How to improve your TV GAMING Experience – Input lag & Response Times

A lot of people game on their TVs – especially console gamers – but not everyone can afford a brand new LG C2 OLED with instant response times and ultra low latency, so in this video I want to test out my budget TV to see what I can do to make the gaming experience better! While you likely won’t have my exact TV, the principles should apply to most setups, especially of this class. So let’s get started!

First things first, we need a baseline. I’ll start with response times. This is a HISENSE 4K IPS 55” TV I bought for right around £300 in the last year or two. I’m not expecting the absolute best response times but.. D’ya Know what? This ain’t that bad. Sure, it’s not exactly ‘fast’, but considering this peaks at 60Hz meaning a refresh rate window of 16.67ms, and from my testing it should be within that for a decent majority of the results. That’s not bad! It’s not perfect for sure, but especially for a console gaming experience I wouldn’t be too mad. Now, most TVs won’t have overdrive options to speed up those response times, so it’s not something you can control. What is, is latency. How long it takes for your inputs to show up on screen can make a massive difference to your gaming experience. The slower it is, the less of a responsive experience you get. In fast paced games where timing is key, a slow display can mean you don’t see your target for considerably longer than someone else using a fast gaming monitor instead.

So how does this fare? Oh.. oh my. That’s an average total system latency of 89ms. For context, a really good gaming monitor will be under 20ms here. Ouch! One of the reasons for this is that a TV’s job is to make the content look as good as possible whereas a monitor is generally more about just spewing the frames at your face as fast as possible, which tends to be the faster approach. TV’s often have a large number of “content enhancement” features which tend to add a lot of latency. Head to your settings menu and switch all of that off. Stuff like “MPEG Noise Reduction” is what you are looking for. Anything with “Adaptive” that isn’t Adaptive Sync can go. While you are here, look for a gaming mode too. Sometimes that’s a dedicated picture mode, although in my TV’s case it’s a toggle you can enable in any picture mode.

So what does the game mode option do? Well it drops the average from 89ms down to 70ms! That’s absolutely incredible. 70ms is still pretty naff, but dropping 20ms off the input latency for turning a few things off and enabling the gaming mode is a great result. It’s worth noting that I also tested the on-display latency with my Time Sleuth, and that reported a little over 20ms of on-display latency at stock, and under 5ms with the game mode on. That’s fantastic – 5ms is still a little on the slow side in this test method as a good gaming monitor would be more like 1ms but considering this is a budget TV I can’t be too mad.

One of the interesting things I noticed during my testing is that my TV, by default, uses backlight strobing. In the “Standard” mode, the backlight pulses off for around 2ms, and on for about 6ms, or just 120Hz at 75% duty cycle. That’s surprising to see, especially since the “adaptive backlight control” was switched off and brightness was at 50%. Switching to the “Sports” mode though meant it smoothed right out. No more dipping to black in the high speed footage, it’s back to being a smooth flicker free experience. Taking a real close look at the smoothed data from OSRTT Pro though, you’ll notice bumps every 16.7ms, which just so happens to be each new frame being displayed on screen at 60Hz. The peak and trough here makes me think it’s still running the PWM backlight at 120Hz, but is just running at 100% duty cycle for much less of a brightness change over time.

In theory, that kind of backlight strobing actually makes the “motion clarity” experience better. I know, seems counterintuitive but basically by showing you it for a short period then making it disappear like an absolute magician your brain perceives it as a smoother movement. Us and our smooth brains right? The problem is that flickering, especially at this kind of really slow frequency, is pretty bad for you – especially for your eyes. Eye strain is a pretty common symptom for people who use PWM controlled displays, as are headaches. For prolonged gaming sessions where you are properly engrossed in your game, a non-flickering backlight will make your experience a lot better. You can check that with your phone’s camera too – if you have a slow mo mode you can use that, but if you don’t just go into your manual mode and set your shutter speed to 1/1000 and take a picture. If you see black bars across the TV’s panel like this, your backlight is flickering off. If it looks like a clean, full image, odds are you are fine. You can often even see it in the preview before taking the picture too.

So, to recap, you’ll want to disable any of the post-processing features like smoothing, noise reduction and anything named “adaptive” that isn’t adaptive sync. You’ll want to search for any game modes, either distinct toggles like mine or full picture modes, and it’s worth checking if your TV is strobing its backlight and if any of the various modes or options like backlight or brightness controls can smooth that out. Of course I’m sure there are tips and tricks I’ve missed here, so please do leave them in the comments below for anyone else looking to improve their gaming experience!