Optimizing Monitors for Sim Racing

Basic Monitor Setup

• Drivers
  • Ensure you're using official, recent drivers
• Color profile
  • Install an official color profile which should be included in the driver
• Refresh rate
  • Ensure Windows and your game are using your monitor's maximum refresh rate
• Response Time
  • My monitor offers an additional set of options called Response Time and it can be set to Normal, Fast, Fastest
  • I tested on testufo.com and Fastest was a net win as it alleviated some issues compared to the other settings even if it exacerbated other issues (ie. overshoot)
  • I recommend searching YouTube for monitor refresh rate reviews, channels like Digital Foundry, and start watching to get an idea of what happens to an image as it moves on your screen. There's blur, ghosting, overshoot, and many other issues you need to watch out for and control.
• GSync / FreeSync
  • Optional but could be valuable to avoid tearing
• Game Mode
  • Enable this to ensure your monitor has baseline optimizations set for gaming
• Image Enhancement
  • Disable this as any additional processing in the GPU->Screen pipeline will introduce some delay
• Brightness
  • You actually don't want this high. Keep close to 50% to alleviate issues like blur and ghosting
• Contrast
  • Keep this higher but not maximum (ex. 70-80%)
• Sharpness
  • What you want here is to disable any additional sharpening that would require processing time that would introduce delay
  • I had to disable mine
  • Yours might work in the opposite way where it softens an image by default.
• Color Temperature
  • Mine is set to Warm and I've gotten used to it
  • You may want to change this to Cold or some other settings based on how images look in video games when you have all game optimizations set (Ex. over vibrant images in game mode)
• Tips
  • Ignore "worse" look on desktop (it's worth it, and you'll get used to it) and in-game (you quickly get used to it, and the frame time benefits will be worth it)
  • Ignore over-vibrant in-game colors (corrected with Color Temperature as needed)

Frame Time (Jitter and Jutter)

• Cap your frame rate so that your frame times are within 1-2ms of what your system is actually reliably capable of
• Example: I capped to 90fps (11.111ms/frame) in GTR2 because I wasn't able to reliably achieve more than that without experiencing sporadic higher frame times which introduced jitter and jutter
• Even though my system could briefly achieve much higher frame rates, I wasn't able to reliably achieve those frame rates, and that's what causes the problem
• It seems the closer you can get to you reliable frame rate, the less jitter and jutter you will see and feel
• I use MSI Afterburner to give me an overlay with various information about GPU and CPU load, frame rates, and a frame time graph