Originally posted by: pm
I bought a 24" Soyo M24EI4 last night to replace a 22" NEC 1350X trinitron CRT. I love the screen for working - the image is bright, beautiful and crisp and the real estate at 1920x1200 is amazing. The colors are nice, the display angle is great and text is crisp and looks fabulous. In fact, I have only great things to say about the monitor until about 30 minutes ago.
I fired up Unreal Tournament 2004 for a bit before going to bed and it was horrible. I played it at my usual resolution - 1280x1024 but that had letterboxing, so I switched to 1280x800. The image looks fine when I'm not moving, but as soon as things get crazy (as they tend to do in UT2004), I'm not sure what happened, but it was like I couldn't see anything very well. I can't explain why exactly things looked awful, but I had a really hard time seeing stuff. It wasn't ghosting I don't think... but whatever it was, it looked terrible and I played horribly, and now I have a bit of a headache.
Eyestrain can induce nausea. When you use a lower resolution, the monitor has to interpolate and ghosting increases because more pixels are being used. This is my best guess as to what is happening to you. I'm sure Soyo cut some corners on the scaler to make this LCD affordable. But you should see to it that your graphics card is being used as a scaler, in the NVIDIA options.
1280x1024 is distorted, and quite a low res on a 1920x1200 native display. See if this happens at 1920x1200. I think your graphics card should be able to handle this, at least at low detail. Maybe this isn't preferable, but it would isolate the problem.
Is this input lag, is it the response rate (monitor is rated for 6ms), is it the 60Hz refresh? Whatever it is... I'm feeling sad because this wonderful monitor is going to have to go back to Office Max. I'll try it again tomorrow, but I'm sure it wasn't my imagination.
Backlights in LCDs flicker from around 200-600 Hz to modulate brightness. But, the display itself is hold-type meaning that the current image is static until it is updated. When it is updated, it is updated at-once, meaning all pixels are requested to transition. There is no raster pattern like on a CRT (scanning electron gun).
If you're grasping for straws you could try using a brightness or contrast of 100 to see if it helps (some LCDs use brightness to control backlight, some use contrast).
Occasionally the polarity of LCD pixels will be reversed to prevent burn-in issues but generally this causes flickering only with certain patterns.
Any guesses on what's causing my problem? I know that I have problems with flicker on CRT's less than 72Hz. I'm a little sensitive to CRT refresh. I understand that LCD refresh is totally different, but I'm still wondering if the image isn't updating fast enough.
I'd love to hear any advice - I don't want to return this screen.
Video card: EVGA 7600GT
Screen: 24" Soyo M24EI4 - lowered contrast and brightness and set color to 6500k and aside from that changed nothing on it.
It's hooked up with DVI, running normally at 1920x1200@60Hz, in game at 1280x800@60Hz. On my CRT this was a good resolution for high FPS.
See if there is anything you can describe that might be causing your nausea. Try to isolate it, see if it happens with other games.
I don't think the image not updating enough is a problem for you. Most LCDs are very easy on the eyes since they give you a continuously lit image.