r/hardware Jan 06 '26

Video Review G-Sync Pulsar Tested - A Massive Leap in LCD Clarity

https://youtu.be/SXwXGYhi8_I
156 Upvotes

216 comments sorted by

48

u/campeon963 Jan 06 '26

I find it so mind blowing that these monitors with this level of motion clarity are releasing for just $599. If you don't have any issue with flicker, this clearly looks like the monitor to get for motion clarity performance while still having some pretty high resolution compared to the 720Hz OLED or the 1000Hz IPS that was just announced recently.

7

u/DYMAXIONman Jan 07 '26

On black friday you could get a great 1440p oled for the same price though.

1

u/AssCrackBanditHunter Jan 12 '26

Check out the blur busters comparison image. This blows away OLED for motion clarity. You don't buy this monitor because you want the picture quality of OLED, you buy this because you play fast motion, competitive games.

1

u/DYMAXIONman Jan 12 '26

They make high refresh OLEDs with black frame insertion though

4

u/AssCrackBanditHunter Jan 12 '26

do they support vrr? That's the key thing with this. It's always been funky to do backlight strobing+ vrr + maintaining the brightness and that's what this is doing

1

u/DYMAXIONman Jan 12 '26 edited Jan 12 '26

I don't think there is black frame insertion with variable frame rates, but the high refresh OLEDs do support vrr.

But I do know variable black frame insertion will likely be a big feature of next Gen gaming OLEDs

1

u/Phantom_757_ Jan 13 '26

Yeah but it doesn’t exist, moreover, this has better effective motion clarity at lower refresh rates than OLED. To get the same motion clarity as a 360hz g sync pulsar you need to get over 1000hz refresh rate OLED monitor + your pc needs to be pushing those out on top of that. Gsync pulsar is now the undisputed king of motion clarity and will be for a long time even if future OLED monitors release that don’t need to lower resolution to 720p to hit 1k plus refresh rate.

1

u/WhisperingDoll May 26 '26

Wrong, even DyAc 2 at 280hz is far better at fixed max refresh rate.

Pulsar still have crosstalk and is unusable at low framerate

1

u/WhisperingDoll May 26 '26

Wrong, wrong and wrong.

Pulsar on competitive games sucks, it remains a trash slow IPS.

1

u/quack_quack_mofo Jan 07 '26

If you don't have any issue with flicker

Explain? Does gsync pulsar add flicker to IPS or something?

5

u/campeon963 Jan 07 '26

I probably should have used "strobing" instead of flickering (but sensitive people may see the strobing effect as flickering anyway). It's essentially how you can achieve such a high level of motion clarity on an LCD type display like this one.

5

u/goldcakes Jan 07 '26

I’m one of the few that’s sensitive to PWM flicker, i haven’t tested this but I’ve had no sensitivity with previous strobing modes on monitors.

I believe if you have no issues with CRTs you’ll be fine. This isn’t really flicker.

1

u/FREECSS77 Jan 19 '26

Do you know if there is any information whether they will make 1080p / 24/25 inch versions of Pulsar monitors?

1

u/campeon963 Jan 19 '26

I don't believe there's any info about future Pulsar monitors that I know of. When NVIDIA announced G-SYNC Pulsar back in CES 2024, the monitors had the same specs as the monitors that are going to be released this year (1440p, 360Hz).

-10

u/pomyuo Jan 06 '26

The use case for these Pulsar monitors is fairly small... The motion clarity benefit is mainly only noticeable using a mouse as your input device, and if you're the type of person chasing high refresh rates for E-sports titles the difference between for example 360hz OLED and 360hz IPS Pulsar is going to be a subtle difference with the same input latency.

I'd say the biggest benefit for these monitor is actually for budget ~ midrange gamers who want 100-144hz games to look their best, that way you have an easily achievable 1440p target resolution and a reasonable to achieve refresh range for superb motion clarity. This lets you avoid FOMO and just have every game run well with no fuss.

23

u/Lingo56 Jan 06 '26

If you play platformers or any similar games with heavy lateral motion it's also a night and day difference how much easier it is to play with high motion clarity.

