Author: Michael Crider / Source: How-To Geek
If you’ve ever dug around the nooks and crannies of your TV or monitor’s picture adjustment menu, you might have come across something called “game mode.” What does that mean? Let’s break it down.
Game Mode Might Mean Minimized Input Lag
Before we start, we need to cover a few basics.
First, you probably understand that your TV or computer monitor isn’t just a dumb screen connected to a video cable. Even for a screen that doesn’t have any “smart” web-connected features, there’s quite a lot of electronics hiding inside the plastic housing, including processors, memory, and all the other stuff you’d generally expect to find in a computer. It isn’t as complicated as a conventional PC, of course—it doesn’t need to be. But the point is that there’s more going on behind the scenes to translate the digital input from your computer, DVD player, or game console into a visible image than you might initially realize.
So, modern displays have computer parts. That means that, unlike some of the simpler televisions and monitors back in the days of cathode ray tubes, images don’t transfer instantly from whatever’s plugged into your screen to the screen itself. There’s a tiny amount of time between when the display receives the signal from the video cable and when it’s fully rendered onto the screen. That’s the amount of time it takes all those electronics inside your TV or monitor to process the image, apply different settings like brightness, contrast, and color correction, and light up the portions of the LCD panel and backlight with the correct data. We call this time the input lag.
Input lag is generally very low in the context of human vision—between five and ten milliseconds (ms) for most modern LCD screens. That’s about one one-hundredth of a second at most. This isn’t a big deal most of the time. As long as your TV’s audio is synced correctly, your brain can’t notice a 1/100th of a second difference, and you don’t need blazing-fast reactions to type up an email on a desktop monitor. But input lag can be a huge deal for playing modern PC or console games. 1/100th of a second in a fast-paced shooter or a twitchy fighting game might be the difference between a punch landing or not.
That brings us to game mode. When you enable game mode on some monitors and televisions, it strips away some or all of the processing that the screen does to the image to get it from the source to the screen panel as fast as possible. Generally, this means shaving a few milliseconds off, like going from 10ms of lag down to 6ms.
Some high-end TVs or monitors, especially those that are marketed to gamers with high refresh rates, can get that time down to just one millisecond—one one-thousandth of a second for the image to go from your game console or PC to the panel…
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