The Gaming PC Bottleneck Everyone Ignores (And It’s Not Your CPU)

You’ve heard of CPU or GPU bottlenecks, but monitor bottlenecks? Well, when you think about it, your monitor is where the rubber hits the road when it comes to gaming performance. Just like a high-performance car with bad tires, it doesn’t matter how good things are under the hood if you can’t make it to the finish line.

This is a more common problem than you might think, because most people don’t upgrade their monitor as often as their other components. Which is funny, because a better monitor can often improve your gaming experience more than a faster CPU or GPU.

When images overwhelm your display

The first and most obvious way a monitor hinders your gaming performance occurs when your computer renders more images than your monitor can actually display. For example, a 60Hz monitor can only show you 60 full frames per second. So if your computer renders 200 frames per second, 140 of them are never seen and provide you with no visual benefit. Sure, the internal state of the game could benefit from lower latencies, but you’ll never see more than 60 frames per second of smoothness no matter what. You can extend this to any arbitrary refresh rate, be it 120Hz, 240Hz or higher.

So without a screen capable of displaying your images, your only option to benefit from your powerful computer is to limit the frame rate and divert that processing power to higher gaming settings, but depending on how powerful your computer is, this can only help up to a point.

Technologies like VRR, FreeSync, and G-Sync help prevent screen tearing, but they don’t actually limit the frame rate. So you’ll still need to use some form of frame throttling if you’re creating more frames than your monitor can handle.

Resolution: The Silent Performance Killer

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You might think it’s always better to have a higher resolution monitor, but thanks to the way flat panel displays work with their physical arrays of fixed pixels, you need to render your game at that “native” resolution to get the best results. This becomes a problem when your computer cannot handle the resolution in question.

If the GPU displays a lower resolution than the native pixel grid requires, some sort of scaling solution is necessary. This is why so much time and effort has been spent on scaling technologies like DLSS, FSR, and XeSS. Processing power intended to solve the problem of upscaling images without horrible artifacts or poor image quality. These technologies work well, but they are not yet perfect.

At the same time, using a monitor with a much lower resolution than your GPU was designed for wastes energy, especially if you can’t divert that energy to higher settings or better frame rates.

The refresh rate and response time trap

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Monitor performance is much more nuanced than just a refresh rate. Even though a cheap and expensive monitor can both have the same refresh rate, it is different from pixel response time.

With each refresh, and therefore with each frame, the pixels on the monitor panel only have a small slice of time to move from their current state to the next. This pixel response time is often listed as a GtG or “gray to gray” number, which is a good measure of how well a monitor performs with motion. Let’s say your monitor has a GtG of 5ms and a refresh rate of 144Hz. This is great because there is about 7ms of time between each refresh to complete the transition. However, on a 240Hz monitor you only have a little over 4ms, which wouldn’t be good with a pixel response time of 5ms!

If your monitor’s pixels change state too slowly to be in time for the next refresh, you get motion blur and ghosting. It’s even more complicated than that, because while GtG is a good average indicator, some transitions can take a lot longer and trip up some panels. VA panels, for example, are known for their slow transitions from black to dark, resulting in a “VA smear” in certain situations.

Color and contrast matter more than you think

Credit: Tim Rattray / How-To Geek

What’s the point of having a computer that renders beautiful graphics, then outputting them to a monitor with washed out colors and black grays? This is why OLED monitors are so popular with PC enthusiasts and console gamers. There is an instant and obvious improvement in image quality without needing an ounce of extra performance from your computer. It’s as much about the quality of your images as it is about their number, and a bad monitor can make each image look worse than it really is.

How to adapt your monitor to your PC

Finding the right sweet spot between your monitor and your computer is a moving target, but I think there are a few general rules that apply when looking at popular resolutions for gaming in the mid-2020s.

Entry-level GPUs like the RTX 3060, 4060, and 5060 (and their AMD equivalents) are pretty much all you need when paired with a 1080p monitor. In most games, these cards should deliver fairly high frame rates, even at higher gaming settings. You can take advantage of this by looking for a 1080p monitor with a higher refresh rate and a compatible form of variable refresh rate technology. Be wary of cheap panel technologies though and in general IPS panels are the best choice here. 1440p is also a viable target if VRAM isn’t a limiting factor, and technologies like DLSS and FSR can help bridge the gap where needed.

For mid-range GPUs, high refresh 1440p monitors are pretty much a perfect match. Consider cards like the RTX 4070 or 4070 Ti. 4K playable frame rates are certainly within reach here, but for my money, 1440p is the sweet spot here. It also gives you access to high-end OLED monitors or other higher-quality gaming monitor options. 1440p is currently THE gaming monitor resolution gets the most attention and support, so there are plenty of awesome options.

If you have a high-end GPU (e.g. a 4080, 5090, etc.), then 1440p is still a good choice, especially at very high refresh rates, but it opens the door to 4K monitors with higher refresh rates. However, getting refresh rates above 120Hz on 4K gaming monitors has been slow, and 4K remains high resolution even for the best cards, so it really depends on your standards for frame rates.

There are so many other things we could talk about about how your monitor can hold back a gaming rig, but the main takeaway here is that your monitor is a performance component, just like your RAM, CPU, GPU, or SSD. Which means it can be a bottleneck, just like any of these components.