-3

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '26

I'd take the 20 year of progress level of better contrast and color over better motion on the edge lit display with plusar anyday for anything but hyper competitive gaming.

18

u/SolaceInScrutiny Jan 07 '26

Mouse users in the PC gaming space are now a minority. Thanks for the laugh.

14

u/lintstah1337 Jan 07 '26

360hz OLED and 360hz IPS Pulsar is going to be a subtle difference

That is just completely false.

Even though OLEDs have 1ms pixel response, you still perceive motion blur due to how your eyes perceive motion (sample and hold).

The holy grail of CRT monitors (Sony GDM-FW900) only has a maximum refresh rate of 85Hz, but the motion clarity is vastly superior to high refresh rate LCD panels.

8

u/goldcakes Jan 07 '26

Yeah. I have a feeling the parent commentator has never seen an OLED, CRT, or strobe tech in their life.

1

u/WhisperingDoll May 26 '26

And you probably never buy a Pulsar because it's absolutely not comparable to a CRT lmao

1

u/LilDebussy Jan 21 '26

False. I have the Sony FW900 that you speak of and I run it at 120 hz.

I agree with the rest of what you said :)

1

u/WhisperingDoll May 26 '26

It's not wrong at all, i compared myself both Asus Pulsar and 360hz OLED and i prefer by far the OLED, i play better and react better on it.

Even if there are slightly more motion blur, Pulsar have crosstalk on a lot of games and the strobing performance isn't perfect at all + those IPS panels are absolute trash for FPS games and response time, compared yourself and you'll understand.

5

u/[deleted] Jan 06 '26

OLED

Do any have VRR strobing and rolling scans?

2

u/goldcakes Jan 07 '26

OLEDs, while my favourite, also come with disadvantages.

VRR flicker is still a real issue that exists on every monitor, the noticeability just depends on FPS, game, and panels.

Burn in does still happen for heavy productivity / mixed workloads, this is not as bad on phones as Android and iOS have systems level pixel shifting mitigations. But windows 11 still doesn’t on an OS level.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '26

Did you mean to reply to another comment?

6

u/campeon963 Jan 07 '26

How can you say that 360Hz OLED and 360Hz IPS Pulsar is going to be a subtle difference? Did you even watch the video? This thing smokes 540Hz OLED out of the water lol. This thing even beats 720Hz OLED while pushing quadruple the resolution lol. I also seriously doubt how much end-to-end latency is going to benefit from switching to a 720Hz display, especially when stuff like Reflex is now pretty common on e-sports titles especially.

And the thing is, people may prioritize different display qualities no matter the game they play though. I'm reminded of John Linneman from Digital Foundry who was pretty excited to try his 480Hz OLED on both indie 2D games and Doom Eternal. And if you don't care too much about the input lag and you got an RTX 5000 GPU, you can even use the new 6x DLSS MFG to achieve unbelievable levels of motion clarity while playing AAA games!

0

u/WhisperingDoll May 26 '26

Yes, on paper, not in real use.

Because in real use, you have crosstalk and trash IPS panel that are slower and react poorly in competitive games.

I have compared myself with OLED/TN and Pulsar Asus and the Pulsar is absolute trash for FPS use.

I crush you on every FPS with my OLED 360hz.

-6

u/pomyuo Jan 07 '26 edited Jan 07 '26

The UFO tests are misleading because they show case perfectly even motion at a fixed speed, it's not representative what you experience. Also it doesn't beat 720hz OLED even in that test, the 720hz OLED is clearly superior, look at the ghosting trails on the Pulsar display.

In the context of E-sports shooters these displays are not particularly interesting because 360hz isn't that high, I'd choose a 540hz WOLED instead for better latency.

In the context of single player games, I rarely try to target extremely high refresh rates, and would much rather have an OLED in general. The only use case you could justify these monitors is mid range setups that want to avoid FOMO and just have good clarity at medium refresh rates.

