7 Settings I Change on Every Monitor

so when most people buy a gaming monitor they just plug it in start using it and that's pretty much it and if you spend a good amount of money on a gaming monitor like this one then the stock performance out of the box will actually be pretty good the colors will be decent the ghosting will be minimized but other times the stock performance is just not optimized at all most of the time in fact the best settings for your monitor are not the ones that are enabled by default so let's take a look at what you need to know the first setting here is a really quick one and i basically just make sure that this is disabled on every monitor out there and that's the automatic dimming most auto brightness dimming on monitors in my experience is just kind of distracting and for the most part most people's workspaces and gaming setups are constant enough that you shouldn't have to be making tons of adjustments and also just a slightly related note here just keep in mind your monitor brightness as a whole i feel like a lot of people are just gaming on way too bright displays and that damage to your eyes is irreversible i prefer to play on a bit of a conservative brightness for this very reason and just to keep my eyes feeling fresh for those really long gaming sessions next up is the white point or color temperature of your display and this setting is how cool or warm your panel is and whether there is any color tint for example basically we want our whites to be as true white as possible and most gaming monitors will have a few settings here under the name color temperature or rgb settings or something similar now most of you won't have a colorimeter to properly measure the white point of your panel and fine-tune the individual rgb values so it's not really worth going into that more than likely you'll just have to go by i and what looks good to you but a couple of things to note here if you do happen to see a color temperature setting named 6500k then that would be the ideal one to set if on the other hand your color temperature settings are named something like cool normal and warm like this monitor here then it's best to go by feel or even better search up a review online where someone has already measured the best option now if you don't have a colorimeter you don't really know what you're doing and there's no reviews online pointing you in the right direction telling you you know what option is the best here for your specific monitor then something to keep in mind here at least kind of to give you a bit of guidance is that most monitors are set up way too cool out of the box in terms of color temperature that means that whites look a little bit bluey and cool uh yellows look a little bit green and reds and oranges don't have that kind of vibrance and warmth that you see on a really good display now to give you an example we're using the warm preset here on this monitor this is the asus xg27 aqm that's what warm looks like and this is what cool looks like which is actually in my experience how you know a lot of say 144hz and 240hz monitors are actually set up out of the box which is unfortunate because people just kind of use that default setting and it just doesn't look as good warm is actually the most color accurate and it's what you want to be using now if for whatever reason the preset color temperature modes on your monitor don't look that good maybe they will have a green tint for example you can actually go in and individually set the rgb values so you can kind of overcome this and bring down that really prominent tint next up is the gamma curve of the monitor most gaming monitors will have this as a setting you just want to make sure that it's set to 2.2 this is something though that you can potentially play around with if you do want a deeper or flatter looking image mostly when it comes to the shadows for the most part though just set this to 2.2 and forget about it we can play around with black equalizer and gamma a little bit later on the next setting is one which you'll probably only find on more mid-range to high-end gaming monitors like this one but that's setting the color space or the video mode of the panel essentially what we want to do here you know for games like this for example where you want a more kind of calibrated experience more true to life colors for example that's when you want to enable the srgb mode if on the other hand you're more of a competitive gamer you probably don't want that you probably want the color mode that's going to give you the widest range of colors in terms of giving you more vibrance and the best visibility and that's kind of what that looks like and depending on the monitor you know it could be called a different thing it could be called dci p3 p3 extended or in this monitor it's basically any other mode except for that srgb mode so here for the racing mode which is what is enabled by default that will give us the widest range of colors but this isn't always what is enabled out of the box in fact a lot of high-end high refresh rate gaming monitors that i've come across as a reviewer have srgb mode as default which is fine but to have that as the default video mode is a bit of a crime for what the monitor is going to be used for now there are some other monitors out there zowie for example that only have a single color space video mode from memory and that's the case as well for usually the more budget-oriented stuff which typically have a more limited color gamut to begin with anyway so at this point the colors are all set the panel's looking good the next thing that i dial in is the pixel overdrive mode some monitors have horrible ghosting out of the box and equally just as many can have horrible inverse ghosting with terrible artifacting with the default settings regardless i'd say that at least ninety percent of the monitors that i've tested are not set up with the optimal settings from factory so let's use this monitor as an example it's the xg27 aqm from asus 