X2 made your argument a few weeks ago bulbousbeard, you and him should get together for coffee, looks like you would get along perfectly. The FACT is, I have been gaming on LCD's for over a decade and I can assure you that it works just fine. I am not entirely sure what your argument is now, you seem to be arguing both FOR LCD's in gaming and against them. But here are some counters to your points:
1) V-sync doesn't cause stuttering unless your video card can't maintain 60 fps, and frankly if you are looking for perfection in a game, you will NEVER get it below 60 fps.
2) Screen tearing will only happen if your framerate drops below 60 fps, with v-sync on.
3) You are mixing up the frequency of frames from the old analogue signals with what a digital rendering will do. Mame won't speed up the game to output 60 frames per second to achieve v-sync, the video card will just upscale the number of frames to get it above 60, just like it will do when watching a 24 fps blu ray or viewing a static picture on your screen. It is when your video card can't process those frames to begin with that you run into problems. Upscaling is easy, creating new unique frames is the hard part.
Personally with v-sync on I don't notice any tearing in mame. Demul on the other hand will tear like crazy, but not enough to warrant a $700 monitor and a $300 vid card to run it, besides, I don't even notice it any more.
Screen tearing, ghosting, and latency can make an LCD perform horribly in comparison to a CRT, but with a CRT you are pretty much stopping yourself at about 20" if you want more than SVGA resolution, and I LIKE having a 24 or 27" for my PC and for modern games. So while high res CRT's were better than LCD's 15 years ago, it is impractical and a moot point to argue the value in the comparison in regards to high end gaming. Thing is, even in games where the graphics card can't maintain 60 fps, 99% of people will never even notice or will be used to it and not even see it happening any more. Sure, lightboost and g-sync will each fix some problems, but you also can't run both at the same time, so either you eliminate tearing with g-sync on graphics cards that are too slow to hit a steady 60 fps, or you get better latency and less ghosting with Lightboost. And both technologies only work on TN screens, they can't achieve the results on any IPS screen, so you have crappy colors and bad off axis viewing.
And resolution has nothing to do with it. I run my 10 year old LCD at 1920x1200.. higher than the latest 1080 monitors. And since it is a good TN, the latency, even at that age, is about 5ms, far faster than the QHD IPS screens. AND at that resolution, just like in QHD (1440 lines) it takes a monster graphics card to get 60 fps in anything 3d intensive. If you haven't figured it out yet, the key to minimizing screen tearing and giving you a better game experience is going to come down to having a monster graphics card.
That being said, your last post looks like you are arguing FOR cheap LCD's..
The whole idea started with a sub $100 monitor, and the reason I pointed out a 4:3 19" is because at that price point any newer 16:9 is going to give you a smaller game field (you can find 20-22" screens at that price used). I personally use 27" IPS panels in my cabs, but if they made a decent 4:3 even at 22-24" I would use those instead. No way I would use a $700 monitor that requires a $300 graphics card to run mame games in a cabinet. On my gaming computer, if I were still into FPS games, I would (and almost did) buy one. Chances are my next gaming monitor will be a decent IPS for around $300 instead, even though I can't do Lightboost or G-Sync with it. But my priorities changed in recent years, I care more about color and picture quality than I do about playing first person shooters.
Bottom line, anything smaller than 27" LCD for arcade I would use a 19" 4:3, it makes more sense and gives a larger play field. Above that any decent IPS 27"+ would be just fine for me. Trust me, an extra 10-20ms of latency or a little slight ghosting will NOT affect my pacman game.
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Topic: Building from the ground up - Hardware Advice Request (Read 9265 times)
