I don't understand why anything would be launching now with HDMI 1.4. Especially a 4k device. Maybe a more casual home user or student isn't their target market. But with that choice they've limited their market to definitely not include those consumers. At least not if they are paying attention. Meanwhile they probably upped their cost for returns because quite a few people not paying attention might buy this anyway and then discover their 4k source won't play through that HDMI port and return the monitor.
I'm starting to feel like the PPI of 1440p on 27" is too low (after spoiling my eyes on Apple Retina displays for the past few years). Would be better at 24" I think.
I'm watching the CSGO Atlanta Majors right now and they're all like a foot away from their monitor. I swear having information in your periphery is a disadvantage. Especially since they're playing on 1080p screens and sitting that close offers virtually no benefit.
They're professional e-sports athletes and sitting very close to the screen is done for two reasons.
-Reducing the distance between the monitor and the eye reduces the distance light has to travel to arrive at a person's retina. That increases that person's response time dramatically since they're not dealing with light transmission-induced lag.
-Humans vision is naturally tunnelized to focus narrowly on a small circle of objects directly in front. The male hunter instinct is triggered by motion in the peripheral areas more acutely, resulting in a naturally aggressive response needed in the violently competitive environment of the e-sports arena. Think about how a human man responds to a tiger pouncing him from the front versus from the side while in a grassy field and put it into context of a video game in an air conditioned room where the sour taint of sweat is already triggering adrenaline and testosterone to flow just like it does in more physically active competitive sports.
-e-Sports professionals play video games for the majority of their waking hours in order to be competitive. They move infrequently from their screens and often get meals delivered to them by their caregivers that live atop them on the above ground floors of their residence. The focal distance of their eyes has become attuned to a cozy, close monitor-to-face distance over the years. While optometrists incorrectly refer to this as near sightedness and try to correct it with glasses or contact lenses, it's actually an evolutionary trait of gaming professionals that helps them win championships that people who can see longer distances wouldn't because they'd get distracted by distant objects and/or hygiene concerns.
So obviously, sitting that close to the screen is part of what makes you a professional.
Physicist here: Calling b*llshit on the light transmission lag. Remember: A foot light travel corresponds to a nanosecond, where both monitor lag and human response are in the millisecond regime, giving no noticable effect for the light travel until you literally sit miles (!) away from your monitor. Also note that the communication between the computers is at (maximum) light speed, meaning that it would be beneficial for e-sports player to sit physically closer to each other...
First of all, I have a heap of qualifications so let's not flaunt expertise in the matter because I don't want to have to start touting the depth of my experience in the matter of physical science. I went to night school, online school, bricks-and-mortar school, and mother-of-flippin'-pearl preschool pal! I'm like the embodiment of the United States public and private and everything in between educational system! And anyway, we MBA sorts manage physicists on a daily basis so don't think you can have the audacity to question the grand rule of our iron fists! (And yes, I know about oxidization too and how iron rusts so I lather those babies in oil and polish them every single night!)
Second of all, light travel time between the monitor and the eye is the one place where we haven't addressed latency. Untold money has been invested in reducing input lag and increasing monitor and GPU response time, but little has been done to address light travel latency. I'm sure there are warp field and vacuum chamber technologies (think Star Trek and Elon Musk's Hyperloop) that we will someday leverage to drive light above the petty light speed barrier, but right now the only reliable solution is the low tech approach of hunching down and pulling the chair closer or purchasing a VR headset.
In the future, I could see a vacuum chamber monitor setup that attaches to the face of a player and then pumps out all the air between the face and the monitor to improve light flow (with a plastic shield over the eyes to prevent the Total Recall effect...that'd be gross) and then a warp nacelle or even a particle accelerator tube behind the monitor to give those photons the oomph they need to go even faster, but we're probably a good 2-5 years out form such a technology or more if you physicists keep wasting your time posting on AT and don't ever get back to physi-sizing like you should be. What am I paying you people to do again? Certainly not this!