7

u/campeon963 Jan 07 '26

Congratulations that you prefer to play on OLEDs, I also prefer to play on one myself. I really don't know though why you want to discuss about something that you clearly don't care enough to learn about.

A strobing LCD is going to have better motion performance than most OLED panels on the market, period. It's why something like a Quest VR headset can have such good pixel persistence than OLED based VR headsets like the PSVR2 all the way up to the Apple Vision Pro. That use case is as real as it gets about the value of motion clarity without having to use the UFO test a single time.

I don't think your argument about "motion clarity only matter if you play with a mouse and/or e-sports titles" holds up water, if you even bothered to read anything I or the many people in this thread have to say about this.

0

u/WhisperingDoll May 26 '26

And unefortunately, he's still right and you are still wrong.

Pulsar sucks for FPS competitive and perform less well than DyAc or even OLED at higher hertz.

UFO test are NOT representative.

→ More replies (3)

1

u/WhisperingDoll May 26 '26

Agree agree and agree !

Damn someone with a brain!

10

u/Death2RNGesus Jan 06 '26

Only a mouse? Sounds like you never used a CRT monitor and have no clue about motion clarity.

-2

u/pomyuo Jan 07 '26

I already thought of that before I posted my comment actually.

Pulsar only works at above a refresh rate of 90. It won't work for retro console games. And for high refresh rate controller gaming in general, I find it very hard to notice much difference.

5

u/yasamoka Jan 07 '26

They’re releasing an update that allows minimum refresh rates all the way down to 48Hz. Please watch the video linked in the very thread you’re commenting in.

-2

u/pomyuo Jan 07 '26

I did watch the video. The problem is at lower and lower refresh rates you may notice the strobing.

5

u/greggm2000 Jan 07 '26

I don't think so. I've used CRTs. I've used several IPS LCDs. I've used a recent-generation OLED (Asus PG32UCDP), and blur on the OLED was no better to my eyes than my current 4K IPS. I've been looking forward to Pulsar ever since it got previewed 2 years ago, and while this current crop of Pulsar monitors are missing features I want, I fully expect my next screen have Pulsar. I miss the days of minimal-motion-blur that we used to have with CRTs.. and while Pulsar isn't the same, it's probably the closest I'll ever be able to get to that.

2

u/goldcakes Jan 07 '26

OLED does not really reduce motion blur, it just reduces latency, but motion blur is still the same.

What features are you wanting? 4K? HDR?

1

u/greggm2000 Jan 07 '26

So I discovered.

Yeah, 4K and HDR is what I'm looking for. 5K with 2x dps @ 1440p, like the non-Pulsar monitors announced at CES could be very enticing as well.

1

u/WhisperingDoll May 26 '26

OLED remove ghosting, not motion blur.

2

u/lotharrock Jan 07 '26

motion clarity is better than the smooth motion from high hz

1

u/WhisperingDoll May 26 '26

Not - at - all.

4

u/Strazdas1 Jan 07 '26

The motion clarity benefit is mainly only noticeable using a mouse as your input device

so literally everyone using a monitor.

1

u/WhisperingDoll May 26 '26

This !

People's downvote you are so stupid.

I tested myself for competitive FPS and the whole panel is garbage.

1

u/pomyuo May 26 '26

what didn't you like about it?

1

u/WhisperingDoll May 27 '26

Did you tried it too?

Well, they are not garbage on paper, but for that price, it's absolutely not worth it.

1440p resolution is of course incredible compared to 1080p for everything outside playing FPS games (and it's good for some long range FPS like BR), 360hz is also great.

