VGA vs digital signal?

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C

Consig

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Jan 8, 2017
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I'm still on a VGA cable because my monitor has VGA port even though it's only a couple of years old. I use a DP adapter.

Is VGA somehow inferior to DVI, DP and HDMI ports as VGA is the only one of those that is an analog signal?

Are there FPS drops or lower quality of the image in games?

Would appreciate a longer answer.
 
Solution
Wolfshadw
For a while, VGA (analog) was considered superior to DVI and HDMI (digital) because while the digital signal was limited to 60Hz, analog (VGA) could kick it up to 75Hz. That's no longer the case. Now that digital has gone up to 120Hz and 144Hz, it's now considered the optimal solution.

If your graphics card is capable of those higher frequencies, then it's "probably" better to use a digital output. Image quality should be the same. FPS drops depend on the game and the card.

-Wolf sends

-Wolf sends
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Wolfshadw

Wolfshadw

Titan
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Aug 3, 2006
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For a while, VGA (analog) was considered superior to DVI and HDMI (digital) because while the digital signal was limited to 60Hz, analog (VGA) could kick it up to 75Hz. That's no longer the case. Now that digital has gone up to 120Hz and 144Hz, it's now considered the optimal solution.

If your graphics card is capable of those higher frequencies, then it's "probably" better to use a digital output. Image quality should be the same. FPS drops depend on the game and the card.

-Wolf sends

-Wolf sends
 
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Solution
Solandri

Solandri

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Jan 4, 2012
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Analog is inferior because it can pick up interference, and because the sync between the signal and the pixels on the screen is based on timing, not a specific signal for each individual pixel. So poor quality video cards can yield soft or fuzzy images over VGA even if there is no interference. This also means brightness / color saturation is partially dependent on the VGA signal quality (and thus the VGA cable), not just the video card and monitor.

That said, HDMI is limited to 60 Hz. You need to use DVI or Displayport, or HDMI 2.1 (which was just standardized this year) to get higher refresh rates with a digital signal.
 
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cryoburner

cryoburner

Judicious
Oct 8, 2011
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HDMI 2.0 also supports higher refresh rates, and that's been out for a few years now. HDMI 2.1 expands support for high refresh rates to 4K through 10K resolutions, though you would need a pretty powerful graphics card to run 4K or higher at anything over 60fps in modern games, so that feature isn't particularly useful yet.
 
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