Bison, I'm sad to say that I've tried cloning myself a couple of times and I seem to always end up with much smaller, less developed versions of me. They end up being really labor-intensive, cry frequently, and emit copious quantities of unpleasant smelling waste products. I have to admit that I don't understand what I'm doing wrong during the cloning process. Night school didn't cover it at all! I may need to consult an alchemist. I think transmutation is a viable option.
Comparing light to something like the hype-r-loop is laughable and a loud statement about you lack of competence in the field of physics. The problem for a fast train is air friction, which becomes tremendous as the speed increases. Light has no friction with the air and the speed of light is only like 60 miles per second slower in air than it is in vacuum. So your ingenious idea of strapping vacuum chambers to people's heads will result in a whooping 0.0003% improvement.
At a typical viewing distance for a large display, the "latency" of light traveling through air would be like 200 picoseconds at most. Moving to vacuum would decrease that to 199.04 - hardly an improvement that merits vacuum tubes. Besides, it would be much easier to simply put displays closed to the eyes, and also tremendously "more beneficial", at least at the particular scale.
Then again, even at top notch gaming hardware your hardware won't be able to get below 30 milliseconds, so there is already miles of progress to be made there before one even gets to the point of splitting hairs by worrying about them slow photos.
Lets for the sake of not lowering my view of mankind assume your post was just a poor joke :D
I'm not bothered by your dim view of humanity OR your inability to understand what is clearly a simple matter of photonic acceleration and air molecule removal! I've spent extensive time immersed in science to the point where I can confidently quote the great MC Hawking when I tell you, "My power is my mass times the speed of light squared!" and that "I have a PhD in Pain and a Masters in disaster!"
I'm like a superluminal jet of amazing ideas, saturating the galactic core in the brilliant leftovers of interstellar indigestables and just because you disagree with the idea of reducing latency because you can't afford a vacuum channel between your face doesn't mean you can Debbie Downer the inevitable tide of the next computer gaming revolution. This will be a revolution more significant than the first US Robotics Sportster 2400 baud external modem. This will be a revolution more significant than the Iomega Rev Drive. I'd even go as far as saying it'll be more significant than Sega Game Gear AND the Dreamcast combined.
Those e-sports professional athletes are you there playing their hearts out in Atlanta (yeah, I saw how you decried their noble careers in your other post which is clearly born of seething, hateful envy) with their faces so close to their monitors that the oils from their skins are actually leaping across the gap between the two. And while they're paying their hearts out with sweat pouring from their hairy underarms and billions of epidermal cells shredding from their very fingers as they hammer mouse buttons and keyboards alike, you're sitting there in the posh comfort of your apartment or mobile home talking down to them. You're talking down to the world's heroes and idols as if they don't deserve particle accelerators and vacuum chambers! The next travesty you'll throw out is how you think they shouldn't have energy drinks or Mountain Dew. The nerve of some people.
I used to be a world ranking FPS gamer back in my youthful days, never broke a sweat. It really helps being healthy and fit rather than a lump of toxic fat that would sweat doing anything, including idling ;)
But well, back then games rewarded reflexes, precision and tactical thinking, not amount of time from your finite life wasted. Back then gamers were cool dudes, not lifeless losers.
I don't think playing video games has become less respectable in recent years. In fact, I think the opposite is true as the hobby has become more mainstream than ever before. It means that "back in the day" when you were supposedly a "world ranking FPS gamer" its more likely that a larger segment of the population considered you a lifeless loser than would consider someone playing professionally now. That is if any bit of your self-promotion is the slightest bit true and, since this is the Internet, I think we all know where that line of thinking ultimately leads.