1440p 270 hertz very highly spec'd monitor and it has five levels of pixel overdrive each ascending one will increase the amount of overdrive sent to the pixels and will reduce the amount of ghosting but most monitors like this one will have a point where too much overdrive is applied and the result is inverse ghosting now the way that you dial in that sweet spot setting and to find the optimal one to choose here is to use something like the moving ufo test from blurbusters.com this will simulate a constant moving image on your display which you can then use to analyze the amount of ghosting for each of those modes so we can see that for this display level four is looking like the ideal amount of overdrive and we can see that level five pushes things a little bit too hard and this is typical of most gaming monitors usually the second highest setting is the way to go but not always so again i'll leave a link down below to the ufo test play around and select the mode that looks the clearest to you with the least amount of ghosting and artifacting but you can reduce the motion blur even further with this next setting which you know not every monitor has this setting and even so the implementation is very hit and miss but it is the backlight strobing mode also known as motion blur reduction you might also know this as dayak or ulmb or elmb vrb what else is there pure xp mbr every monster company calls it something different but in practice it is all doing the same thing essentially what this mode does is it turns the backlight off between screen refreshes to help with clearer pixel transitions and less motion blur how well it works though depends on two things mainly the composition of the panel itself and the tuning from the manufacturer an example of really good backlight strobing would be on the viewsonic xg2431 i still think that this is the best 240hz monitor that you can buy at the moment even after my review six months ago one of the reasons for that is the exceptionally good blur reduction mode which is called pure xp granted even without blur reduction it does look decent enough compared to other displays but we can see just how much of an improvement that strobing mode makes an example of bad backlight strobing well the 1440p 240hz aurus fi 27qx is what first comes to mind that mode is ironically called aim stabilizer which yeah nothing really more to add there i think you guys can make your own mind up another thing to keep in mind with these backlight strobing modes is that they'll all lower the screen brightness to some degree for some monitors it basically makes this mode unusable but for others it's okay for playing during the night or with the room with the shades kind of closed so again here just as with the response time overdrive modes boot up the ufo ghosting test and see whether the implementation on your monitor looks good or not if it even has it and then there's adaptive sync most of you know this as g-sync or freesync this technology ensures that every frame that is displayed on your monitor is a completely rendered frame and avoids what's known as screen tearing that's caused by your screen refreshing at a different interval compared to what your gpu is rendering at for example rendering 200 fps on a 240hz monitor g-sync and freesync will sync the two together to give you a tear-free experience make sure that you're always getting complete frames now this is usually a feature that is mutually exclusive to the backlight strobing mode that we just mentioned and it also means that you might miss out on some potentially early rendered information that can be displayed on your screen sooner basically sometimes it's not ideal for super high fps competitive games so to make things simple here's where i would and wouldn't use adaptive sync if the game that you're playing is running below 150 fps also and especially if the frame rates are a lot more variable that's where the benefits of g-sync or freesync can really be felt the best single player games for example which you'd be running at higher settings and lower frame rates or even multiplayer titles which kind of fit under those same circumstances and the screen tearing would otherwise be really noticeable where i probably wouldn't recommend adaptive sync though is mostly for competitive titles where you're exceeding your monitor's refresh rate anyway or you're pretty close to it or you'd be better off enabling backlight strobing if your monitor supports it and supports it well so those are the settings that i'm mostly concerned about when setting up a new gaming monitor for review and testing but there are a couple more that you should know black equalizer is an extra one here it's a mode that most gaming monitors have these days and can be pretty useful in lifting up the shadows in some games personally i don't really play many dark first person shooters so this isn't a setting that i have a lot of experience with but i know it's pretty popular for games like rainbow six and modern warfare play around with it keep it in mind just note that by doing so you're also flattening the image and kind of destroying the contrast and lastly just note that you can also make adjustments through the graphics drivers control panel things like digital vibrance and the gamma are really popular options here but definitely make sure that you're following the first few steps to set up the monitor's white point and video mode first and that way you'll get the best results with these two so that's pretty much it hopefully these settings helped you out in setting up your gaming monitor as always a huge thanks for watching and i'll see you all in the next one

Channel: Optimum Tech

Views: 574,470

Keywords: best monitor settings, gaming monitor, best overdrive monitor settings, monitor vibrance, monitor saturation, digital vibrance, best nvidia settings, valorant, apex legends, pc gaming, optimum tech

Id: FzHgTG9Gw4k

Length: 10min 32sec (632 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 05 2022