Zero motion blur gaming LCD has arrived!!! (Asus VG278H hack -- less motion blur than plasma)

Hello,

If you have an Asus VG278H computer monitor (27"), here are instructions for force-enabling 3D Lightboost during 2D mode. (3D Lightboost is a strobed backlight -- It flickers the backlight like a CRT):

Instructions: Eliminate Motion Blur While Gaming With NVIDIA LightBoost!

From what I've seen, it has less motion blur than a plasma display!
If you own an Asus VG278H monitor, give this setting a try.
Edited by Mark Rejhon - 12/14/12 at 8:59pm

Just did tests on my recently-purchased VG278H, and have confirmed --
the motion does look similar to CRT. Zero motion blur!!!!

The color quality isn't as good as a well-calibrated CRT, but the motion quality (perfect sharp motion) is definitely in "CRT territory". (PixPerAn motion benchmark tests indicate about 85% less motion blur than a standard 60 Hz LCD). Crystal clear moving windows, and scrolling text, as well as games running at 120fps@120Hz. The movement of windows and scrolling becomes more-or-less CRT quality when I do the following:

VG278H Instructions for Zero Motion Blur

1. I'm using driver 306.97 driver (WHQL)
2. Go to Control Panel -> Display -> Adjust Resolution
3. Verify "Enable Stereoscopic 3D settings for all displays" is enabled
4. Go to NVIDIA Control Panel (system tray -> nVidia icon)

5. Select "Set up Stereoscopic 3D" at left bar
6. Select "Enable Stereoscopic 3D" checkbox
7. Select "Asus 120Hz LCD"
8. Click Apply
9. Whole screen should suddenly dim a bit, this is normal due to strobing.
You should also have the "3D" indicator light at the top edge of your VG278H
10. To fix the dimness, use the monitor's Menu to set Contrast to 92. This makes the picture brighter while preserving all colors in this Lagom Contrast Test Pattern.
11. Smooth scroll in web browsers: If you're using Chrome and web browsing, install Chromium Smooth Scroller to gain the benefits of sharp text scrolling with the mouse wheel.

What is now different is that there's no motion blur when you drag windows, or scroll webpages, play MAME or NES emulators (perfect platformer scrolling), and when you launch videogames in 2D mode, there is no motion blur.

Very Minor Side Effects: Slightly dimmer screen, some flicker feel (if you are sensitive to flicker). My desktop stayed in 2D mode, but I did avoid installing any 3D-related desktop software (e.g. 3D login screen, etc) Some video games will insist in going into 3D mode rather ; this will be annoying when you're not in the mood for 3D. You have to override this. (Game specific, probably). There's an extremely faint amount of ghosting, similiar to crosstalk in 3D glasses, but it's no more objectionable than the phosphor-ghosting of CRT. Color quality is slightly degraded during strobed backlight. Long term, someone needs to build a system tray utility to turn this feature on/off in a single click -- when you're doing photoshop editing, you'll want the slightly improved static image quality of turning off LightBoost. There is some strange temporal artifacts when dragging the browser window while displaying Inversion Walk Pixel Patterns. Other than that, motion blur is virtually completely gone in video games -- it's CRT sharp; allowing complete immersion without being distracted by motion blur. You do need a GPU (GTX 680) fast enough to frequently hit 120fps@120Hz most of the time to really notice the big improvement in motion clarity. The CRT-style motion clarity more than outweighs the other side effects.

Side note: I have not yet played many games, but I'm liking what I am seeing. Just like CRT, I can identify far-away enemies without stopping turning. Faster identification of enemies. Faster reaction times. :-) Allowing faster reaction times that more than compensates for the input lag of LCD (From now on, competition gamers unable to get a CRT, but purchasing LCD monitors should probably factor in the motion blur advantage of LightBoost. IMHO, I'd take a LightBoost montior with 8ms input lag, over a non-LightBoost monitor with 5ms input lag. The CRT clarity of LightBoost allows me to react faster that more than compensates the 3ms difference in input lag.)

Stubborn Games that insists on going into 3D mode (if you have no 3D glasses, or don't want 3D) ...Turn off "Enable Stereoscopic 3D", keep the NVIDIA Control Panel window open, launch the game and start the game, then Alt+Tab back, and then re-enable "Enable Stereoscopic 3D". That turns on LightBoost without enabling 3D in the videogame, because I've already launched the videogame. Switch back to the game. And then play!

It is not a complete substitute for a Sony GDM-W900 (color quality, etc), but it's the next best thing for former CRT videogamers who want to have the same zero motion blur effect in an LCD.