Anyway, I personally prefer games where its simply a matter of making the occasional small investment of a couple hundred hundred dollars or so to purchase the best equipment, consumables, and vanity items that make it difficult or impossible to be harmed by players that are unwilling to make a similar expenditure. Those sorts of games automatically stratify players and make it easy to pick out who's worth interacting with and who'll simply be stomped into the proverbial dirt on the way to claiming the leaderboard. Microtransaction games have really made online gaming interesting and amusing because its not necessary to waste time with reflexes or "precision and tactical thinking." I do enough of that silliness at work so when I'm at home, I should, like anyone else, be able to reap the rewards of my social class by rocking the best gear in the game.
Yeah, what is more interesting and fun than paying actual money to buy imaginary merit in some game for losers. I presume it would be an attractive prospect for people who don't have any real-world merit, but it is just sad. Such games also tend to be absent any plot or story line whatsoever. They are truly a waste of time for people whose time isn't worth anything.
I've only been playing games because of the challenge, and because I find fun in competition, not the actual game. And not the type of games which would require to play for several hours a day to get xp or find artifacts, but the kind of game where you can join, destroy in 15-20 minutes and then get back to your life. As I said, games that reward skill, not games that reward the inability to have a life. Not that there weren't "lifeless losers" playing those games back in the days, but they were wannabes without skill who kept on trying in the hope to improve. I never had any ambitions, I was just naturally good at high pace reflex shooters and combat tactics. It is stupid to have ambitions in games, and it is far better to be number 10 in the stats by investing less than an hour a day than to be number 1 by investing literally all of your time.
But those were different times, today everyone is a winner, they give away participation medals, and everyone's kickstarter has merit, you cannot call things the way you are and you must be "politically correct". Everyone is special and unique, and lifeless losers who waste money and life on pointless games are the pinnacle of this form of more degraded society. So yeah, they are worthy of respect, from the likes of you anyway ;) For those who seek such breaks from reality are the ones neglecting it the most - it is a vicious cycle, people don't invest enough in reality, as a result reality gets worse and worse, and as a result people seek more and more absurd ways to get away from that which they badly need to focus on.
"Such games also tend to be absent any plot or story line whatsoever," conflicts quite dramatically with your later stated point that you only play games for challenge and competition for spans of 15-20 minutes.
"It is stupid to have ambitions in games...,"conflicts your your earlier claim of playing competitively and being "world ranked" which is clearly the result of ambitiousness. Then again, I think we've debunked that since you're not objecting about it being untrue.
As for your last paragraph, I won't get into politics, but if you're not intelligent enough to find satire and the obvious joking in my entire string of posts at this point (honestly, the revolution of the Game Gear and my mother-of-flippin'-pearl preschool as an educational qualification should have given that away...along with everything else about my comments) then you're not reading very closely and are one of those very people you think are beneath you, but simply have failed to realize it in your eagerness to use my comments as a reason to drag out your soapbox.
e-sports do not qualify for athletics. Athletic sports involve physical activities such as running or jumping. Not all people who practice sports are athletes, and e-sports are not really sports to begin with. The term "e-sports" itself is some lame joke and a complete mockery. Sport is "competitive physical activity", games are not sport, neither games like chess nor electronic games.
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
27 Comments
Back to Article
savagemike - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link
I don't understand why anything would be launching now with HDMI 1.4. Especially a 4k device. Maybe a more casual home user or student isn't their target market. But with that choice they've limited their market to definitely not include those consumers. At least not if they are paying attention.Meanwhile they probably upped their cost for returns because quite a few people not paying attention might buy this anyway and then discover their 4k source won't play through that HDMI port and return the monitor.
savagemike - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link
Just realized two things.1. This isn't a 4k monitor, the article in my other browser tab was about a 4k monitor.
