How to Find the Perfect Overdrive Setting for Your Monitor
Monitor settings are important for visual clarity but there is no setting more important than overdrive when it comes to gaming. The problem is that each monitor has different optimal overdrive settings and each panel could also have slight differences in its pixel response times while using identical settings.
Because of these conditions, it is best to find the ideal overdrive setting for your monitor yourself and test it individually based on what games you play and what FPS and Hz you get in those games.
Recommended Values
The very first thing you would want to do when it comes to overdrive values is to look up your monitor on tech review sites and Reddit threads to see what other users have decided on. I have found that my VG279QM performs the best when set to an overdrive of 80 out of 100. This information came from Rtings, a reputable site, and also various Blur Buster threads.
It is important to note that for my monitor if you are not using the max refresh rate then OD 60 or 40 works better – a clear example of the fact that no one setting is best even on the same monitor.
Based on the information you have gathered from outside sources and the games you play you can start testing the most common values proposed by others for yourself.
Testing In Games
If you trust nobody and want to find the best value yourself then the most basic way you can do this is by testing OD in your main game. You can start with the highest value (which usually results in ghosting and haloing) that will allow for the best response times and see if it is playable in game.
Test each value by going from highest to lowest and find the highest value that does not add artifacts and preserves visual clarity while maintaining the lowest response time the panel can handle. The value you will decide on will also depend on whether the game has a lot of motion or is mostly static.
If you do not mind visual artifacts and only care for the response time then go with the highest OD value possible.
Blur Busters UFO Test
A very popular test for figuring out what the best OD value is for your monitor is the UFO test from Blur Busters. Since this is a stable environment you can go through each OD setting one by one and notice the differences easier than in a game where the scenery and enemies change constantly.
The UFO test is the recommended method if you have no special equipment or software to test pixel response times and overshoot professionally.
Recommended Method
The way I set up my OD settings for my monitors is a combination of all of the things mentioned above. First I go do my research from outside sources and figure out the range of usable OD values. With the understanding that these values might not produce the same effects on my panel I go in and test each of the viable OD values both in game and with the UFO test.
The game I like to use is KovaaK’s aim trainer since you can use different patterns for the background that can showcase ghosting and pixel overshoot. Then I test the OD values in a fast-paced game like Apex Legends where there are a lot of different colors and look at the visual clarity during fast movement.
Usually it would take me around 20-30 minutes while testing to figure out the optimal value that I can use with my current monitor settings and FPS in games so do not get discouraged if the process is quite tedious for yourself.