VGA or DVI Differences

[xFuryofFivex]

I was wondering what are the differences if any between VGA(analog) or DVI...i know they have VGA to DVI adapters... but would that make me run in DVI mode...and whats better to game with DVI or VGA or is there really no difference in "games"

and why are the adapters sooo overpriced at places such as walmart...bestbuy, staples..

last question

if i run dual monitors...

can i run one analog and one DVi... and if so what kind of performance hit am i looking at

 

[EnderW]

if you can run in DVI, do it - the picture quality is a lot better
a VGA > DVI adapter will do nothing for picture quality, in fact I've never seen one - are you sure you aren't thinking of DVI > VGA?

running two monitors isn't going to give you any kind of performance hit, no matter how you have them hooked up, unless you try and play your games stretched across both screens

if you hook 2 identical LCDs up side by side, one on VGA, one on DVI, you can tell a big difference, I could at least - turned the VGA monitor off completely until my dual DVI card got here

 

[xFuryofFivex]

DVI to VGA.. thats it heh
just wanted to see what it lookd like to have an extra wide screen...would be cool.. play games on one screen and have chats on other heh

gonna be awkward 19inch CRT with 15 maybe 13inch CRT next to it...
ill post a pic if it works.

 

[JL_Audio_User]

DVI is noticeably better than VGA on my monitor

 

[Matrox462]

I have a 19" LCD that I went from VGA (analog) to DVI (digital), and let me tell you, the difference is HUGE. With DVI there is no need to "auto adjust" the image, because it's a digital signal. Text was much sharper! You mentioned if it's for gaming, but the benefits of a sharper image are apparent in everything.

I have dual monitors hooked up, and I have one DVI, and one VGA. There are absolutely no problems with doing this. The only thing is that the VGA doesn't look as nice on the one monitor but that's fine since it's an older 15" LCD.

This is a stupid question, but do CRT monitors even support DVI? I haven't delt with any of the newer CRTs, since I've been using LCDs, so I don't know...

 

[xFuryofFivex]

dvi to VGA?.. i dont think they do,i think only LCD's

 

[xonik]

This is a stupid question, but do CRT monitors even support DVI?

Yes, a few of the later ones did. It's not a stupid question; DVI support came at the very final generations of many CRT monitors, and high-end models only. By that time, LCDs had stolen the limelight.

 

[Bastek]

It depends on the monitor and the card. I run dual VP-912 on DVI and VGA with the same settings, and nobody can tell any difference in quality. Same thing with my friend's dual Nec 2180UX. Quality D/A and A/D converters is the key, but no mfg publishes any specs for them.

 

[mistar]

As DVI-I is a digital and analogue connection some CRT monitors can use it as well.

But it depends on the gfx card. It needs to have a DVI-I output in order to send an analogue signal.
Many gfx cards come with the DVI-D which is limited to digital monitors.

DVI-D is for digital transmission
DVI-A is for analogue transmission
DVI-I is a combination of the two.

No reasonable gfx cards are made with a DVI-A output only. =)

I did about 6-7 reviews on monitors now and on each and every one of them I could see a difference between D-SUB and DVI-D. On some monitors the VGA cable did contribute to a reduced quality picture but for most of the monitors the difference couldn't be avoided even though I tried to move the VGA cable away from all interference.
The difference differs a lot from monitor to monitor. On some the quality is fair or even really good with VGA and on others I couldn’t endure the pain it was looking at the monitor when I knew how much better the DVI picture looked.

According to the technological principle it isn't peculiar that a difference can be seen.

 

[Matrox462]

Yes, a few of the later ones did. It's not a stupid question; DVI support came at the very final generations of many CRT monitors, and high-end models only. By that time, LCDs had stolen the limelight.

Thanks for answering that

 

[PenaltyShot]

That's good to hear some real-world comments on DVI vs. analog. I've read conflicting articles on the Net. Some say there's very "marginal" improvement on LCD monitors with DVI over analog, others go so far to say that there's no point in buying an LCD monitor if you're not going to use it with DVI. I was wondering what the real truth was. I'm sure some of it is subjective preference, but on the other hand, just about everyone can tell the quality difference between a plain old budget TV set and a plasma screen, or even a regular Video TV picture versus S-Video. So I figured that the DVI picture would just have to be noticeably sharper, no matter what.

 

[[jarod]is[root]]

DVI to VGA.. thats it heh
just wanted to see what it lookd like to have an extra wide screen...would be cool.. play games on one screen and have chats on other heh.

If you do run dual screen, you will not be able to use it while playing a game. The game will disable dual screen and run on only one monitor. The other monitor will just go to stand-bye.

 

[xFuryofFivex]

ahhh ok...it still would be cool to have 2 monitors... make extra screen...but 2 monitors,decent ones at that, are in the $300+ range

 

[ucisilentbob]

The odd thing i noticed is that when you have a dvi monitor like my 2001fp, plugged into vga versus dvi, the difference is huge. but on a monitor that is purely vga, the image quality is nowhere near as bad as when i compare vga and dvi on my 2001fp. is it because the dvi interferes with the vga, or is it because dvi =>vga conversion on a native dvi panel is causing the IQ problems?

 

[Matrox462]

The odd thing i noticed is that when you have a dvi monitor like my 2001fp, plugged into vga versus dvi, the difference is huge. but on a monitor that is purely vga, the image quality is nowhere near as bad as when i compare vga and dvi on my 2001fp. is it because the dvi interferes with the vga, or is it because dvi =>vga conversion on a native dvi panel is causing the IQ problems?

It's probably just because you can't try DVI on that second monitor to truely see what it could look like. Remember, all LCD's are digital displays (with or without dvi), so using a VGA signal means that it has to convert digital to analog and back to digital. Like so:

VGA
Graphics card (digital) > Output to Cable (converted to analog) > LCD (converted to digital)

DVI
Graphics card (digital) > Output to Cable (digital) > LCD (digital)

Hope that makes sense

edit: I realized you didn't mention what you were comparing the 2001fp to. Unless it's a similiarly sized monitor, a larger monitor will show more quality difference (since, well, it's larger!)