How Dell’s New Monitor Can Help You Play Games Better
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Gaming gear always looks fancy, and often carries a higher price tag to accompany those fancy features. But if you’re new to PC gaming, you might rightfully question what real benefits you get from these more expensive products. Why, for example, do you need a gaming monitor, and how does it help make you better at games?
There are gaming mice, keyboards, headphones, mouse mats and even gaming chairs. But a gaming monitor is, in my opinion, the most beneficial of all gaming-specific hardware.
To help illustrate my point, I’m using the new Dell 25 Gaming Monitor as a great example of a display that’s purpose-built to make your gaming experience better. It prioritizes speed and accuracy over everything else, to help the most competitive gamers play at their best.
Let’s take a look at this high-performance monitor to find out what features it brings to help you win more consistently.
Accuracy, Up!
When your gaming PC or console spits out a video signal, that signal has to be processed by the display before an image is shown on screen. Most TVs and non-gaming monitors take their sweet time at this, prioritizing fancy image-enhancing effects, which add several milliseconds of lag.
This is fine for movies or office work, but it can make video games feel sluggish. This can impact your aim in shooters, or throw you off your racing line in a driving game.
Most modern TVs have a Game Mode, which significantly speeds up this processing step, but they’re still not nearly as quick as a good gaming display.
Screens like the Dell 25 Gaming Monitor don’t apply complex image effects like those slow TVs, so they’re able to push the signal through to the display in a near instant. This means low lag, snappier-feeling controls, and a more accurate depiction of what’s happening in the game versus what you’re seeing.
Boost Your Reaction Speed
TVs and office monitors update their displays with a new image 60 times per second (in other words, they run at 60Hz). And that’s fine. But the Dell 25 Gaming Monitor runs at 240Hz — four times faster.
This not only makes for much smoother-looking gameplay, but it also means that the time between frames is four times smaller, reducing input lag and giving you four times the visual information. If you’re playing Fortnite, you’ll see someone pop out from behind a wall three frames before someone with a conventional screen.
You might think this is splitting hairs, but it’s more about feel than looks. When you experience high frame rate gaming for the first time, you’ll immediately feel the difference, even if you can’t immediately see it. If you play fast-paced shooters like Counter Strike or Call of Duty: Warzone, where there are milliseconds between life and death, 240Hz is ideal.
See Distant Enemies Clearly
Pixel response refers to the time it takes for those microscopic pixels on your display to change color. A slow pixel response results in blur during fast moving action.
Office displays don’t prioritize pixel response. But any gaming monitor worth its salt these days will boast a 3ms response time or faster, which means razer sharpness even in motion. This helps keep distant enemies in games like PUBG sharp and easier to track.
The Dell 25 Gaming monitor has a 1ms response when set to the ‘Extreme’ mode in its on-screen menu. But this mode tends to cause issues with black areas shimmering slightly. I prefer the medium setting, ‘Super Fast’ mode. It’s still incredibly sharp, but with less visible noise.
No More Stuttering
When things get chaotic, some games can slow down and become choppy. This can affect your speed and accuracy in driving games, shooters, platformers or any game requiring fast reactions.
While conventional displays suffer during these stuttering moments, gaming monitors solve this problem by synchronizing their refresh rates with your game’s frame rate. This results in silky smooth, linear gameplay during low frame rate moments, which minimizes its impact on gameplay. But it also means that a high refresh rate display like the Dell 25 Gaming Monitor (240Hz) can stay in sync with your games at blistering speeds.
Get the Right Resolution for Your Gaming Preferences
When shopping for a gaming monitor, it’s important to get a display that suits your needs. With a relatively low resolution of 1080p, and an ultra-high refresh rate of 240Hz, the Dell 25 Gaming Monitor is clearly intended for competitive gamers who care more about speed and accuracy than image quality.
At that resolution, even a mid-range gaming PC will be able to drive high frame rates for a better competitive edge in games like Counter Strike or Fortnite. And for good measure, it also serves up 99% sRGB color coverage, resulting in vivid-looking graphics with excellent contrast.
That said, if you mostly play offline, single player adventures or slow-paced games, you’d be better served by a higher resolution (1440p or 4K) screen, or perhaps a cheaper display with a lower refresh rate like this Dell 27 Curved Gaming Monitor.
Buy the Dell 25 Gaming Monitor
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