What kind of a lag do you think you are seeing now? Because response time has nothing to do with any lags. Response time is the time it takes for a pixel to switch from one color to another. Slow response time cause blurriness in scenes with fast moving objects on high contrast backgrounds. This is called "ghosting".
Your 1ms monitor is of course a TN monitor with awful colors and angles, so this cheap Acer will be a huge improvement.
Do you need a 5 ms response time or less for gaming?
There are two groups of people that say this.
The first are the people that think response time refers to input lag/latency, which is not true as I explained in the previous section. Don't confuse response time with latency. If you switch from a 5 ms monitor to a new 1 ms monitor and the new one "feels faster", what you're feeling is not due to the faster response time. You are feeling a decrease in latency, which is completely unrelated to those 5 ms / 1 ms figures on the box, and is probably more along the lines of a 20–50 ms decrease or even up to 200–400 ms if you're coming from a TV. Even if you can feel decreased latency on your new monitor, the fact that the response time also happens to be lower than your old monitor is basically a coincidence and is not what is causing any feelings of decreased latency. Feeling a difference between 1 ms and 5 ms is totally impossible, and if you think you can, have a go at this so you get an idea of how short a millisecond is:
http://humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime.
Response time and latency
This is probably the biggest and most common misconception I see on here, so it's going first. Most people are under the impression that the response time is a measure of the display's latency, that ingame feeling of delay between hitting a button and seeing your command play out onscreen, "controller lag" as some people call it. A perfectly reasonable assumption; the value for response time is even given in milliseconds after all. But alas, this delay is NOT what response time measures. Response time is something
entirely different, it just happens to be confusingly named. That "controller lag", delay, whatever you want to call it, is called input lag or latency, and unfortunately it is never actually listed in the specs of a monitor. You'll need to look to review sites like
TFTCentral or
Blur Busters which actually test latency using advanced equipment.
Response time, in case you were wondering, is the time it takes for a pixel to switch from one color to another. Typically 1–10 ms, it isn't nearly enough to have any kind impact on the perceived latency or "controller lag", especially considering the color transition doesn't even have to be fully completed for us to see and begin reacting to the new image that is being formed. What it can do is cause blurriness in scenes with fast moving objects on high contrast backgrounds. These moving objects might leave a visible "trail" behind them on displays with a very very slow response time. This is called "ghosting" (not to be confused with the
smearing/echo effect over VGA connections also called "ghosting"). You can call it motion blur if you like, but that is technically incorrect as the term motion blur usually refers to the "built-in" blur that is part of the content being viewed (movies, etc.). When you pause and the entire scene is blurry, that is motion blur. That blurry image is exactly what the monitor is being instructed to display, and a faster response time won't make it any less blurry.
It's also worth noting that response time is not a single number for some display types, like LCDs. Response time is actually a whole range of values, and the specific response time of a color transition depends on which two colors are involved. When an LCD has a "5 ms response time", that doesn't mean it takes 5 milliseconds to switch between any two colors. It means it takes 5 milliseconds to switch between those two specific colors that the manufacturer chose for the test. Of course, since they don't publish which colors are used for the tests, or their testing methodology, or their testing equipment, it does make the number rather meaningless. There is also no standard for which color to use, so not only do you not know which colors are tested, you don't even have the comfort of knowing that all the manufacturers are at least testing the same transitions, whichever they may be. Different display manufacturers can all be testing the response times of different color transitions, which means response time numbers are not directly comparable between monitors. An 8 ms monitor can be faster than a 5 ms monitor in reality, or a 5 ms monitor might be slower than a different 5 ms monitor. In the end it hardly matters anyway, since ghosting hasn't been a big problem since the old days of early IPS panels without modern response time compensation technologies, whose response times reached up to 50 ms and beyond. With any half-decent modern display, even ones with the infamously slow "IPS" type panels, you'll find that they aren't actually slow at all and that severe ghosting issues are a thing of the past. As for latency, it only depends on the monitor's internal circuitry, it has nothing to do with what type of panel is used (IPS, TN, etc.). You can find fast TN monitors and laggy ones, and likewise you can find fast, responsive IPS panels as well as laggy ones.
Display Technology FAQ / Mythbuster
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