helps make things look smoother.

 

High refresh rates (>60hz) are nice if your graphics card can handle it.

 

Panel type is an important consideration. You frequently have to trade colour accuracy and viewing angles for low refresh times. TN screens tend to have very low refresh times but poor colour accuracy and bad viewing angles. IPS panels are usually the other way around. MVA panels tend to be somewhere in the middle, although this isn't quite so pronounced any more. In terms of colour accuracy, a lot of cheaper panels use 6 bit colour panels (262000 colours), as opposed to 8 bit (16.7 million colours) or 10 bit (1.07 billion colours). To make up for this, the cheaper panels usually use dithering to hide the difference. You may or may not care. 10 bit panels are comparatively rare and expensive and probably wouldn't be especially useful outside of design, photography or video work.

 

The last thing to bear in mind is backlight technology. Most panels these days use LED backlights, as opposed to cathodes. They tend to be more uniform and consume less power. There are other also some panels which can "zone" their panels and have different brightness levels for the backlight, making blacks more vivid. This is not the same as an OLED screen, where pixels are made up of tiny LEDs, they're still LCD screens.

 

 

/edit

 

Oh, and input types as well. PCs seem to be using DisplayPort and USB-C more and more while consoles still use HDMI. You will want to chose a monitor that has both. If you're using your monitor with an HDMI source, you will most likely want to make sure that there is at least an audio passthrough on the monitor otherwise you won't get any sound out of it!

Edited February 10, 2021 by Norphy

[Rob_D]

Also, if you get a higher refresh rate monitor then you'll ideally need HDMI 2.1 otherwise you'll be limited to 30htz at 4k for the PS5.

[brat02]

RGB. All gaming stuff needs RGB. It seems to be the law these days. More RGB means more FPS, apparently.

In all seriousness, like so many things in life it's a balancing act.

A feature like GSync (Nvidia) or FreeSync (AMD) may be useful, with this the monitor only updates when the graphics card sends a frame. It reduces tearing and helps make things look smoother.

High refresh rates (>60hz) are nice if your graphics card can handle it.

Panel type is an important consideration. You frequently have to trade colour accuracy and viewing angles for low refresh times. TN screens tend to have very low refresh times but poor colour accuracy and bad viewing angles. IPS panels are usually the other way around. MVA panels tend to be somewhere in the middle, although this isn't quite so pronounced any more. In terms of colour accuracy, a lot of cheaper panels use 6 bit colour panels (262000 colours), as opposed to 8 bit (16.7 million colours) or 10 bit (1.07 billion colours). To make up for this, the cheaper panels usually use dithering to hide the difference. You may or may not care. 10 bit panels are comparatively rare and expensive and probably wouldn't be especially useful outside of design, photography or video work.

The last thing to bear in mind is backlight technology. Most panels these days use LED backlights, as opposed to cathodes. They tend to be more uniform and consume less power. There are other also some panels which can "zone" their panels and have different brightness levels for the backlight, making blacks more vivid. This is not the same as an OLED screen, where pixels are made up of tiny LEDs, they're still LCD screens.

/edit

Oh, and input types as well. PCs seem to be using DisplayPort and USB-C more and more while consoles still use HDMI. You will want to chose a monitor that has both. If you're using your monitor with an HDMI source, you will most likely want to make sure that there is at least an audio passthrough on the monitor otherwise you won't get any sound out of it!

so much information! Thanks a lot!

 

What graphic card from the ones I have listed is better to get for 4k gaming?

[Rob_D]

so much information! Thanks a lot!

What graphic card from the ones I have listed is better to get for 4k gaming?

The bigger the better. For 4K ultra I'd go 3090.

 

But seriously, if you want 4K and all the graphical bells and whistles in modern games then I wouldn't drop below the RXT3080/RX6800XT level (If you've got ray-tracing turned on the RTX preforms ever so slightly better).

 

Although it's probably worth waiting to see what the 3070/80 ti models look like. And by then you might actually be able to by one of the cards .