Nvidia LDAT & PCAT – What Are They?

Display Latency

This is one that most of you will be the most familiar with. If you’ve ever played games on a TV, I’m sure you have, you’ll know this all too well. On my LG TV, for example, there is a terrifying delay between input and on-screen action due to the processing of the image. However, turn off all those features or put the TV in game mode, and the response time is drastically improved. The same is true for PC monitors too, albeit, they’re usually a lot better for latency than TVs.

One of the biggest improvements you can make is the refresh rate. 60 Hz is fine for most, but for competitive gaming, higher is certainly better. 120 Hz is becoming more common in the living room. However, PC gamers can now enjoy monitors of up to 360 Hz. That means the display can update the on-screen information every 0.0027 seconds rather than every 0.016 as it does with 60 Hz. So it’s all good and well improving peripheral, system and game latency, but if you’re then throwing that faster information away on a slow display, you’re unlikely to see most of the benefits.

Most monitors have a fixed response time, usually, it’ll say on the back of the box that it’s 5ms, 1ms, or 0.5ms, so at least something similar to that. So a lower response/GTG time is better, as are higher refresh rates.