Which screen is better? AW17 120hz or AW18 PLS

Title says it... I care more about brightness and "pop" than I do viewing angles.

Anyone that has seen both have anything to comment?

 

The Alienware 17 120Hz screen is superior to that of all the other screens currently offered, which is why it's the main selling point of the Alienware 17. Not only is it brighter and really captures the details, it also eliminates the hassle of dealing with Optimus technology. This basically means your system is not held back by anything.

Just because it has "IPS" in the description, doesn't make it a better screen.

 

The PLS display in the AW 18 is good in that it produces good colours and decent vertical viewing angles. What it doesn't offer is the higher refresh rate, response time and brightness of the AW 17 screen. The display is the same as on the 3D version of the M17x R4. Aside from the gaming benefits of the 120Hz display, there is also the film benefits where 120Hz is a multiple of 24 (film frame rate) so your movies will playback smooth and like in the cinema and will give you that pop you are looking for. A 24fps movie on a 60Hz display requires a pull down method introducing even stuttering. Most people won't notice this but it is a small benefit. With a calibrated profile, the 3D display on the 17 incher is a real beauty and I have yet to see another screen in the same category match it. (I mention same category as high resolution "retina" displays are in a different category)

 

Dang you guys have really talked up that 120hz display, I may just take it!

Thanks guys.

 

Where would I find a calibrated profile? Thanks in advance


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

Here's one I recently commented in http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...choice-ssd-4910-120hz-screen.html#post9689150

 

How does 3D work? Do games have to be developed for it? That is my assumption.

 

Like all 3D it relies on providing each eye with a slightly different perspective as real life does. Close one eye and you loose depth.

All the different methods boil down to 3 popular ways to do this.

1. Anaglyph (3D Vision Discover mode). This just needs the cheap two colour glasses and is good just to check it out - but eye-strain is almost certain .

2. Side-by-side. This is what 3dTV uses. Both frames are sent in one large one and the TV splits them out using the glasses that come with the TV. Rubbish for gaming as it has a very low frequency (24hz) and lowered resolution because of squeezing it all into a single frame. The TV also smooths out that poor 24hz signal which in theory is great but in practice introduces unplayable input lag .

4. Dedicated full 60hz signal to each eye synchronised with the supplied glasses (NOT 3D TV ones). This is what NV have gone for and is far superior to any other method I have seen .

The game does not have to be written to support 3D as all the information for depth is already there in the 2D perspective (things get bigger as you get closer) so all it needs is the processing power to extract all this and supply two slightly different frames alternatively. It's come into it's own (IMO) with the latest round of GPU's being able to maintain a decent frame rate as you can expect a 30% to 50% drop.

Some games are better than others and some do have 3D options but these are often a hangover from a console port. Some games just do not work well, for me Far Cry3 was a huge disappointment but the Batman series is just awesome - he free-flow kills once you rack them up are works af art .

Probably more info than you were looking for but I got on a roll

 

What's the earliest game you've played? Did it work well?

 

Latest? Wolfenstein, no 3D at all, the game is written in OGL so runs super fast though. Before that Bioshock Inf and Tomb raider, both have excellent 3D

 

I should have said oldest, lol. No idea why I said earliest.

 

The portal games are quite old and I find the older games tend to work better (from a performance perspective) since the graphics stress the GPU less.

I've just loaded up Thief and that game has an option for 3D. Pretty good, and the FPS even with everything maxed out is acceptable for smooth gameplay

Edit: And it supports 120hz refresh in normal mode - not too many games allow that...