Game Mode on Displays - Is it necessary?

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stephen0983

Gawd
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Feb 3, 2010
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Ok I'm pretty much just wondering is it worth losing some of the image quality to put a display on "Game Mode" to reduce lag time. My monitors and TV both have the feature, yet I don't typically use it. Monitors being Dell 2412M and 2311H, TV being 40" Samsung 60Hz LCD. TIA
 
Depends what your doing on the TV and if input lag bothers you. It turns off some of the post processing on the TV in order to cut down on input lag. So to answer your question, no its not necessary. It is however a good easy way to reduce input lag. You can also go into the settings of TVs and turn off those settings manually. So gaming mode is not always needed.
 
The U2412m's game mode does nothing except screw with colors. It is very fast in every mode so use the one you like best for visuals.

For TVs it varies on the manufacturer and model number. AVSforum can help here.
 
Game modes in TVs that work in a way they should do NOT reduce image quality. It removes all post processing and scalers to reduce the lag. In other words it should show the image as it is without "enhancements" (ok, some enhancements are nice for movies). In some TVs like Sonys game mode is the only way to get 4:4:4 support which actually improves image quality from PC sources!
 
Only Dell to have working game mode is U2410 and there it introduce ugliness only because Dell deliberately make it so. Thankfully with so called game mode trick one can use all image options with full quality. Other models like u2412m and u2311 game mode is left for marketing purposes.

On TVs only feature that will definitely be disabled is motion upscaler (so called 100/120/200/240/400/600Hz) as it have to introduce at least one frame input lag. Other thing would be advanced RTC that fetch more frames ahead so there might be more RTC errors (though most TV even in game mode have so horrendous input lag it's still probably on). Scalers, image postprocessing etc are disabled it's not bad thing but good as those often only make aliasing more visible by sharpening sharp edges.
 
There are quite a few TV's with delay free game modes (most sites and AVS members test input lag with the stop-watch timer=high and inaccurate values), the problem is many have locked picture settings when GM is enabled.

Most monitors game modes have lower average gamma values (1.8-2.0) to lighten dark areas.
 
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