What sort of monitor are you playing AOE3 on?
Are you still 27" or have you bumped up to 32"?
1080p vs 1440p?
Straight or curved?
I was at Costco today, they have a 1440p 32" LG for $229. And a 32" curved, 1080p Samsung for $229 as well.
It’s tempting to try one… or maybe I should stick with my 27" 1080p. I have plenty of horsepower to push a 1440p if I want to try that.
All comments welcome.
For competitive smaller monitors are better, for just casual then whatever you like.
As for the screen size, that will depend on how far away you are sitting from the screen. Larger screens are designed to be viewed from farther away. When you sit close up to one, especially curved monitors, you start to get that “IMAX experience” where your eye cannot easily take in everything on the screen all at once. Your attention shifts from thing to thing more like what you do in real life. Naturally for gaming, you want to be able to see the whole battlefield. If something is flanking you from the side, you want to see it as soon as the machine starts drawing the pixels; accordingly, you don’t want the IMAX experience here.
There’s a whole science of ergonomics involved with this sort of thing, taking into account the distance from the eyes, the amount of angle of vision where we see at the highest acuity, the width of our peripheral vision, etc. I’ll not bore you with it. If you’re interested you can Google these kinds of things, looking for the optimal screen size, best ergonomics, etc
My advice:
-Find out what your graphics card can support first. It doesn’t do any good to buy a super nifty 32" 4K monitor with all the bells and whistles if your graphics card can’t display onto it at a reasonable (at least 30 fps, optimally 60 fps or better) frame rate and resolution without melting down.
-Determine how much space you have. If you’ve got a cramped room for your desktop and sit the average 2-3’ from the monitor like most people, get a smaller monitor that accommodates that. If you’ve got a dedicated theater room or some other luxury like that and you want bigger so you can play from your couch or arm chair, consider going bigger.
I don’t know Costco’s return policy, but if they let you do returns without hassle, you can always just pick one, try it, and if you don’t like it, return it and exchange.
Costco is 90 days on returns for monitors and tv’s.
Can’t beat that.