over the last while I've been living with some va-based gaming monitors and I quickly came to
the conclusion which is my opinion of course that VA monitors despite many strengths kind
of suck for gaming now if you want a very condensed reason why I think that here is
some motion being displayed on an IPS gaming monitor whereas here is some motion being
displayed on a va-based gaming monitor oh look at that smearing now as is always the case with
life it's not quite as straightforward as VA panels give you cholera and IPS panels
give you belly rubs so we're gonna have a closer look at gaming on VA panels in this
video to see how we feel about it by the end of it but before we get into that it's
time for a word from today's video sponsor that helped buy some monitors for the video
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experience with a VA panel was earlier this year with a Samsung g302 and I was really
excited to try it out because VA solves one of the biggest shortcomings of ips displays
contrast ratio IPS displays really struggle to display deep black levels and VA is much
better at it although my excitement evaporated quickly for the g302 because the motion rendering
was very blurry which in a game like escape from tarkov which I was playing a lot back
then it makes it really difficult to spot enemy players far off in the distance because every
time you move everything just kind of blurs together it didn't look very good so I sent
it back quite quickly and replaced it with a 24 inch LG IPS display which despite having
very similar response time and refresh rate specs had motion rendering that didn't feel
like it was rubbing Vaseline into my eyes every time I touched my mouse and this was my first
disappointing experience with VA you can have black levels deeper than the Mariana Trench
but if the monitor has built-in heavy motion blur it's not going to be a good gaming display
now my second experience with a VA panel was by far the longest and most disappointing and
it was with this Cooler Master gm34 cqargb what a beautiful name now don't get me wrong
this monitor has a beautiful image it's bright contrasty the colors pop and are really amazing
but that's with static images the moment that there's movement things all fall apart really
badly it has a pretty serious black smearing problem with movement that picture that I showed
you in the beginning of the video of the smury asteroid yes that one that was from this display
the smearing problem is so bad on this monitor that in the video where I first looked at it I
was convinced the panel was damaged in shipping but a lot of people commented on that video
saying nah that's just what VA looks like now in the displays menus there are a lot of settings
to help combat this things like overdrive and Clarity settings but that smeary asteroid picture
was with the best settings I could find for the monitor in terms of motion rendering having said
that it is better in some games than others Battlefield 5 for example doesn't have an
immediately obvious smearing problem at least depending on the map so despite having very
impressive response time and refresh rate specs this monitor has a really bad motion artifact
which after spending a month using this monitor as my primary gaming display I just couldn't get used
to it it's so distracting so I decided to go out and buy a comparable IPS alternative to this VA
Ultra wide so that they can battle it out it's a surprisingly light big monitor now for this video
I went out and bought this GN 850 by LG because aside from two characteristics it being an IPS
as opposed to a VA and it having a slightly less aggressive curve to it specs wise this monitor
is remarkably similar to that Cooler Master VA panel I've been using it's even got a nano
IPS panel compared to the quantum.va on the other monitor so it's like gimmick IPS versus gimmick VA
and first impressions were very positive yeah the motion is so much better than it is on the VA
panel like it is a remarkable difference between the two actually but remember earlier in the video
I said Battlefield 5 wasn't nearly the worst offender when it came to the smearing on the VA
panel so let's get to some other comparisons first I tried out some high contrast CS go with the IPS
display in its stock configuration compared to the VA panel in the best motion settings now
this is by no means a perfect test but it does help to illustrate the difference the VA panel
has a lot more overshoot and the edges of the gun is quite a bit more blurry and despite being
said to the same refresh rate and having similar response times to my eye in person the VA looked
a lot blurrier I then moved over to No Man's sky where initially subjectively I didn't notice much
of a difference between the two displays which I found really weird considering that I noticed
really bad smearing while using the VA panel at home so I got into my ship flew around a bit
it and eventually found some smearing on the VA and the inconsistency of the smearing intensity
in no man's sky made me realize something which I quickly confirmed playing around in Photoshop the
extent to the black smearing on this Cooler Master VA panel varies massively depending on the color
palette of the scene which is why some games smear more than others on this display and considering
the worst defending color palette it's real bad news for people who like to use dark mode browsing
even just scrolling through a dark Mode YouTube feed on this Cooler Master VA looks pretty rough
which shows it's not only a problem for gaming but don't get me wrong even motion that is in a
color palette that doesn't offend this monitor is still pretty bad looking but at least it doesn't
have that deep black smearing in it but is that the case for all VA monitors are they all good
unless you like movement and gray well to find out I guess I've gotta go buy another monitor
now I also bought this LG 32 gk60 for a couple of reasons first off I wanted to display that price
wise landed between The Cooler Master and the Samsung display that I tried a while ago also
it is one of the few VA panels that I've seen around at the moment that isn't curved that's
that's quite rare for some reason so let's plug in this LG V8 Monitor and see if it's
any better now my first impression is actually that I really like this screen size 32 inches
awesome although this one's 1440p which you know the pixel density is not great but at 4K this
would be amazing anyway that's not really why we're here so let's get into some of the games
that we used earlier for motion rendering tests oh another player that's very rare
um anyway aside from that even even not in a scene where the monitor is offended by Gray's
ah the motion rendering is really bad on these displays bye player and after that excitement I
launched my spaceship and very quickly realized that the smearing was definitely a problem on
this monitor as well oh it's so bad and with this shot that looks like it's from footage of
a Bigfoot sighting there's the smearing clear as day having said that the smearing on this LG
VA isn't quite as bad as the smearing on that Cooler Master VA but honestly it still looks
pretty terrible so at the end of the day both IPS and VA each have one main shortcoming IPS doesn't
have particularly good contrast ratio whereas VA has pretty terrible motion rendering one of those
is a bit of a shame the other is a complete deal breaker at least to me now I am quite sensitive to
this kind of thing so maybe it's not going to be as big a deal for you let me know in the comment
section down below if you have a VA panel that you use for gaming where you don't really mind
about the smearing or haven't noticed all also I have seen some Hardware unboxed reviews of some
high-end new Samsung VA panels which apparently mostly solve the problem however I haven't had
any first-hand experience with either of those monitors so I can't really comment on that which
neatly brings me to the closing thoughts on this video something may seem very promising on paper
but it doesn't mean that it won't attack your eyes with dessert Forks the moment you get it
behind closed doors anyway until the next video thank you for watching bye thank you