It might even be making it slightly worse, depending on what effects are being applied.
#ROKU TV FOR PC GAMING TV#
If “game mode” on your TV or monitor is just a color setting, it might look brighter and more colorful in a generally appealing way, but it isn’t affecting the input lag in at functional level. You can adjust these values manually with the color settings, but these broad modes are meant as a quick way move between them like equalizer presets on a stereo. You’ve probably seen these in the menu as well: the “normal” mode is a cooler image with more of a blue tone, the “movies” mode tends to be warmer with higher contrast for more vivid blacks, the “sports” mode ups the color saturation and brightness for easily spotting motion and bright colors. If your TV or monitor isn’t designed with gaming in mind, “game mode” might not be a setting related to the input lag at all.
Unfortunately, the term “game mode” is somewhat ambiguous. RELATED: Why Does My New HDTV's Picture Look Sped Up and "Smooth"? …Or Game Mode Might Just Be Another Color Setting It’s better to adjust specific video settings to reduce the effect, but if you can’t do that (maybe you’re at a friend or relative’s house where you don’t want to mess with the settings), switching over to game mode might help. Not only is this well below the threshold for human reaction times, but it’s also at or below the input lag for controllers, keyboards, and mice, not to mention way, way below the network latency you’ll experience in any online multiplayer game.īy the way, if you’ve got a TV (especially a 4K TV) that suffers from the dreaded “soap opera effect” and your TV’s game mode falls into this category, turning it on can often reduce that effect. Some high-end TVs or monitors, especially those that are marketed to gamers with high refresh rates, can get that time down to just one millisecond-one one-thousandth of a second for the image to go from your game console or PC to the panel in front of your face. Generally, this means shaving a few milliseconds off, like going from 10ms of lag down to 6ms. When you enable game mode on some monitors and televisions, it strips away some or all of the processing that the screen does to the image to get it from the source to the screen panel as fast as possible. This TCL TV is more helpful than most: it tells you right away that the game mode reduces input lag.
1/100th of a second in a fast-paced shooter or a twitchy fighting game might be the difference between a punch landing or not. But input lag can be a huge deal for playing modern PC or console games. As long as your TV’s audio is synced correctly, your brain can’t notice a 1/100th of a second difference, and you don’t need blazing-fast reactions to type up an email on a desktop monitor. That’s about one one-hundredth of a second at most. Input lag is generally very low in the context of human vision-between five and ten milliseconds (ms) for most modern LCD screens.
That’s the amount of time it takes all those electronics inside your TV or monitor to process the image, apply different settings like brightness, contrast, and color correction, and light up the portions of the LCD panel and backlight with the correct data. There’s a tiny amount of time between when the display receives the signal from the video cable and when it’s fully rendered onto the screen. That means that, unlike some of the simpler televisions and monitors back in the days of cathode ray tubes, images don’t transfer instantly from whatever’s plugged into your screen to the screen itself. A motherboard from the inside of a typical computer monitor. But the point is that there’s more going on behind the scenes to translate the digital input from your computer, DVD player, or game console into a visible image than you might initially realize. It isn’t as complicated as a conventional PC, of course-it doesn’t need to be. Even for a screen that doesn’t have any “smart” web-connected features, there’s quite a lot of electronics hiding inside the plastic housing, including processors, memory, and all the other stuff you’d generally expect to find in a computer.
First, you probably understand that your TV or computer monitor isn’t just a dumb screen connected to a video cable. Before we start, we need to cover a few basics.