3xpert wrote:Hello, I'm stuck with choosing a gaming monitor to play CS:GO with the lowest input lag which is not over priced as my budged is $350, I have found some monitors with 240hz that is below or on my budget but it have freesync and I have a Nvidia gtx 1070 GPU, I heard Freesync and GSync is useless for CS:GO but im not sure as there are mix thoughts regarding that. And is it possible to turnoff the Freesync feature and use the 240hz with nvidia GPU? Or is there a big difference with 144hz and 240hz? I used a 144hz before. Can you please recommend the best lowest input gaming monitor for CS:GO on a budget of $350. Thank You!
GSYNC/FreeSync (VRR technologies) also adds other engineering to a monitor that are non-VRR related.
For example, NVIDIA engineering for GSYNC also adds other non-GSYNC improvements:
-- Overdrive calibration
-- Optional ULMB (Ultra Low Motion Blur) setting
Historically there was a rough trend of GSYNC usually having less lag in non-GSYNC mode than FreeSync monitors in non-FreeSync mode, but this is changing, since FreeSync 2 put more rigorous certification for FreeSync monitors. So it's not necessarily as clear-cut these days.
The bottom line is you can turn on/off VRR, and if you ever play other games for fun occasionally, the VRR feature feels like a free graphics card upgrade. Given how expensive GPU's are due to cryptocurrency overpricing, the premium of GSYNC can sometimes be a bargain anyway, depending on how picky/fussy you are. If you play other games only 10% of the time (even say, you're still itching to play a solo game of Bioshock/Deus Ex style game), it can still make other monitor features worth it, even if they lay dormant most of the time if you're owning the monitor for 3-5 years. But if you only play CS:GO and you upgrade monitor every year, then perhaps VRR doesn't matter to you if your framerates are almost always near 240fps anyway...
VRR does tend to be less important (in general) for CS:GO because CS:GO usually runs at framerates above refresh rate, and VRR benefits more when your framerates are fluctuating much more wildly all over the place (like in other games like PUBG or Battlefield series etc) -- it can be such a chore to aim in some of those engines that adding VRR improves things quite a bit. Whereas it doesn't affect CS:GO nearly as much. How long will you have the monitor? Will you always only play CS:GO for that time duration?
GSYNC can be turned on/off, and sometimes it really helps certain games (e.g. PUBG reportedly benefits more from VRR than CS:GO does). 240Hz is about 1/2 as much motion blur as 120Hz, which can help aiming if you are trying to avoid lag of strobing.
On that note, $350 almost definitely means you won't be able to buy GSYNC
and 240Hz (except during holiday sales when Dell AW2518H's were on Black Friday and Boxing Day sales impressively almost within your budget).
So on that note, since you may be only playing CS:GO and you might be upgrading your monitor often (e.g. every year), then
Dell AW2518Hf and
Viewsonic XG2530 are the ones that currently I recommend in your budget range that won't frameskip at 240Hz (like the AOC and ACER 240Hz FreeSync monitors....sigh). No GSYNC monitor has a frameskipping issue as far as we are aware.
There was a number of frameskipping 240Hz FreeSync monitors (In non-FreeSync mode, they only displayed approximately 234 unique refresh cycles per second, skipping 6 refresh cycles per second). On several models, this is fixable with a CRU tweak, except for the Acer XF270HA where the frameskipping fix is as of yet unknown.