2. I can't delete comments here.
quiksilvr - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link
They really need to just use Disqus as their comment tool.BrokenCrayons - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link
I'd rather AT stay away from Disqus. There's enough data mining going on already thanks.Samus - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link
I love the AT commenting system. Disqus sucks. I prefer comments not be deleted, even if they are mistakes. Remember history - Winston ChurchillMurloc - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link
Disqus has spam bots because it's popular.lmcd - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link
Is that what they call B*llwinkle M**se these days?jsntech - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link
I'm starting to feel like the PPI of 1440p on 27" is too low (after spoiling my eyes on Apple Retina displays for the past few years). Would be better at 24" I think.willis936 - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link
Sit further away from your monitors.I'm watching the CSGO Atlanta Majors right now and they're all like a foot away from their monitor. I swear having information in your periphery is a disadvantage. Especially since they're playing on 1080p screens and sitting that close offers virtually no benefit.
BrokenCrayons - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link
They're professional e-sports athletes and sitting very close to the screen is done for two reasons.-Reducing the distance between the monitor and the eye reduces the distance light has to travel to arrive at a person's retina. That increases that person's response time dramatically since they're not dealing with light transmission-induced lag.
-Humans vision is naturally tunnelized to focus narrowly on a small circle of objects directly in front. The male hunter instinct is triggered by motion in the peripheral areas more acutely, resulting in a naturally aggressive response needed in the violently competitive environment of the e-sports arena. Think about how a human man responds to a tiger pouncing him from the front versus from the side while in a grassy field and put it into context of a video game in an air conditioned room where the sour taint of sweat is already triggering adrenaline and testosterone to flow just like it does in more physically active competitive sports.
-e-Sports professionals play video games for the majority of their waking hours in order to be competitive. They move infrequently from their screens and often get meals delivered to them by their caregivers that live atop them on the above ground floors of their residence. The focal distance of their eyes has become attuned to a cozy, close monitor-to-face distance over the years. While optometrists incorrectly refer to this as near sightedness and try to correct it with glasses or contact lenses, it's actually an evolutionary trait of gaming professionals that helps them win championships that people who can see longer distances wouldn't because they'd get distracted by distant objects and/or hygiene concerns.
So obviously, sitting that close to the screen is part of what makes you a professional.
HilbertSpace - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link
I can't tell if you are being serious with these comments. Funny though either way, especially the ridiculousness of point 1.BrokenCrayons - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link
I'm like British-levels of serious here.ovigo - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link
Physicist here: Calling b*llshit on the light transmission lag. Remember: A foot light travel corresponds to a nanosecond, where both monitor lag and human response are in the millisecond regime, giving no noticable effect for the light travel until you literally sit miles (!) away from your monitor.Also note that the communication between the computers is at (maximum) light speed, meaning that it would be beneficial for e-sports player to sit physically closer to each other...
BrokenCrayons - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link
First of all, I have a heap of qualifications so let's not flaunt expertise in the matter because I don't want to have to start touting the depth of my experience in the matter of physical science. I went to night school, online school, bricks-and-mortar school, and mother-of-flippin'-pearl preschool pal! I'm like the embodiment of the United States public and private and everything in between educational system! And anyway, we MBA sorts manage physicists on a daily basis so don't think you can have the audacity to question the grand rule of our iron fists! (And yes, I know about oxidization too and how iron rusts so I lather those babies in oil and polish them every single night!)Second of all, light travel time between the monitor and the eye is the one place where we haven't addressed latency. Untold money has been invested in reducing input lag and increasing monitor and GPU response time, but little has been done to address light travel latency. I'm sure there are warp field and vacuum chamber technologies (think Star Trek and Elon Musk's Hyperloop) that we will someday leverage to drive light above the petty light speed barrier, but right now the only reliable solution is the low tech approach of hunching down and pulling the chair closer or purchasing a VR headset.
In the future, I could see a vacuum chamber monitor setup that attaches to the face of a player and then pumps out all the air between the face and the monitor to improve light flow (with a plastic shield over the eyes to prevent the Total Recall effect...that'd be gross) and then a warp nacelle or even a particle accelerator tube behind the monitor to give those photons the oomph they need to go even faster, but we're probably a good 2-5 years out form such a technology or more if you physicists keep wasting your time posting on AT and don't ever get back to physi-sizing like you should be. What am I paying you people to do again? Certainly not this!
