VGA VS DVI

H

Hulk

Supreme [H]ardness
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  1. What exactly is the differnce between the two?
  2. Will I see a huge difference upgrading from VGA to DVI?
 
2) depends whether you have a good picture already with VGA.
 
VGA could never look as good as DVI. The picture is sharper, and VGA is grainy.
 
GJSNeptune said:
VGA could never look as good as DVI. The picture is sharper, and VGA is grainy.
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Thats true if your VGA picture is grainy and isnt sharp.
But if your VGA picture isnt grainy and is sharp, then its not true :rolleyes:
 
GJSNeptune said:
I'd love to see a VGA picture as good or better than a DVI picture.
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I've seen many and have my own experience too.
Before I got my 42" Plasma, I had a 37" S-IPS LCD that only had VGA in for 1080p PC use.
The picture quality was free from any defect.
There was no noise, no grain, it was as sharp as could be.
From previous threads on this topic, others have had a similar experience too.

What you should have stated is that with DVI, you have a 100% chance of having a sharp noise free picture whereas with VGA you dont.
If you currently have a picture you are happy with using VGA, DVI is unlikely to be of benefit.
 
Being happy with VGA means you don't know what you're missing.

My gripe with DVI is that it doesn't always turn on the monitor.
 
Quality can't vary much with digital signals. It either works or doesn't. I suppose the materials used could determine durability and such, but cheap cables work just as well as expensive ones. Link Depot is fine, but I would head over to monoprice.com.
 
Nenu said:
If you currently have a picture you are happy with using VGA, DVI is unlikely to be of benefit.
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I've never seen VGA look as good as DVI. Its not unusable, but its not like DVI/HDMI cables are that expensive either.
 
GJSNeptune said:
Being happy with VGA means you don't know what you're missing..
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Have you actually tested this by getting a friend to plug the monitor in to a DVI or VGA port without you knowing which one the monitor was plugged into?

Hulk said:
VGA VS DVI
What exactly is the differnce between the two?
Will I see a huge difference upgrading from VGA to DVI?
Click to expand...

As stated before VGA is analog, DVI is digital.

The chances of you being able to tell the difference between the two is doubtful. Why don't you test it for your self and see if you can see the difference? Get a friend to plug in the monitor into DVI or VGA without you knowing which one he plugged it into come back into the room and see which one looks better.
 
kur1j said:
Have you actually tested this by getting a friend to plug the monitor in to a DVI or VGA port without you knowing which one the monitor was plugged into?
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I only have DVI ports, but my 15" has only a VGA connector, so it's on an adapter. The difference is night & day for me. Maybe newer and/or high-end monitors and HDTVs handle VGA better, but with my monitors it's easy to see.

On the other hand, since DVI is digital its quality can't fluctuate. If I wiggle my VGA connector a bit, the picture changes, dims, shifts colors, etc.
 
The difference between VGA and DVI is HUGE to me. I can immediately sit down at a computer and tell what connection it is using. No joke. Do yourself and your eyes a big favor and never, ever use VGA anything ever again.

I also know alot of people are not as sensitive or anal to this crap. -The same people that can sit in front of a 60hz CRT 8 hours a day and not wanna jump off a cliff.
 
My LG 194WT monitors hooked up to my old eVGA 7800GS via DVI and VGA looked identical.
I tested our Dell 17" monitor that has both DVI and VGA on it and you could see that the DVI was sharper than the VGA on that monitor, VGA was slightly blurry.

I will say it depends on the monitor.
 
Will you see a huge difference between VGA and DVI?

It all depends on what video chipset is being used inside the display. Some chipsets have great VGA implementation, where most people would be hard pressed to notice a difference.

Sometimes a graphics card VGA output can be flawed, heck sometimes even the dvi output can be flawed. DVI to VGA adapters can ruin the picture too sometimes, and make them less sharp.

Otherwise it's like what everyone else is saying, most of the time DVI/HDMI is perceptibly better than VGA.

