Monitors for Melee Netplay

7 min readNov 26, 2022

There are a lot of monitors on sale lately, and a lot of people are trying to get the best possible deal on a gaming monitor. In this post, I hope to provide a basic framework for determining how good a deal is at a glance.

The Basic Features of an Ideal Monitor for Melee

Here are some quick bullet points regarding what you are looking for. I’ll go into more detail below.

Panel type: IPS or OLED
Refresh Rate: 165+hz. Ideally 180hz or 240hz exactly.
GTG Response Time: 1ms or less
Input Lag: Read more to find out! (omg clickbait!!)
Variable Refresh Rate
Size: See Below
Price: See below

Panel Types

Generally speaking, you will see 4 panel types when looking at monitors online. These are going to be IPS, VA, TN, and OLED.

IPS is the most common type of panel that you will see in gaming monitors these days. Nowadays, you will see monitors advertising “Fast IPS” or something similar, indicating a faster pixel response time (more below in response time section).

Benefits of IPS: Vibrant colors, wide viewing angles, high brightness, fast response time (fast IPS only).

Drawbacks of IPS: Susceptible to “IPS glow”, when the monitor backlight becomes very noticeable especially against black backgrounds, making them appear grey.

VA is the second most common type of panel you will see. It is typically found in larger size monitors from LG and Samsung, as well as some gaming TVs.

Benefits of VA: Similar to IPS in terms of picture quality and vibrance, less expensive at larger screen sizes. Also does not suffer from IPS glow so dark colors will be much deeper and clearer.

Drawbacks of VA: Slow pixel response time makes this panel type unviable for Melee. Fast motion on VA monitors can appear “blurry” due to slow response times.

TN was once the most common panel type in gaming monitors, but was driven out of the market by the debut of Fast IPS in 2017/18. As a result, it is safe to assume that any monitors with a TN panel are from 2017 or older, and are not worth paying more than $110 or so. The old benefit of TN over IPS was that TN had faster response times while IPS had better colors, but modern IPS has TN beat in both categories. On this note, 1080p monitors with 144hz refresh rates are likely also from 2017 or prior, as 144hz was a limitation of DVI input.

OLED is the holy grail… if you’re willing to pay. For gaming, it does basically everything better than every panel type above. LG is debuting their $1000 OLED monitor next month, which is far more than I’m willing to pay for a monitor that will suffer burn-in within a year.

Pros of OLED: Better-than-IPS image quality. CRT-like response time.

Cons of OLED: High price, low durability due to image retention, meaning you’d need to deal with burn-in or rebuy every year or two. Also, it’s not available right now.

Refresh Rates

The higher the better. Slippi also recommends that you set your monitor to a refresh rate that is a multiple of 60 to stay in sync with Melee’s 60 frames per second. As a result, it is recommended to look for a monitor with a 180hz or 240hz refresh rate. There is an Alienware monitor with 360hz, which I’m sure would be great for Melee.

Response Time

The single most misunderstood metric when shopping for monitors.

Is response time the same as input lag? NO.

Response time indicates how fast a pixel can change colors. When response time is slow, fast motion on screen can look blurry and leave afterimages when the monitor can’t update the pixel color fast enough to keep up. If you’ve ever tried to play Melee on a Macbook screen, you’ve surely seen this phenomenon before.

What is GTG response time?

GTG means “gray to gray”. It is the measure of time it takes a pixel to change from one shade of gray to another. Gaming monitors tend to advertise “1ms GTG response time”, but this can be misleading as games tend to be in color, not black and white. Of course, it takes longer for pixels to change colors when using the whole color palette and not just grayscale.

RTINGS.com tends to have thorough reviews with a more detailed assessment of a monitor’s actual response time. Here’s an example of a review with an assessment of response times (partially changing color, fully changing color, accuracy of color change, etc).

So how can I tell if this response time is good?

You can generally trust the RTINGS evaluation, especially as mousing over the question mark icons will tell you what an ideal response time is (source):

Basically, as long as the Rise/Fall Time is faster than the frame time on your refresh rate, you will not see ghosting. The monitor listed in this screenshot is 180hz, meaning one frame is 1/180th of a second, or 5.56 ms. Since the Rise/Fall time of 3.7 ms is well under 5.56 ms, it will be free of ghosting. Likewise, if your monitor refresh rate is 240hz, you are looking for a measured Rise/Fall Time of under 4.17 ms.