Small Bison - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link
Do you have any relatives and/or clones that you can convince to join the site and comment on articles?BrokenCrayons - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link
Bison, I'm sad to say that I've tried cloning myself a couple of times and I seem to always end up with much smaller, less developed versions of me. They end up being really labor-intensive, cry frequently, and emit copious quantities of unpleasant smelling waste products. I have to admit that I don't understand what I'm doing wrong during the cloning process. Night school didn't cover it at all! I may need to consult an alchemist. I think transmutation is a viable option.ddriver - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link
Comparing light to something like the hype-r-loop is laughable and a loud statement about you lack of competence in the field of physics. The problem for a fast train is air friction, which becomes tremendous as the speed increases. Light has no friction with the air and the speed of light is only like 60 miles per second slower in air than it is in vacuum. So your ingenious idea of strapping vacuum chambers to people's heads will result in a whooping 0.0003% improvement.At a typical viewing distance for a large display, the "latency" of light traveling through air would be like 200 picoseconds at most. Moving to vacuum would decrease that to 199.04 - hardly an improvement that merits vacuum tubes. Besides, it would be much easier to simply put displays closed to the eyes, and also tremendously "more beneficial", at least at the particular scale.
Then again, even at top notch gaming hardware your hardware won't be able to get below 30 milliseconds, so there is already miles of progress to be made there before one even gets to the point of splitting hairs by worrying about them slow photos.
Lets for the sake of not lowering my view of mankind assume your post was just a poor joke :D
BrokenCrayons - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link
I'm not bothered by your dim view of humanity OR your inability to understand what is clearly a simple matter of photonic acceleration and air molecule removal! I've spent extensive time immersed in science to the point where I can confidently quote the great MC Hawking when I tell you, "My power is my mass times the speed of light squared!" and that "I have a PhD in Pain and a Masters in disaster!"(NSFW warning) https://www.mchawking.com/
I'm like a superluminal jet of amazing ideas, saturating the galactic core in the brilliant leftovers of interstellar indigestables and just because you disagree with the idea of reducing latency because you can't afford a vacuum channel between your face doesn't mean you can Debbie Downer the inevitable tide of the next computer gaming revolution. This will be a revolution more significant than the first US Robotics Sportster 2400 baud external modem. This will be a revolution more significant than the Iomega Rev Drive. I'd even go as far as saying it'll be more significant than Sega Game Gear AND the Dreamcast combined.
Those e-sports professional athletes are you there playing their hearts out in Atlanta (yeah, I saw how you decried their noble careers in your other post which is clearly born of seething, hateful envy) with their faces so close to their monitors that the oils from their skins are actually leaping across the gap between the two. And while they're paying their hearts out with sweat pouring from their hairy underarms and billions of epidermal cells shredding from their very fingers as they hammer mouse buttons and keyboards alike, you're sitting there in the posh comfort of your apartment or mobile home talking down to them. You're talking down to the world's heroes and idols as if they don't deserve particle accelerators and vacuum chambers! The next travesty you'll throw out is how you think they shouldn't have energy drinks or Mountain Dew. The nerve of some people.
ddriver - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link
I used to be a world ranking FPS gamer back in my youthful days, never broke a sweat. It really helps being healthy and fit rather than a lump of toxic fat that would sweat doing anything, including idling ;)But well, back then games rewarded reflexes, precision and tactical thinking, not amount of time from your finite life wasted. Back then gamers were cool dudes, not lifeless losers.