I think there's a way for me to hack the LightBoost2 via DDC hacking (enabling the strobe-mode backlight seems to be done via a DDC command), or modifying the LightBoost2 driver in the monitor, so it can run at any refresh rate (even 60Hz), even consoles. I may do this hack sometime next year, once I get a second LightBoost2 monitor and I'm daring enough to break open a LightBoost2 monitor -- I will still use my existing LED's in a cheap LCD panel, but LightBoost2 is an attractive hack target. Also, from my tests, the LightBoost2 strobes are approx 2.5ms long (1/400sec). There's more room for improvement, but this is competitive to a medium-long persistence CRT (2ms = 1/500sec). I captured high speed video of the LightBoost2 strobe backlight in action, will post a YouTube soon. nVidia LightBoost2 is simply full-screen strobes, sort of like a strobe light behind the LCD according to 1000fps footage -- occuring during the in-between refresh moments when LCD pixel persistence is virtually gone. You can 'feel' the flicker, but it's no more objectionable than a 120Hz CRT, and less objectionable than a flickery plasma (like the Panasonic 2500 Hz FFD plasma display, which also flickers a lot too)

In fact, my Asus VG278H LCD monitor (With the LightBoost2-in-2D-mode strobe tweak) has far less motion blur than the Panasonic 2500Hz FFD plasma (The VT50) which I went to Best Buy and saw -- hamstrung by 5ms RG phosphor decay. LCD pulls ahead of plasma now in motion blur.... (shocker) even though color quality (because of TN) is poor compared to plasma and CRT. But motion blur trophy is now in the LCD ballpark today (at least when you own an nVidia graphics card in your PC/HTPC and use a LightBoost2 LCD). Motion blur is far less than the best plasmas, and is reaching CRT territory. Additional good news is Benq XL2411T and XL2420T works as zero motion blur LCD monitors with the LightBoost2 strobe backlight tweak (force LightBoost2 to work in 2D mode) And without the input lag of the motion-interpolated stuff.
Edited by Mark Rejhon - 12/17/12 at 11:44pm

More confirmations are now flowing in from other forums, links included:
(All the above: Geforce GTX 680 or 680 SLI, or better, combined with a LightBoost2 monitor + the 2D mode tweak + 120fps@120Hz
Confirmed monitors: Asus VG278H, VG278HE, Benq XL2411T, XL2420T

Disadvantages/gotchas:
-- There is the flicker disadvantage, but if you don't mind CRT/plasma flicker, no problem -- LightBoost2 120Hz flickers less or unnoticeably for most people. Not everyone. (Some hate flicker even at 120Hz). Fortunately LightBoost2 is a feature that can be turned on and off.
-- Poor color quality for this unit (it's a TN LCD panel). This isn't it for film buffs or photography lovers.

But motion looks CRT perfect sharp. Better than plasma for motion blur.
LCD better than the best plasma in motion blur! Can you believe that! Motion blur! Formerly a terrible LCD attribute. Gone!
These are the best-ever LCD gaming displays by a massive margin, for first-person gaming action. The difference between 120Hz->LightBoost2 strobes is bigger, than the difference between 60Hz->120Hz, when doing online FPS matches.

Though, you must have a powerful GPU because you need 120 real frames per second (120fps@120Hz)
The zero motion blur effect disappears if you're running 60fps@120Hz, because the LightBoost2 strobing is only enabled at 100Hz or above. (Hopefully this can be overriden).

This is Flat Panel General & New FP Tech. Eventually, this could filter.
But it has excellent applications for home theater gaming of the future, since this technology scales to HDTV-sized LCD displays.
In addition, I'm working more in the gamut of home theater computers and gaming.
Though you can play videos off a PC, too, which can get benefit from the strobe backlight (though works best with 120fps native material)

Also, large size home theater LCD's with strobed backlights do exist (see Existing Technology) in the form of scanning backlights, but they have not optimized them to work well for video game purposes, and they unfortunately flicker excessively at 60 Hz, and they don't connect to computers or consoles at 120Hz, and the scanning (instead of strobing), has pros and cons. There's too much input lag because of motion interpolation (60Hz->120Hz). Another con is scanning does not seem to reduce motion blur nearly as much as strobing, due to backlight diffusion issues. Still a vast improvement, at least for the well designed ones (e.g. Elite LCD HDTV)

[DISPLAY-THEORY-TALK]
Long term, for video-sourced material (sports, opera, documentaries, etc) what we need is more 120Hz-native source material to permit flicker-free strobes from various strobe technologies without using motion interpolation. Sadly, it'll be 10+ years before this happens. The people at NHK was wise to decide to make 120Hz a feature of 8K. An 8K better-than-IPS LCD with a configurable 120Hz strobe-or-steady backlight, might be what we're seeing in our home theaters in the 2030's if they don't fix the OLED flaws by then. The end of the CRT era means we have wonderfully steady flicker free pictures, but terrible motion resolution, which we have to band-aid with motion interpolation, or stobing, and that's no good for home theater gaming when we connect our Xbox2160's or Wii5's or whatnot to our 8K UHDTV in a couple decades from now.

