Best Gaming Monitors

At a glance, it may look like a regular monitor with a more colorful design, but there’s more to it than that. Gaming monitors are designed to have a higher refresh rate, lower input lag, and game-genre presets that let you quickly adjust the settings—brightness, contrast, response time, and more—to suit different styles of play.

One might be particularly useful for fast-paced first-person shooters like Call of Duty, while another is geared toward less frenetic fare like Civilization VI or Crusader Kings III.

You’ll find models with all the common resolutions, too—from 1080p all the way up to 4K—though you need to have a very high-end graphics card in your computer to use a 4K monitor effectively. The higher the resolution, the more pixels the card has to push.

Now what do we mean when we say that a gaming monitor has a “high refresh rate”?

It simply means that the device can rapidly screen the individual images that go into video animation, not to mention the ones that routinely pop up in your browser window. As a result, any motion you see on the screen, whether you’re scrolling through Facebook or playing games like Need for Speed, appears much smoother.

Refresh rate is measured in Hertz: Standard monitors typically measure 60Hz (as in 60 refreshes per second), while gaming monitors typically start at 120Hz. In our tests, 144Hz was the minimum. A few models we reviewed can reach 240Hz, which is probably faster than the average gamer needs, though you can find models aimed at e-sports pros (or pros-in-training) that peak at 360Hz. In mid-2022, Asus announced a 500Hz monitor, but there’s no release date for that yet.

In the end, you could play a game like CS:GO or Apex Legends with a standard, 60Hz monitor, but once you see the difference 144Hz or better makes, it’s hard to go back. Your mouse suddenly feels heavy moving across the screen, and you can practically count the frames of animation as they play out. It’s like trying to jog or swim on a full stomach.

At 144Hz, things start to feel much snappier and look much smoother.

Heck, you might not even want to browse the web at 60Hz once you give a gaming monitor a try.

Input lag (the latency for a given system) measures in milliseconds the time it takes for, say, a click of your mouse or tap of a key on your keyboard to register on the display, whether that’s the firing of a gun in Halo, the throwing of a punch in Street Fighter, or the stealing of a car in Grand Theft Auto.

Standard monitors have more input lag than gaming monitors, so if you’re playing a game on one, you may encounter even greater delays in in-game reaction times.

If you’re clicking around on Amazon, Yahoo, or, fingers crossed, discountninja.online, you likely won’t notice the difference. But if you’re trying to outgun your opponents in Call of Duty Warzone, well, it could be—virtually speaking—a life or death choice.

One final tip: Gaming monitors typically support a technology known as adaptive sync, which helps reduce graphical imperfections known as “tearing” that can cause games to briefly appear slightly crooked or misaligned. AMD and Nvidia, the two big graphics card manufacturers, have their own adaptive sync tech called Freesync and G Sync, respectively. The gaming monitors we tested support both options, but not all models do, so make certain the one you choose is compatible with the graphics card you own before you click “add to cart.”