4k monitors? Which monitors to get

[TheCreature13]

Hi there. I've never done this before. I'm building a Hyperspin cabinet for the kids in our youth group. I would love to go 4k, but not sure if that causes problems or not. Can you please recommend the best monitor/tv to use with minimal input lag for both the main game display and also a hyper marquee setup? Actually - what is the hyper marquee monitor that looks like the old marquees? Like an extra wide but shorter monitor?

Any and all help is appreciated. Want to get cracking on this build soon! Thank you in advance!

-Creech

[almulder]

No Need to go 4k, and can cause problems where full screen is only 1/4 of the screen (Like just the top left corner)

[nzbsolo]

Depends on what you want to do. For emulation, there is no need to go 4K, most games and emulation natively run at max 640x480. Dreamcast, N64, PS2, and other emulators can raise the internal resolution that will use 4k... but the games were never meant to be displayed at such a high resolution so there is no real cause to do so.

On top of this, there are other concerns to be concerned with, mostly input latency and accuracy of emulation. When buying a flatscreen you shouldn't be so much looking at the resolution but instead the latency. If the latency is high, its going to lead to a bad gaming experience as the input to screen response will be slower than you remembered. If you are just making a machine to mess around with and you don't care about accuracy, then anything up to 40ms will be fine (or 2+ frames of latency on top of the everything else that causes latency). One of the benefits of going CRT in this case is that Latency on CRT's are always 1MS. Input latency is important, because games that require twitch reflexes (Fighting Games and shooters) heavily depend on the response time from control response to screen. 10MS could be the difference between eating a high damage combo or getting blown up by a boss.

Continuing on with accuracy, there is also frame rates to consider. Most games run at 60FPS. But some games run at weird framerates. Since most monitors refresh at 60fps, it would cause stuttering in game. Mortal Kombat is a great example, as it runs 54 frames a second instead of 60. Forcing the in game refresh rate to 60 FPS causing the game to studder momentarily every other second. This may not seem like a big deal, but it causes major issues when playing, and if you are a videophile or audiophile, you will see it, and it will drive you insane.

If this is a concern to you, you should look into investing into a monitor and video card that does Freesync, or Gsync. This tech is a godsend for emulators and cab makers, as with a AMD video card that supports Freesync (all of them these days) and a monitor that supports it, when running the game full screen the video card will only draw the frames the game is running. So for Mortal Kombat, it will only draw 54 frames a second instead of forcing 60FPS, ensuring silky smooth gameplay. The video below illustrates quite well what is happening.

As for the tech, G-Sync is Nvidia's technology, and Freesync is ATI's (its somewhat open source). ATI's tech is much less expensive, because its software based. Nvidia's is hardware based, so buying a monitor with G-Sync is much more expensive ($2-300 premium on the monitor).

Anyways I hope this helps to make a more informed decision on buying a monitor/video card. Here is a link that displaylag.com, a site dedicated to talking about monitor refresh rates and lag: https://displaylag.com

Here is the video talking about G-Sync/FreeSync in regards to emulation. Good luck!