After a 7-year corporate stint, Tanveer found his love for writing and tech too much to resist. An MBA in Marketing and the owner of a PC building business, he writes on PC hardware, technology, and Windows. When not scouring the web for ideas, he can be found building PCs, watching anime, or playing Smash Karts on his RTX 3080 (sigh).
Most gamers understand the importance of a good gaming monitor. They look at the screen size, refresh rate, resolution, and HDR performance before making their choice. However, your expensive IPS or VA display has another feature that can prevent motion artifacts, but most people aren't even aware of it.
This setting is called "overdrive," typically found in the response time section of the monitor's on-screen display (OSD). OLED monitors are fast enough without needing tricks like overdrive, but LED monitors need capable overdrive tuning to meet their advertised response time targets. The problem is that your existing overdrive setting may not be ideal, and most people never think about it.
Overdrive often flies under the radar
Most gamers gloss over it
After buying a new gaming monitor, most gamers dial in the best adaptive sync, game mode, and HDR settings for their respective model. After all, you wouldn't want to leave performance on the table after spending hundreds on a great gaming display. These settings undoubtedly affect your gaming experience in obvious ways, but the overdrive setting might be the most underrated setting of all.
Most manufacturers claiming a 1ms response time on IPS and VA monitors don't reveal that these numbers are obtained under specific overdrive settings. To push a display to a 1ms response time, you need to push enough voltage to force the pixels so that they transition fast enough. The various overdrive settings determine how much voltage is pushed, determining the motion clarity of the panel.
Gamers typically don't think about the overdrive setting at all. It's usually found under the "Response Time" or "Advanced Motion Accelerator" (AMA) section of the OSD, and most people never think about tweaking whatever is pre-selected. However, this might be hurting your gameplay without you realizing what's behind it.
It's crucial for your display's response time performance
The wrong overdrive setting can ruin a perfectly good display
Without the right response time setting, even the best gaming display can feel cheap. Overdrive determines how fast your monitor's pixels transition from one frame to the next. If the voltage supplied to the panel is too low, it causes ghosting, i.e., a faint trail or double image behind fast-moving objects. On the other hand, if the voltage is too high, it can result in inverse ghosting, i.e., a bright halo around moving objects.
If the overdrive setting on your monitor is set too high, such as "Faster," "Extreme," or "Maximum," it's this inverse ghosting that ruins the immersion during gaming. If you're seeing bright trails in front of fast-moving objects, you may not connect the problem to the overdrive settings, since the feature is relatively less talked about.
The best overall overdrive setting is usually the second-fastest setting available on your panel. Typically, this is "Fast" on most models. This setting balances the voltage sent to the panel, avoiding both ghosting and inverse ghosting.
The "best" overdrive setting isn't constant
It can change, depending on what's running on your monitor
Credit: Nvidia
Another angle to the overdrive story is that the best setting doesn't apply universally. The "Fast" setting might work for a particular refresh rate window and type of game, but might fall apart in different scenarios. The voltage your pixels are receiving can become too much if the refresh rate fluctuates and drops beyond a point. Hence, you need to test different overdrive modes and pick the one that satisfies most scenarios.
The overdrive performance also depends on the quality of your panel's tuning, so there's some bit of luck involved, too. That said, if your monitor has a variable overdrive setting, it can adjust the response time performance based on the changing refresh rate. This is the best solution, but most displays don't have it. So, your best course of action is to play different titles — a fast-paced shooter, a slow AAA game, a platformer — and choose the setting that looks the best.
You can use the UFO test by Blur Busters to examine ghosting and inverse ghosting at various overdrive settings. This test gives you a single window to find the best overdrive setting, in general, for your monitor.
You don't need to change your overdrive mode too often
Most gamers need to dial in the right overdrive setting only once when setting up their new monitor. The mode that works for most games and refresh rate windows will continue to be the right one for whatever you play. Overdrive deserves to be more popular, since it can impact your gaming performance in decidedly visible ways.