Max Refresh Rate for LCD

[greyhound35]

Hi All,

I'm planning on constructing a slimline cab, making use of a 20" 4:3 LCD monitor.  I understand there will be issues in getting the authentic look, however my main concern is that of refresh rate.

The monitor I'm looking at (not many 20" 4:3's are being sold these days!) has a refresh rate of 8ms.  Will that be sufficient to play Mame games on?

I also want to be able to hook my xbox1 up to it via an x2vga unit

Thanks in advance

[Blanka]

Not only worry about the refresh time. Well a slow refresh may even not be that bad at all! It only adds ghosting, which many old CRT's had with their bad phosphors. The real thing to worry about is input lag. And unfortunately, this aspect is never advertised. To compensate for ghosting, LCD's calculate overdrive behaviour from 2 previous frames. Which means a lag of 2/60's of a second, or around 30ms. You can try this by hooking up both your considered LCD and a CRT in dual head mirror setup to your PC. Then run this:
http://tft.vanity.dk/inputlag.html
Make a picture of both screens side by side and calculate the lag based on the difference on both screens
Although I think my LCD screen has a lag of 2 frames as well, I do not find it annoying with Mame.

About 20 inch. There is also 21.3 inch 4:3. And these screens are all awesome. Check a Samsung 214T someday. You'll love it.

[TOK]

I'd be worried about fast action games like Defender blurring with an 8ms LCD. I bought a 19" 4:3 LCD for my bartop. I think that is 2ms.

I've read about input lag as it applies to LCDs and other PC games (mainly first person shooters), but I've never noticed it.

[Jack Burton]

If you played the original game a lot you will definitely notice 8ms of input delay.  If you have never played much MAME then it is likely you won't notice or care. 

For schmups and fighters I would recommend you try to find a monitor with 2ms delay.

[Ummon]

It only adds ghosting, which many old CRT's had with their bad phosphors.

  They weren't bad phosphors and it wasn't ghosting. Any material has a period of deactivation and phosphors are far better than LCD components.

[patrickl]

Thanks for that inputlag link. I just bought a LCD TV and was unable to play GTA or Driver on it. I just couldn't get the steering right. It felt like the riming was off. I remembered something about the lag, ran the timers and indeed with default settings the TV adds 200ms lag! Luckily it has a "Games" setting and then it's similar to my LCD monitor.

Seriously 200ms lag on a TV (extra). That's just ridiculous isn't it? I guess it's all the image enhancement stuff that these new TVs run.