frunction wrote:I don't think banding is the fault of the monitor manufacturer necessarily.
Correct. Banding is greatly influenced by a lot of the weakest links.
Many factors can reduce the precision of the colors (whether monitor, firmware drivers, GPU, game, source art, etc). All that 10-bit or 12-bit beauty can be for naught with a poorly compressed 8-bit JPG -- or a graphics driver -- or a monitor's poor processing.
frunction wrote:For IPS/VA generally, why do people care so much about viewing angle? How are they using their computer that it should matter? Even standing, slouching in chair, or using as a side monitor... TN is still fine to me. With IPS monitors I've had (XB271HU, QNIX), don't like the ghosting during gaming. When moving them over to use as a side monitor, the stupid glow/backlight are not worth slight improvement in colors imo.
Everybody has different vision sensitivites. Some are sensitive to brightness. Some are more sensitive to colors, others not (8% of population is colorblind). Some are sensitive to flicker, others are not. Some are sensitive to color shifts, others are not. Etc.
I've seen instances where strobed TN has less eyetrain for certain types of people than others (e.g. for people motion blur eyestrain). While most people got less eyestrain when the world moved from CRT to LCD, there are actually people who got MORE eyestrain.
And some human flicker sensitivities do behave weird with PWM: They get eyestrain from PWM dimming, but they don't get eyestrain from
motion blur reduction / ULMB (since it's a precision one-strobe-per-refresh that cleanly eliminates motion blur). In this case, the motion blur sensitivity is more painful than that individual's PWM sensitivity.
It's quite all over the map, and a poorly studied topic -- but so many anecdotes is saying everybody has different vision sensitivities.
I'm not surprised -- a huge number of different people see very differently, and this leads me to believe that "subtle sensitivity differences" are quite widespread (much more so than vision diseases). One person might be sensitive to 60Hz or 75Hz or "X" Hz flicker, and another may only see that same frequency as a slight flicker. Another person may see colors just fine but don't see a big difference between IPS vs TN. Etc. Etc.
Hate motion blur? Or even eyestrain from motion blur?
Get a strobed monitor (ULMB, DyAc, etc -- improved descendants of LightBoost)
Hate motion blur
and flicker? ...
Get as much Hz as you can afford (240Hz), get a good GPU, and run 240fps@240Hz
Sensitive to gamma shifts? ....
Get an IPS monitor
Unusually sensitive to poor contrast? ...
Get a VA or OLED display
Sensitive to brightness? ....
Get a monitor with a wide brightness adjust range
Sensitive to blue light? ....
Get a monitor with adjustability here (Low Color Temperature, Low Blue Light, Night Mode, etc)
Sensitive to stutters/tearing? ....
Get GSYNC or FreeSync
Etc...
No monitor can solve all the above, all simultaneously, for all games.
It's very, very hard to simultaneously solve motion blur (get CRT clarity) and flicker (avoid impulsing/strobing/etc), until you go into the Hertz stratosphere, so it's often an "either-or" proposion. It is also
why we were so eager to test 480Hz -- basically the closest thing you can get to "Strobeless LightBoost" or "Strobeless ULMB". Until it truly happens, we're stuck with selecting multiple different modes on the same gaming monitor to try to address a specific problem.
There's currently no jack-of-all-trades display that addresses every single human sensitivity, but many of the monitors can check multiple boxes simultaneously. A modern 240Hz monitor can check multiple boxes all at once, just have to select between different modes of operation. Many often has PWM-free backlight dimming (addresses flicker sensitivity) while also giving option to switch to strobed modes (addresses motion blur sensitivity) or switch to variable refresh rate (addresses stutter/tearing sensitivity) etc. And you can often adjust/calibrate to address brightness sensitivities.
If your eyes is fine with TN LCD, then a good 240Hz with VRR/strobing features (and PWM-free dimming in non-strobed mode) is quite flexible in selectiable modes: It can provide you with multiple modes to try out:
(1) normal fixed-Hz modes for compatibility
(2) strobed modes for fixing motion blur
(3) variable-refresh-rate modes to fix stutters/tearing
(4) and also, the minimum possible motion blur that you can get without strobing (240Hz, of the 1ms GtG TN type, definitely has less motion blur than anything non-strobed less than 240Hz).
(5) many of these monitors can also provide other ergonomic options (wide brightness adjust range, low blue light, PWM-free brightness, etc) if one addresses your specific sensitivity.
For those interested, we always mark which ones has VRR or strobing features:
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Official List of Best Gaming Monitors
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List of G-SYNC Monitors
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List of FreeSync Monitors