Then again, it's a matter of a point of view:
Interpolation? Bandaid.
Strobes? Bandaid.
Finite framerates? Bandaid.
Finite resolution? Bandaid.
Non-holographic 3D? Bandaid.
etc.

Say, for a motion fluidity videophile (sports and games instead of film, etc) -- We can only strive our best, replace interpolation with true frames. But to avoid strobes, we need an a silly framerate (e.g. you need 1000fps@1000Hz sample-and-hold in order to equal the motion clarity of 60fps@1ms strobes). Do we compromise by avoiding strobes and going to an insanely high framerate? Even though there's diminishing returns beyond 120Hz, it's worth noting for sample-and-hold displays, the jump between 60fps->120fps is 50% less motion blur, but the jump from 120fps->960fps is 93.75% less motion blur. Likewise for impulse-driven displays, the jump between 1/60sec strobes(@60Hz)->1/120sec strobes(@60Hz) is 50% less motion blur, but the jump from 1/120sec strobes(@60Hz)->1/960sec strobes(@60Hz) is 93.75% less motion blur. All scientifically proven motion blur equivalences. Many CRT's have 1ms phosphor decay, so that provides the 1/1000sec strobe equivalence or the sample-and-hold display motion equivalence of a theoretical 1000fps@1000Hz display (for comparison's sake). Even though some say going beyond 120Hz makes no difference to the human eye, this is a plainly wrong assertion, due to scientific testing, as the many links to research papers show. Spiking far down the curve of the point of diminishing returns is another clearly noticeable 43.75% improvement on the 50%, so clearly, the ultimate is well far beyond 120fps, showing it's worthwhile to jump all the way to 960fps (darn near 1000fps real-time). But it'll never be practical to have 1000fps sports TV broadcasts playing in real time (non-slo-mo) at 1000fps on 1000Hz displays, for the CRT perfect motion effect on a non-flicker display. Impractical, bandwidth-wise for the forseeable future. See.....Anything less than ~1000fps is a band aid from this point of view. (real time playback 1000fps@1000Hz) Instead, we depend on interpolation or strobing/scanning (or combination thereof) to get the good motion resolution.
.... So, what's a motion videophile to do, for sports and video games? Live with motion blur? Sure, that's one thing. But let's welcome technological improvements such a compromise balance between a higher framerate (e.g. 120fps @ 120Hz) combined with interpolation (for those that hate flicker) or strobes (for those that prefer non-interpolated, or when low latency/lag is needed for games). Tough compromise. So far, 120fps@120Hz+strobed backlight is a really good compromise for PC users wanting a flicker-free zero-motion-blur effect.
.... The number 60 Hertz is a bandaid invented for a practical reason, based on AC electrical frequency, early TV sets synchronizing refresh to the electrical grid. For video/documentary/sports/game material, we need to say goodbye to 60 Hz in the next two decades. A few hints are showing through, top-end gaming LCD's, the NHK 8K 120Hz, and a few other 120Hz initiatives are slowly beginning, and may spread. It's a small step, even if 120 Hz is, too, also a bandaid (but one that is above flicker fusion threshold for most people). It will take a long time (even two decades or more) for 120 native to replace 60, but the trend is starting to show (bleeding edge territory, ala HDTV in the 1990's). Some of us will want motion blur for many things, like for movies, etc, or for artistic reasons, but other times we want to avoid motion blur forced upon us (and let our eyes naturally create motion blur instead for us), by eliminating motion blur limitations in the source and in the display.
.... And movie needs are a bit different for many people, even myself (sometimes we WANT the motion blur effect of 24fps or even 48fps), etc.
[/DISPLAY-THEORY-TALK]

Now I'll go back onto the topic of zero motion blur flat panels for video gaming.
The ones that are here today, the ones that we can buy today, with what appears to be world's least motion blur for a non-CRT display (without the input lag of interpolation) are now the LightBoost2 strobe-backlight-capable monitors.
Edited by Mark Rejhon - 12/18/12 at 9:41am

I think that would work. The picture brightness will fall to half. It will flicker badly like a 60Hz CRT, but in a dark room, that may be tolerable when you need the zero motion blur effect at 60Hz. It's possible to write utility software to generate software-based black frame insertion, simply by blacking out the whole screen every other refresh. Could even be 3D-related hack of making the left eye the 2D frame, and right eye the black frame. Put down the 3D glasses, don't use them for 2D 60Hz. Then it alternates between the frames, generating black frames for you. Your eyes only see the 2D with a black frame insertion effect. Might need some video driver integration.