Here's where most of us shop for our cables http://www.monoprice.com/products/subdepartment.asp?c_id=102&cp_id=10209
 
GJSNeptune said:
I only have DVI ports, but my 15" has only a VGA connector, so it's on an adapter. The difference is night & day for me. Maybe newer and/or high-end monitors and HDTVs handle VGA better, but with my monitors it's easy to see.

On the other hand, since DVI is digital its quality can't fluctuate. If I wiggle my VGA connector a bit, the picture changes, dims, shifts colors, etc.
Click to expand...

OH, so you sit down with a shitty old monitor, then say the newer monitor looks great. You should do reviews man, you're so properly subjective.
 
I recently made the switch, and I've found that DVI produces a much sharper image at 1920*1200

Unfortunately the resolution information is sent digitally (something about EDID) so I can't specify a custom resolution above the native 1920*1200. Crysis has this problem where it only lets you go up to the 2nd highest supported res (at least on my machine) so I used a fake high-res in VGA to enable 1920*1200. Now I can't do it.
 
If you won't to be technical dvi will always be as good as monitors scaler will allow, with that said VGA will always be as good as the monitors scaler allows. On some it is better on others it is not. It all depends on if the manufacture decided to put a good analog to digital convertor and viceversa into the monitor.

Also the reson people bash vga over dvi is because with it being analog there is a tendency for there to be artifacts and blurriness from the connection because its a fluctuating voltage. DVI is a flutcuating voltage but if there is an artifact within it's signal then it just resends the data. The problem is with vga well not really a problem but a drawback is that it can go to higher resolutions than dvi but there is a greater chance of an artifact if the vga was equal in quality to dvi on a particular monitor.

being digital(DVI) there is a certain amount of bandwidth that the signal can't threshold. With vga you can go past that threshold becasue there isn't one. with analog you can send as much data as you want it just may be corrupted once it is transferred. Dvi can only send as much data as the controller can process. So technicly at lower resolutions you will be fine with either if the monitor and (videocard most people forget) have a good output/input for vga.

once you get to higher resolutions dvi will require an additional connection. while vga doesn't now wiht vga you could bump the resolution up to the point that the signal is so blurry and grainy that it looks like crap. if you wanted you could send a resolution/signal accross vga that would reqiore 4 dvi connections to have enough bandwidth to hit that same resoluiton. The thing with dvi is that it has to be perfect.in acuality if we were to have say 4 vga iputs for 1/4 of the screen vs 1 dvi and you set a resolution of say 640 by 480 and you were sending the data directly from an analog signal which one would you think to be better. Of course the vga would be. the reason being becasue we live in an analog world and the image itself being analog and those imperfections is what make them the best.

an analog recording the master sounds way better in analog then once the turn it to digital. Most people think that digital is better for sound. No it is only better for perfect copy's and to make sure those copys stay as close to the original as possible. analog in itself will always be superiour to digital as far as a cleaner image and a cleaner sound. The only problem is that is with the orignal. Now ive typed and gone completely off the subject abit.

To be honest as long as you don't go any higher than 1680by1050 and your monitor has as good of a vga input as a dvi. Then either will work although being analog on some monitors you can acutally run at a higher refresh at native over dvi if the scaler itself can handle the input. the vga over dvi thing will i think keep being posted.

I myself when i first started made this exact thread but have since selfeduated myself along with this awesome site. if dvi works better then vga on your monitor. CHEERs!:D If it doesn't then it's not the fault of VGA being inferior to dvi becasue technically being in an analog world any analog connection will be superior. But since we have to make copys of things the best next thing is digital for its ability to send perfect copys. That being said at lower resolutions it doesn't matter, at higher resolutions it may not as well.....

also since videocards render the data based on mathmatics that has a cetain color for each pixel represented by a certain number of bits then keeping it digital will give you perfect copy becasue you started digital. So technicly on computer connections digital is better. But analog can do just as good at lower resolutions and in a way it has the ability to hit higher resolutions. so you can't knock it either.

Edit: (for spaceing between paragraphs:p)

this is the diffrence between the two. Seeing a diffrence will only depend on your monitor!
 
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