2560×1600 Performance Investigation (updated)

30” HP LP3065

Before I get to the benchmarks, I’d like to take a moment to describe the display itself. As you’ve seen from the hardware setup on the previous page, my new display is a 30” HP LP3065.

Before buying this device, I did a lot of research across the 30” panels. Being a die-hard CRT user, I simply could not tolerate significant input lag or ghosting. Most panels in this size category have horrific input lag, especially the Dell 3008 which I looked very closely at. The significance of the HP LP3065 is that it has no video processor and no overdrive, and thus has extremely low input lag. It’s as snappy as the 22” TN I briefly used, and I can’t detect any significant lag compared to my old CRT. I‘ve not seen any significant ghosting on it either.

The panel itself is massive and makes the 19” CRT look positively tiny. You can’t truly appreciate how big such a display is until you see it in person right in front of you. Gaming on it is like gaming on a projector; guns are so big, it’s almost like you’re holding them yourself.

The colors are great with rich reds, blues and amazing greens. I hadn’t realized how many different shades of green many games used for vegetation until I saw them on this display. The first outdoor area in Far Cry looks absolutely amazing. The panel’s uniformity and viewing angles are also far better than the TN panel I was briefly using too.

Despite not having a video processor, the panel handles scaling of non-native resolutions very well (it always fills the screen, so to stop this you’ll need to use your GPU’s scaling). There are a lot of resolutions including the common 1680×1050 and 1920×1200 widescreen ones, CRT resolutions like 1600×1200 and 2048×1536, and even my old favorite: 1920×1440. The display correctly identifies these resolutions without a driver and they’re automatically visible to any applications that don’t have hard-coded resolutions.

Many applications that have hard-coded resolutions can still be made to run at 2560×1600, and after some tinkering I’ve managed to get 65 out of my current 96 installed games running at 2560×1600. This figure will rise when I get a more powerful GPU as I have several newer games that don’t yet run acceptably at this resolution.

My only real gripe is that it isn’t 120 Hz, but realistically that’s going to take years before it arrives on panels this size. So for now I believe I’ve purchased one of the best gaming monitors available in consumer space, and I’ve been loving the several days I’ve already spent gaming on it. I’m currently playing through Painkiller again at 2560×1600 with 8xMSAA, and it looks stunning.