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Having never owned an LCD desktop monitor, I'm wondering what the advantages and disadvantages are between owning a TN and an IPS monitor in regards to gaming performance. While I know there are several factors upon which you can compare the two for general usage, I'm primarily concerned with the differences in gaming experience between them and what factors I would need to consider when comparing the two.

I'm currently having difficulty disseminating information from pages and pages of forum posts. What I'm primarily looking for is a comparison between the following points, though any additional information in regards to differing factors would also be welcome:

  • Refresh rate
  • Responsiveness
  • Graphics/texture quality differences due to varying color depth in displays
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Some considerations about IPS vs TN competition:

  • IPS costs more than TN
  • IPS reproduce colors better than TN
  • IPS has a wider viewing angle than TN
  • IPS has a slower response time (latency) than TN monitors (5-8 ms vs 2-5 ms)
  • IPS (at the moment) does not support a 120 Hz refresh rate. Therefore if you want to play 3D games (e.g. using NVidia 3D Vision) on IPS monitor you can have 30 fps maximum (60/2).

These are general assumptions about these two different monitor technologies. Then every product has his own story. You can read some good reviews on websites like, for example, Digital Versus.

Said this, if you do not plan to watch many movies or to play a lot of FPS/action games and you have the budget I suggest you a good IPS monitor because their are wonderful to work with (program, web design, etc.). Otherwise, go for a good TN monitor.

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    Accepting this as an answer because of the great link to Digital Versus. While my question is a bit general in scope, that site has proved immensely helpful in supplementing other questions I had about more specific properties. – FAE Jun 24 '11 at 10:28
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Typically, TN displays have faster response times but IPS technology has been rapidly improving in that aspect. However, TN is still much cheaper than IPS.

IPS does offers a richer color and wider viewing angle, great for more general purpose use such as multimedia.

This article is a good read about the pros and cons of each.

@FallenAngelEyes sorry if it wasn't much help. The only important piece of advise I'd offer is to go with the IPS monitor, yes you pay a little more, but in the future, should you choose to add a second monitor (when IPS is cheaper), you don't want to be stuck with a TN + IPS monitor since the contrast can be big enough to induce headaches (at least for me). I have a IPS+TN setup and I regret it immensely.

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  • While I agree the link is informative, it didn't really give me any more detail on the criteria I was looking for before I came here. The vagueness on what constitutes "fast paced games" and the lack of hard numbers aside from the brief mention of average response time is somewhat disappointing. – FAE Jun 8 '11 at 0:37
  • I missed your response because you edited into your answer, sorry about that! In the future, I'll get the @ notification if you add it as a comment rather than editing. :) – FAE Jun 24 '11 at 10:29
  • The future is here, and IPS is still not cheaper than TN ^^. – Petr Hudeček Dec 10 '16 at 22:22
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I read a decent article that covered all these issues.

The short rundown is = IPS (inplane switching), its pixels are organized in a different way to TN (Twisted nematic). TN, generally, has faster hertz and response times, its also cheaper, currently, to manufacture. TN are a kind of cheap and nasty solution to fast hertz and ms.

IPS has superior colors and viewing angles, its a bit more expensive, but quickly catching up to TN in speed.

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IPS is better than TN in terms of clarity, wide viewing angle, but costly.

Those are the main differences. IPS screens generally have a response time of around 8ms, sometimes 5 depending on the model. TN screens generally have 2ms - 5ms sometimes 8ms. So no big difference there.

Refresh rate will be 59Hz or 60Hz just like every normal monitor.

Colors are displayed better on an IPS then a TN. People say the colors on a IPS have more depth and are more pure then those on an TN.

That's everything I know/found about IPS vs TN I hope it'll help you :)

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