As a point of trivia, before fast IPS, it wasn’t viable to make high refresh rate IPS monitors since the pixels couldn’t refresh in time to keep up with 144+hz. In 2017, it was standard to see 3–5ms GTG response times on IPS panels, so it was likely that their actual response times were greater than 10ms.

Input Lag

So what is Input Lag?

Input lag can be thought of as the sum of everything that happens between your input being executed, and your input being shown on the screen. To get how much input lag you have, you add up all of the following:

The transmission time over your controller cable
Your computer hardware’s processing time
Windows’ processing time
Your controller adapter’s processing time
Dolphin’s processing time
Your monitor’s processing time
Your monitor’s response time

Since most of this is not actually related to the monitor, you won’t see monitors advertising input lag since they can’t accurately test it, as it varies between computers, input methods, operating systems, and games.

RTINGS has an article about input lag. Their testing process doesn’t fully include the whole end-to-end input with a game running on Windows, so expect your real input lag to be much higher than what RTINGS lists.

Monitor Size

People will typically say you will want:

23–25" for 1080p. I think this is fine.

27" for 1440p. I currently have this, but I think since my monitor is kind of far back on my desk, I could use 32" 1440p. I’ve also used a 24" 1440p monitor in the past, and I thought the image was too small/dense. Some might like the smaller, sharper image more.

27" or 32" for 4k. I think this is too pixel dense for me, but I also don’t think I’ll need 4k for another few years. I don’t think you’re going to get a 4k monitor for Melee so I haven’t touched on it, but I do know 4k144hz monitors are on the market at the moment and are viable for Melee. I wouldn’t buy one anyways because I am not buying a graphics card capable of driving modern games at 4k144hz.

Variable Refresh Rate, G-Sync, FreeSync

These terms generally mean that your monitor can intelligently change its refresh rate to synchronize with whatever game you’re playing. It typically does not add input lag, but YMMV.

Here are some quick bullet points:

Variable Refresh Rate, or VRR, can be used to refer to either G-Sync or FreeSync.
G-Sync is for NVIDIA graphics cards.
FreeSync is an open standard that can be used by NVIDIA or AMD cards. You’ll see this marketed as “G-Sync compatible” on monitors.
G-Sync Ultimate is an upgraded version of G-Sync that increases the refresh rate range. It comes at a price premium.

Personally, I am currently avoiding G-Sync Ultimate monitors due to the fact that I don’t know if my next graphics card will be an NVIDIA card given the fact that the company has jumped the shark and started pandering to scalpers instead of actual customers, and cut their contract with EVGA, my preferred maker.

Price

These are prices I’d be willing to pay:

TN 144hz: $110 max. Ideally under $100 due to age.

IPS 1080p, 165–180hz: $150 max, especially as good 180hz monitors like this one have been as low as $115 (with VRR!).

IPS 1080p, 240hz: $180–200

IPS 1080p, 360hz: $300, no higher. Refresh rates have diminishing returns after 240hz.

IPS 1440p, 165–180hz: $200 max, but this number can be as low as $150.

IPS 1440p, 240hz: $400–500. This is still a relatively new technology so it’s hard to find it at a lower price in the current year. It is expected to drop rapidly over the next two years.

VA 1440p, 240hz: $300–400. Don’t buy it for Melee.

IPS 4k, 144hz: $600–700. Don’t buy it for Melee.

OLED 1440p, 240hz: $1000, with frequent rebuys. Don’t do it until the tech improves.

Don’t forget to check price history to verify that a deal is actually a deal. You can do this on Amazon with a Chrome extension like Keepa or visiting CamelCamelCamel.

Other Points

If you’re gonna splurge on a good monitor, make sure it has all the QoL stuff you want. If you like having a built in USB hub, make sure it has one. If you’re taller, make sure the stand can reach your desired height or can fit on a VESA mount. If you like a brighter screen, make sure the screen can get as bright as you want. Sometimes, you may want to pay more for a Dell or Alienware product because of their 3-year warranty as opposed to most companies’ 1-year warranty. And of course, the recommendations in this post are mainly based on SSBM netplay, but if you are trying to play Melee as well as Cyberpunk 2077 on max graphics on your monitor, then by all means go for that 4k 144hz monitor.