It could even be done using an HDMI dongle. Connect a 2D 60Hz signal to the HDMI dongle adaptor. It outputs a 3D signal, but puts the 2D 60Hz in one eye frame, and a blacked-out frame in the other eye frame. Connect to any 3D monitor or HDTV that alternates between the two. Viola. Black frame insertion. It would also work for both strobed and non strobed backlights, but the zero motion blur effect will only happen with a strobed backlight. The black frame is simply to suppress every other 120Hz strobe from generating a repeated-frame for 60fps material.

Any of the above could be a worthy research target.
Edited by Mark Rejhon - 12/18/12 at 10:03am

Fortunately, in most the games I've tried, you can turn off this GPU-generated artificial motion blur effect, since it's not useful when you're trying to get the most frags during online competition. It can be a good aesthetic, but can be quite obnoxious for the times when it is undesired.

FYI, a Geforce GTX 680 graphics card easily does 120fps@120Hz on my machine in source-engine games, though sometimes I have to unlock the framerate using fps_max (e.g. fps_max 240). For 120fps@120Hz at 1080p in Crysis, you need a GTX 680 SLI (two cards running in parallel).
Yes, but many LightBoost monitors are locked to 120Hz if you enable LightBoost.
I've since discovered I can bump LightBoost to a 100Hz strobe, so you can do 100fps@100Hz. However, I've also measured that strobe lengths gets a bit longer.

At 120Hz, the strobe lengths are 2.4 milliseconds long on VG278H, according to my oscilloscope tests:



I've noticed that at 100Hz, the strobe lengths become proportionally almost 20% longer. It doesn't have to be, but the monitor does this because the picture will otherwise be dimmer if you don't lengthen the strobe when lowering the refresh rate. We want to keep the strobe lengths short for the zero motion blur effect.
The good news is that a Geforce GTX680 works great at staying at 120fps in many Source Engine games (as long as fps_max is raised at the Console, some games have a 60fps limiter, which causes problems)

But, bottom line, there's no technical reason why a monitor can't sync its strobing to any refresh rate -- as long as the blanking interval is big enough to let the pixel persistence settle before the next refresh.
Edited by Mark Rejhon - 12/23/12 at 4:17pm

Here's a video I've made for forum readers, captured at 480fps and 1000fps:

High Speed Video Of LightBoost



It also proves that strobing can be used to bypass pixel persistence.
Enjoy!

Vega from HardForum confirms PixPerAn readability 30/30 on the BENQ XL2411T LCD monitor with LightBoost enabled.
Others say 24/30 or 25/30, some of it only because they can't read that fast because text at 120Hz moves double the speed as text at 60Hz.

Either way, we've got multiple independent confirmations that the clarity of motion (zero motion blur) on LightBoost LCD is equivalent to CRT. (Motion quality, not color quality) Here's quotes, including links to the original forum posts:

That said, there are disadvantages -- it's a TN panel, so it's not as good color as IPS. That said, it's excellent for videogamers on PC, with powerful GPU's that can push 120fps @ 120Hz. (i.e. Don't bother if your graphics card is not powerful enough to push 120fps).

What's confirmed is that these LightBoost monitors has less motion blur than plasma, and is competitive with CRT's.
Let's hope this technologies filter to IPS, and perhaps someday also to home theater.
Edited by Mark Rejhon - 12/24/12 at 2:40pm

No motion interpolation.
Zero _added_ input lag!!! (Well, not measurable -- everybody above say they can't tell -- probably less than 1-2ms).

The gamers in one of the threads on the esreality forums are giving rave reviews for the LightBoost monitors during Quake Live matches and games like TF2, etc. Fast-twitch games are perfectly playable with LightBoost strobing. The reduced motion blur allows faster reaction times, especially when shooting far-away enemies, since it's easier to identify tiny on-screen objects without stopping moving first (to stop the motion blur). Also, by being able to keep moving, you become less of a sitting duck for sniper enemies in video games. The improved reaction time (100-200ms in some cases) is far more important than any 1ms-or-less-added-input-lag.
Edited by Mark Rejhon - 12/24/12 at 2:42pm