BrokenCrayons - Friday, January 27, 2017 - link
I don't think playing video games has become less respectable in recent years. In fact, I think the opposite is true as the hobby has become more mainstream than ever before. It means that "back in the day" when you were supposedly a "world ranking FPS gamer" its more likely that a larger segment of the population considered you a lifeless loser than would consider someone playing professionally now. That is if any bit of your self-promotion is the slightest bit true and, since this is the Internet, I think we all know where that line of thinking ultimately leads.Anyway, I personally prefer games where its simply a matter of making the occasional small investment of a couple hundred hundred dollars or so to purchase the best equipment, consumables, and vanity items that make it difficult or impossible to be harmed by players that are unwilling to make a similar expenditure. Those sorts of games automatically stratify players and make it easy to pick out who's worth interacting with and who'll simply be stomped into the proverbial dirt on the way to claiming the leaderboard. Microtransaction games have really made online gaming interesting and amusing because its not necessary to waste time with reflexes or "precision and tactical thinking." I do enough of that silliness at work so when I'm at home, I should, like anyone else, be able to reap the rewards of my social class by rocking the best gear in the game.
ddriver - Friday, January 27, 2017 - link
Yeah, what is more interesting and fun than paying actual money to buy imaginary merit in some game for losers. I presume it would be an attractive prospect for people who don't have any real-world merit, but it is just sad. Such games also tend to be absent any plot or story line whatsoever. They are truly a waste of time for people whose time isn't worth anything.I've only been playing games because of the challenge, and because I find fun in competition, not the actual game. And not the type of games which would require to play for several hours a day to get xp or find artifacts, but the kind of game where you can join, destroy in 15-20 minutes and then get back to your life. As I said, games that reward skill, not games that reward the inability to have a life. Not that there weren't "lifeless losers" playing those games back in the days, but they were wannabes without skill who kept on trying in the hope to improve. I never had any ambitions, I was just naturally good at high pace reflex shooters and combat tactics. It is stupid to have ambitions in games, and it is far better to be number 10 in the stats by investing less than an hour a day than to be number 1 by investing literally all of your time.
But those were different times, today everyone is a winner, they give away participation medals, and everyone's kickstarter has merit, you cannot call things the way you are and you must be "politically correct". Everyone is special and unique, and lifeless losers who waste money and life on pointless games are the pinnacle of this form of more degraded society. So yeah, they are worthy of respect, from the likes of you anyway ;) For those who seek such breaks from reality are the ones neglecting it the most - it is a vicious cycle, people don't invest enough in reality, as a result reality gets worse and worse, and as a result people seek more and more absurd ways to get away from that which they badly need to focus on.
BrokenCrayons - Friday, January 27, 2017 - link
"Such games also tend to be absent any plot or story line whatsoever," conflicts quite dramatically with your later stated point that you only play games for challenge and competition for spans of 15-20 minutes."It is stupid to have ambitions in games...,"conflicts your your earlier claim of playing competitively and being "world ranked" which is clearly the result of ambitiousness. Then again, I think we've debunked that since you're not objecting about it being untrue.
As for your last paragraph, I won't get into politics, but if you're not intelligent enough to find satire and the obvious joking in my entire string of posts at this point (honestly, the revolution of the Game Gear and my mother-of-flippin'-pearl preschool as an educational qualification should have given that away...along with everything else about my comments) then you're not reading very closely and are one of those very people you think are beneath you, but simply have failed to realize it in your eagerness to use my comments as a reason to drag out your soapbox.
psychobriggsy - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link
Whoosh!ddriver - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link
e-sports do not qualify for athletics. Athletic sports involve physical activities such as running or jumping. Not all people who practice sports are athletes, and e-sports are not really sports to begin with. The term "e-sports" itself is some lame joke and a complete mockery. Sport is "competitive physical activity", games are not sport, neither games like chess nor electronic games.DanNeely - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link
120 vs 110 DPI is a negligible difference for any case except swearing at crapplications that still don't scale right.Lolimaster - Friday, January 27, 2017 - link
If pros care about input lag, they should use CRT with sub-milisecond response time.Michael Bay - Sunday, January 29, 2017 - link
I don`t like this IPS or VA thing. Difference here is quite important.