Whether you’re using a gaming monitor or a work monitor, ghosting is something you will probably have come across several times. Monitor ghosting isn’t as terrifying as the name suggests, but it can still cause you trouble.
Having a monitor with the issue of ghosting can be more than irritating. It can significantly impact your gaming performance, cause eye strain, and generally, ruin your experience. It is a real problem on even the best PC monitors.
What is Monitor Ghosting?
Monitor Ghosting is a common occurrence that one might experience on any monitor. Monitor ghosting occurs when an image artefact shows up as a trail of pixels behind objects that are moving at a fast rate.
They also follow slower moving objects. When you move your mouse quickly or scroll up and down quickly while browsing a website, you’ll notice an effect where the previous image frame stays for a few seconds. When the monitor is ghosting, you will notice a discolouration of some areas of the display. It’s popularly known as screen burn, ghost image, image burn-in, and screen burn-in.
Ghosting is generally caused by your monitor delivering a slow response time and not catching up to the image refresh rate. It can make the images look like they are overlaid on each other.
It could occur when you’re using your PC for graphics-heavy work such as video editing, graphic design, or image editing, who want to get the best performance possible out of their PC. This also occurs in fast-paced competitive games like First Person or Third Person Shooting games and RPG games with hardcore gamers. Monitor ghosting ultimately spoils the experience.
What Causes Monitor Ghosting?
There are a few different causes of monitor ghosting. They are as follows:
- The leading cause of ghosting is the inability of the display to move at the same speed as the images. If your PC has a lower refresh rate than the minimum of 65Hz, or if the gaming monitor has a high response time of 10ms and above.
- Response time is known as the time it takes for a pixel to shift between colours. The shorter the response time, the more responsive the motor is. Screen refresh rate is how often your screen displays a new image. It is measured in hertz. A 60Hz refresh rate implies that the monitor refreshes itself 60 times per second.
- With a monitor that has a low refresh rate and a high response time, you’ll most likely experience the screen ghosting issue.
- Sometimes ghosting isn’t a problem associated with the monitor itself. The issue could possibly be with your monitor cable.
- Your monitor settings might be causing problems too.
- In order to solve the problem, you overclock the monitor to achieve a higher refresh rate, but this can also cause ghosting.
How Do I fix it?
If you are experiencing ghosting on a monitor, there are a couple of effective fixes. The steps for fixing Monitor ghosting are much easier and less costly than other issues such as image retention and monitor burn-in. It’s very simple to identify if your monitor has this issue.
If you sense that your PC is experiencing Monitor ghosting, the best thing to do is test out the issue to confirm the problem.
If the monitor ghosting test confirms your suspicion, make sure to troubleshoot the problem with the above steps before immediately sending it in for repairs. Since ghosting is mostly not a physical problem with your monitor, chances are you can solve this issue on your own with a bit of checking the system and some simple fixes.
If the issue is caused by your system specification and compatibility issues, you might solve it using the system settings.
Step 1: Check refresh rate and response time
Your gaming monitor shouldn’t be running with a refresh rate lower than 60 Hz.
If your monitor spec shows that you have support for a higher refresh rate, changing to the higher refresh rate would probably solve the issue you’re having.
Check that the response time shouldn’t be above 10ms. 5ms and below is the sweet spot for gaming monitor response time. So having something considerably higher in this age of advancing gaming PCs can cause ghosting on a monitor.
If your issue isn’t resolved, follow the next step.
Step 2: Enable overdrive.
Another way to fix screen ghosting is to enable overdrive, and the OverDrive setting is also known as Advanced Motion Acceleration or AMA.
Open the On-Screen Display menu >> search Overdrive or Trace Free or Response Time>> Enable if not already done >> if enabled, check the option it’s been set to and try out different options while monitoring if it makes a difference.
Step 3:Check your monitor setup.
It would be best if you considered disabling ULMB( Ultra Low Motion Blur), Nvidia G-sync or AMD FreeSync as they have been found to produce ghosting.
If they are already disabled, then try enabling it to see if it fixes the issue. It would help if you also disabled visual effects like Dynamic Contrast, Perfect Clear, Motion Smoothing, Noise Reduction.
While attempting to get the best settings for our devices, we could inadvertently break some things. So take your time to review the settings. If you’re unsure of what’s wrong, you might revert to the default settings and see if that fixes the problem.
Step 4: Check your graphics card
When the graphics card driver is outdated, that could certainly be the cause of the ghosting. You should check the changelog of the driver update notes to see if issues like ghosting are stated in it. If you’re gaming via a PC, it’s worth updating your drivers and seeing if this helps fix the issue.
Step 5: Keep in mind the age of your monitor.
If you’re using an older monitor, you’re probably using the display for something it wasn’t designed to support, especially the demand for newer computer and console games. So the recommended fix if your monitor is older will be to invest in a new gaming monitor.
Step 6: Check your faulty cables or other devices in a short-range.
Remove all of the devices that are placed close to your monitor, including your printer, modem, speakers, and check whether they have an impact on ghosting. It could definitely be a problem that has to do with proximity.
Step 7:check your monitor cable for any tears, bends, kinks, or rust.
Any of these can cause ghosting.
Suppose ghosting is still visible even after changing overdrive settings, removing other devices near the monitor, and changing the cable. In that case, the issue can be a faulty monitor or faulty video ports.
Another option is to use an Anti Ghosting monitor, an anti-ghosting monitor, to reduce monitor ghosting to zero.
Moreover, the best thing you can do is research your monitor thoroughly before you buy it. Most customer reviews will mention if ghosting is an issue. Try to get a monitor with a refresh rate of at least 75Hz for console gaming and 144Hz for PC gaming. It has a maximum of 5ms response time, the lower, the better. Please don’t buy a VA panel when searching for a new monitor as they have the slowest response time; get either an IPS or TN panel. Cheaper IPS monitors can also show ghosting artefacts but to a much smaller degree.
Whilst some think that Monitor Ghosting might resemble more permanent problems with your display, it is actually temporary and can be easily fixed. It can significantly destroy your gaming experience or your movie night. Most people have already adapted and learned how to deal with some monitor ghosting and issues, even if they don’t exactly like it.
This makes Monitor Ghosting a temporary problem since it will only last as long as you move on the screen that your monitor can’t keep up with. If your computer monitor starts to show weird icons, lines, blocks, ghosting, or strange artefacts, don’t throw it away.
You may only have to route your computer monitor cable away from some electrical devices emitting an electrical field. If you’re dealing with the Ghosting effect on your screen, Make sure to follow these methods properly, there is a good chance you can fix it and get yourself a good monitor with the best-recommended features if you cannot get it fixed using these methods.