What is the best gaming monitor? If you’ve been using the same old monitor for years, you won’t know what you’re missing out on. Thanks to wider screens, higher resolutions, improved refresh rates, and new technologies, you can enjoy your favorite games with a level of clarity, smoothness, and immersion that you’ve never seen before.
Display technologies have come a long way over the past several years, with Micro LED and OLED options finally arriving on the market. These technologies finally mean it’s possible to enjoy a great HDR experience while you’re sitting at your gaming desk, but be prepared to cough up some cash for this premium experience.
For everyone else, traditional LCD screens using the various IPS, TN, and VA panels remain as reliable as ever. Now, resolutions and refresh rates previously reserved for the higher end of the space are readily available at much more reasonable prices.
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Best gaming monitors in 2024:
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How to choose the best gaming monitor
The first place any of us should start when picking a gaming monitor is to consider what our priorities are for that screen. If money’s no object, some of the top screens available can do everything well but in most instances, there’s some compromise to be made.
As such, perhaps the single best place to start is with the refresh rate of a screen. If you’re into competitive esports FPS games, you’ll want a very high refresh rate to ensure the image onscreen is updated as rapidly as possible affording you peak accuracy. That’s why we recommend 240Hz or higher screens for serious competitive gamers.
If you like to play reasonably fast-paced games but aren’t super into the competitive scene, 120Hz is fine and also ensures you have nice smooth-looking scrolling and other animation on your desktop.
In general, if you’re not at all into any sort of speedy gaming you can get away with a 60Hz screen – 60Hz has, after all, been good enough for consoles for the longest time. However, even if you’re on a really tight budget we’d still recommend looking out for an 85Hz or 100Hz screen to get just that slightly smoother look to your games and desktop scrolling.
Once you’ve decided just how fast a screen you need, it’s then time to look at size and resolution. If you’re on a tight budget, you’ll be forced to stick to screens with a 1080p resolution, which is fine for most games and just about does the job for most desktop use. On 24-inch screens, that resolution can look reasonably sharp but on 27-inch screens and larger it can look quite blocky, so we recommend moving up to a higher resolution.
Aiming for a 27-inch screen with a 1440p resolution is an ideal balance for most users. You get a screen that’s big enough and high enough resolution for some desktop multitasking but that also looks reasonably sharp.
Meanwhile, if your budget can stretch to it – and your graphics card can handle it – 4K, 32-inch screens or even ultrawide and superwide screens come into play. 4K is great if you’re really into cinematic games and want a pin-sharp image that makes the most of your top-tier graphics card. Likewise, if you’re into video or image editing, the extra resolution can be super useful.
As for ultrawide screens, these are generally 34-inch in size and offer what we consider an ideal balance of size and resolution. The extra width means you can easily fit two or three windows side-by-side plus the wider view (aspect ratio) is an ideal match for widescreen movies and works great for many games too.
Perhaps the ultimate gaming monitor option right now is the 49-inch super wide screen. These are even wider than an ultrawide screen and are big enough to fit three or four desktop windows side-by-side. However, as impressive as they are, they’re too wide for most widescreen movies and many games don’t support the extra width or start to feel a bit strange at such a wide view. However, these displays are fantastic for racing and flight sims, so again it depends on your priorities.
As for whether to go for LCD or OLED, OLED is better in almost every way and well worth getting if you can afford it. However, LCDs can be brighter, OLEDs can suffer from burn-in (permanent marks getting burned into the screen), and they’re not as good for text clarity. As such, we wouldn’t recommend any of the most common OLEDs for a main work/reading screen other than the 32-inch 4K models – they’re best just used for gaming and video.
FAQs
Is 60Hz good for gaming?
While 360Hz monitors like the MSI MPG 271QRX are top-tier when it comes to helping aid quick reaction times in competitive multiplayer games, 60Hz panels can still be brilliant for gaming, especially if you’re not playing at a professional level. That said, prices for faster refresh rate screens have dropped so much these days that you often might as well at least step up to a 120Hz panel for a generally smoother feel to your games. It’s generally only 4k screens where the cost of higher refresh rates is meaningfully higher than for 60Hz models.
Should I use two gaming monitors?
Multi-monitor setups admittedly look a bit like a hacker setup from a cheesy Hollywood action flick, but using more than one display is beneficial. The extra screen will give you somewhere to pop your Discord window while running games, and it’ll come in handy if you work from home.
Of course, using additional monitors fully depends on your graphics card of choice, as you’ll need appropriate display outputs. The extra screens could also make lower-spec GPUs sweat, which in turn can affect in-game performance.
Should I use Nvidia G-Sync?
Yes. It’s nearly always better to use G-Sync or Freesync, though there are some cases where you might want to experiment with turning it off. It’s possible to use G-Sync on many FreeSync monitors, as the underlying technology is fundamentally the same. Here’s our handy video on how to enable Adaptive Sync with an Nvidia GeForce GPU. PCGamesN also has a full guide on how to run AMD’s screen tech with a GeForce GPU.
Is a curved or flat screen better for gaming?
This is purely a personal choice, but a lot of people would prefer a curved option because it can help to make games more immersive. This is particularly true for games from a first-person perspective, where it can recreate the feeling of peripheral vision. Curves are particularly beneficial for larger screens. If the curve of a screen is too sharp, however, it runs the risk of damaging the immersion by having both curves visible in your eyeline.
Is IPS, TN, or VA better?
This largely comes down to personal preference and your needs as a gamer. However, for the best balance of image quality and gaming response, we recommend IPS. TN is the fastest to respond – with screens running up to 540Hz – making it a natural choice for competitive gaming. Meanwhile, VA has the best black levels and contrast, so it’s great for atmospheric games and video but it’s generally the slowest to respond so often isn’t the best for competitive gaming. Read our full IPS vs TN vs VA guide for a more detailed breakdown of the differences.
What is ghosting?
Ghosting is where a screen’s pixels take a while to fully change from one color to another and as a result, the overall image can look like there are ghostly trails behind moving parts of the image. This is also known as blur or smearing and it can be both distracting in general and downright game-ruining for faster-paced competitive gamers. A monitor’s response time is the measurement to look for to avoid ghosting – the lower the better. OLED is the fastest tech out there (<1ms average), with old CRT screens also being very fast, while LCD screens are the slowest, with TN being the fastest type of LCD (<3ms), IPS being a bit slower (<5ms) and VA generally being the slowest (<10ms).
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