TV Game Mode

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

Just bought myself a new telly to keep me entertained during the ongoing plague (Samsung RU7400), and it's always recommended to turn on game mode in order to reduce input lag (in this case they claim the TV will get down to about 12 ms). The problem is that this locks out a lot of the picture options. I usually get the settings from review sites on the internet, but obviously with game mode enabled this isn't possible, so you're left with a picture that, in my case, just looks a bit wank.

Does game mode affect anything that I couldn't achieve myself by turning off all the post processing options in the menu?

[Sheffield Wednesday]

That's the nature of game mode on some tellies, I'm afraid.

The most significant difference it is will make is input lag, as you say. It depends what type of games you play and what the lag is like in 'Movie' mode or whatever it will be called.

If I'm playing a bullet hell shmup or twitch platformer, or anything at 60fps, I can feel the input lag in Movie mode. If I'm playing a third person action game like God of War or many things at 30fps, it's less noticeable. Some stuff makes no difference whatsoever in practice. If you play a lot of Civilisation, it'll make zero difference, for example.

Good luck with it.

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

Hmm. I don't play online really, so lag isn't that much of a factor. I suppose I could turn it on if I was playing an FPS or something. I'm not sure what else the telly could possibly be doing that I couldn't do myself in the menu options though. Presumably it just outputs a raw signal from the console to the TV and doesn't let you fuck around with it much.

[Dewt]

TVs keep the image in a buffer for a while to do all the processing, which isn't instant. The reason you can't change picture options in game mode is because turning off those options is what game mode is. Those options are what cause the lag.

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

So the choices are:
Bad picture, low lag
Good picture, high lag?

[Sebastian Cobb]

My tv's almost 10 years old but the advice for that one on AVForums was to put it on game mode for all sources to disable all the de-noise/de-pixelate plugins that just made everything worse. Mine still allowed brightness/contrast and colour temp to be changed though.

I'd be willing to accept the DSP's have gotten better in a decade but we had a wall of different models at my last work to test out our CTV apps and the modern ones all looked shit with their 'invent three quarters of the frames' setting.

[Dewt]

Yeah, I'm with Seb. I hate most of the processing TVs do, and that shit should live in the devices that push the image to the TV (or only be enable in when the TV's 'smart' apps are being used)

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

Just had a quick go on RDR2 with game mode turned on and it definitely feels a bit snappier. It's a minefield all this telly crap. Only reason I bought a new one was because the old one's panel appeared to be on the way out.