I’ve been using an ‘older’ but solid and powerful enough desktop (ASUS Z170-K Motherboard with Intel Core i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz. Windows 10 Pro 64 bit). Display monitors and even wifi projector work fine off the onboard GPU, an Intel HD Graphics 530. Love it cuz no fan/noise.
Trying an HDMI connection to a 65" Sharp TV. I was expecting lots of lag from mouse movement. Surprisingly, no lag there at all. But there is visual lag between hearing something and the corresponding meter movements. ½ second maybe more.
Great image up to 4k, but refresh rate maxes out at ~30 Hz. Lowering resolution (or refresh rate makes no difference)
AI says it’s because of HDMI and it should be fine using Display Port, but I don’t have that and would have to purchase an ‘active’ USB-3 to Display Port.
Any chance someone knows of way to reduce/eliminate the visual lag? Other than installing a Graphics card? If not, any recommendations for a quiet one? Would this even solve the lag problem?
HDMI is fine. Switch off all the special noise reduction and frame smoothing features etc. of the tv. Enable “game mode” / low latency (or whatever is the equivalent on your tv - you might have to look it up).
Just … no! A good example of “artificial idiocy” (I wish people would just stop using this nonsense).
Pretty much any compatible discrete graphics card would improve matters. Up to recently I’d been using a rig similar to yours (until Microsoft obsoleted it) and fitted a Palit GeForce RTX 3050 KalmX 6GB, which is fanless, has HDMI and DisplayPort. It worked fine, although I use a “2K” main display monitor (2560x1440).
The problem is going to be finding an affordable graphics card, at least until the so-called AI bubble bursts, but pretty much anything you can find in the GeForce RTX range that still has supported NVIDIA drivers on Windows 10 should be fine – just check the specs that it can do 4K resolution,
TV’s are very bad computer monitors sometimes, often they add an extra processing time.
And they need to guarantee synced audio and video signals. So they introduce delays as needed.
As @Phil_Pendlebury already suggested, switch to a game mode if possible.
fwiw: I sold off my 3X32" monitors a few years ago and now use an LG TV 65" running at 4K 60Hz - HDMI. Admittedly I do have a pretty powerful GPU (see system info in sig). Never regretted it once. The display is beautiful and super convenient for what I want. There is nothing here related to latency of audio, (using an RME interface here). Just make sure that the screen itself is set to low latency or game mode as mentioned above to avoid perceived latency from input devices.
Thank you to all for taking the time. Your help was invaluable.
If interested, enabling Game Mode helped, but not perfect. Increasing refresh from 30 to ~60 Hz was the key. My GPU wouldn’t do that at 4k so I installed a fanless ASUS GeForce GT 1030 (NVIDEA GDDR5) which is surprisingly nice. Excellent sync now with meters, metronome/measure display in 4K at 60Hz.
It depends a lot on what you need to do … I can still run Cubase 15 on a ThinkPad from 2011 (albeit highly optimised) for simple tasks like recording a track with a few VSTi’s running accompaniment. If you’re happy with Windows 10 then just keep it away from the internet and you should be fine.