TV or Monitor for Gaming: Which Is Better For You?

Today, universal connectors like HDMI have made it trivially easy to connect a console to a high-end gaming monitor, or a PC to a massive 4K TV. And, in fact, if you hop on Reddit or any number of other AV and gaming forums, you’ll see that a fair number of people do exactly that — even if most folks still use a TV for console gaming and a monitor for PC.

So what’s keeping TVs and monitors from merging into a single class of glorious, do-everything panels? Is there any reason not to buy the sweetest TV you can find and use it for your desktop PC gaming or to grab a high-performance monitor for your console? The answers to all of your questions are up ahead.

What’s the Difference, Anyway?

Without a doubt, the difference between TVs and monitors is smaller than it’s ever been. However, both types of display are still optimized for their conventional applications: console gaming and media streaming for TVs, work and PC gaming for monitors.

Basically, that means the hardware and software in your TV or monitor are designed with certain basic assumptions about how you’re using the panel. TVs are optimized for viewing at a distance of five feet or more, typically using streaming apps and/or gaming consoles connected via HDMI. Monitors are optimized for closer viewing and being connected to a PC via HDMI, DisplayPort, or other connectors.

Again, however, that’s certainly not to say you can’t use one as the other — but you’ll want to pay attention to the following differences.

Advantages of TVs for Gamers

1. Bigger Screens

Simply put, if the size is a major factor for you, a TV is probably the best choice. 55-inch 4K TVs are the dominant standard these days, and models 70 inches and up are increasingly common. Meanwhile, over in the monitor world, the 49-inch Samsung Odyssey G9 is still considered an exotic beast (and comes with an eye-popping price tag to match).

Note that larger screen sizes require the viewer to sit farther away because your eyes can only take in so much screen at once. That’s another reason why TVs are typically the choice for couch-bound entertainment like console gaming. If you’re planning on using a jumbo-sized TV as your PC monitor, remember that you’ll probably need to design your desk setup to allow you to sit at a greater distance.

2. Advanced Display Technologies

TVs are also more likely to offer advanced display technologies that can make your games come alive in new ways. Organic LED panels (OLED) are the most prominent example. The superb “true blacks” and high contrast of OLED TVs are widely available today but still relatively rare (and extremely expensive) on monitors. That’s gradually changing as manufacturers introduce more OLED gaming displays, but TVs are definitely far ahead as of 2023.

Other display technologies, like the color-enhancing High Dynamic Range (HDR) and the contrast-boosting Full Array Local Dimming (FALD), are also widely available on TVs. While you can still find these features on monitors, you’ll pay a comparatively higher premium for them, and they’re often not as well-implemented on monitors as they are on TVs.

3. Wider Viewing Angles

Planning to enjoy in-person multiplayer matches with your friends? A TV may be a better fit for your needs. That’s because TVs are designed to be viewed from multiple angles, so a person viewing from the corner of the room has a mostly comparable view to someone sitting directly in front of it.

Monitors, by contrast, are pretty much exclusively built for head-on viewing. If you’re not sitting in a monitor’s ideal viewing range, you may end up with various visual distortions like overly dark images or washed-out colors. In addition, a lot of monitors simply aren’t big enough to be a good substitute for TVs when it comes to in-person multiplayer gaming (or enjoying movies and TV).

Advantages of Monitors for Gamers

1. Faster Refresh Rate

A display’s refresh rate determines its maximum frame rate, which is critically important for a smooth and lag-free gaming experience. Both monitors and TVs offer a minimum refresh rate of 60Hz, which means frame rates will cap out at 60 fps. That’s a respectable number for most types of gaming, but many gamers (particularly competitive shooter players) look for the higher refresh rates that monitors can provide.

It’s true that TVs with native 120Hz refresh rates are available today, but it can be hard to find desk-friendly smaller models, since most people buying them are console gamers. Furthermore, TVs without a true native 120Hz refresh may use motion smoothing technologies that produce smeared-looking images in games. Meanwhile, PC gamers with beefy hardware who want to push 150+ fps will also need monitors, since TVs generally don’t offer refresh rates above 120Hz.

2. Lower Input Latency

Computer monitors (particularly gaming models) are also designed to minimize input latency. This is the time between your control inputs and seeing the results on screen, measured in milliseconds. Most gaming monitors are designed for ultra-low latency, with lag times as low as 2-4 ms.

TVs have historically struggled with higher latency in gaming applications due to additional image processing steps that they apply. This isn’t a huge problem for gamers who play story-focused single-player or casual multiplayer games, but it can seriously flummox competitive shooter players. Many TVs do now include a Game Mode that bypasses these image processing steps to improve the panel’s response times — but they’re often still not quite up to the standard of monitors.

3. Higher Pixel Density

Since TVs assume the viewer is sitting farther away, their pixels are generally farther apart. Viewers on the couch will never notice, but someone using the TV as a monitor might find small details (particularly text) to look blurry — fine for watching sports from 10 feet away but not so great for office work up close.

Thus, a monitor is typically the best choice for gamers who want to sit close to their display. It can be a perfect hack for console gamers who play in small spaces, such as dorm rooms or studio apartments. However, this advantage tends to dissipate quickly once you’re a few feet away from the screen.

So, in some ways, this is one of those boring cases where the conventional wisdom is (mostly) right: TVs are still usually the best choice for console gamers and monitors for PC gamers. The point, however, is to think carefully about which is best for you and then make the choice that aligns with what you’re looking for.