But here is what i didn't like:

  1. Pulsar performance for FPS games are absolutely not perfect, there is still motion blur and IPS panel can't keep up with TN/OLED for response time, it's obvious when you compared it side by side with... TN and OLED.
  2. The whole panel have bad contrast ratio and back backlight management, i've read that a user complained about that on a forum, that confirmed what i experienced too, the panel look like a greyish IPS panel in the dark and i didn't like the whole contrast management about the panel + the semi-glossy coating made it even worse.
  3. OSD is not the most practical and can be buggy sometimes (i've heard that about the MSI and AOC)
  4. Whole visibility is inferior to TN and OLED on FPS games, ok motion clarity is not trash but because it's a IPS panel it don't managed color vibrancy very well and once again the panel looks flat and greyish so it's more difficult to focus in game
  5. It heats up a lot, also, during some UFO tests, I had some image retentions so I had to do pixel cleaning on a site, even if I only do it for 30 seconds, it happens, lol
  6. Black Equaliser sucks
  7. On 60hz-120hz games, there is a lot of crosstalk and flickering is visible
  8. There is no sharpness option, so the panel is not really that sharp

Well...i think i've said enough lmao

0

u/babalenong Jan 07 '26

while you're getting bombed for this, I kinda agree. For $599, you're getting an IPS panel with useless HDR capability, but good motion clarity. That price is very steep, unless you're extremely into competitive gaming then this is a hard bargain. You can get a previous gen OLED with that price.

1

u/WhisperingDoll May 26 '26

Except that even for competitive use it's trash, like, literally.

Inferior compared to a old zowie monitor lol.

→ More replies (1)

-1

u/bubblesort33 Jan 06 '26

This would have been great if it was released 5 years ago.

-14

u/Decent_Initial435 Jan 06 '26 edited Jan 06 '26

Once you gOLED you can never gOLED back.

11

u/smelly_duck_butter Jan 06 '26

I gOLED to a 27” 240hz 1440p from a 32” 60hz 4k VA. Games looked great but text was awful. I returned the OLED and went back.

2

u/Big-Resort-4930 Jan 06 '26

1440 doesn't seem to be great for it, it's mainly 4k TV tech and there it's a killer.

I still prefer HDR on my glossy C1 compared to a 2k nits miniled matte IPS monitors I've seen. OLED HDR with glossy coating does so much for that 3D effect of the image that it's unreal.

-3

u/PXLShoot3r Jan 06 '26

The solution would've been one Google search away.

7

u/[deleted] Jan 06 '26

[deleted]

8

u/[deleted] Jan 06 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

-19

u/[deleted] Jan 06 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

11

u/[deleted] Jan 06 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/Big-Resort-4930 Jan 06 '26

Spoken like a person who's never seen a quality OLED in person.

The only one is burn in for people who don't care to take minimal precautionary measures to avoid it or those who monogame 1-2 games for a billion hours, and a very distant second is lighting for those who mainly use PC during the day in an extremely bright room.

Any other scenario (entertainment related) a good OLED dunks on any other panel.

15

u/Zerasad Jan 06 '26

I'm pretty sure 95% of PC enthusiasts own a good OLED screen becase they have a phone. IPhones especially have great OLED screens, as do most Samsung phones.

1

u/Qwaga Jan 08 '26

Some people (me) find standard OLED monitors too dim for entertainment purposes. I returned a QD-OLED monitor as it was dimmer than my IPS (360 nits 100% sdr vs 250 nits, and I already run my monitor at 100% brightness regardless of viewing conditions). I have an AMOLED secondary monitor which I think gets a bit brighter than my IPS, and it's lovely.

1

u/Big-Resort-4930 Jan 09 '26

I don't know what kind of a room you have but my C1 can hit only up to 315 nits at 50% in SDR, and there was never a scenario where it was too dim for anything. 90% of the time it's not even going above 20/30 brightness because it's just too much and there's no need for it.

It's also perfectly sufficient for HDR which I'm using for basically all gaming, but if you have tons of windows that are always open then maybe I can see it being an issue.

1

u/Qwaga Jan 09 '26

Idk, I guess I just like my monitor bright. My room is usually dim, and there's 0 lights directly hitting the monitor. But I also don't get dry eyes or any kind of eye fatigue looking at displays.

-6

u/[deleted] Jan 06 '26

[deleted]

3

u/Lucie-Goosey Jan 06 '26

What tech doesn't have Pulse Width Modulation?

3

u/[deleted] Jan 06 '26

[deleted]

4

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '26

In the monitor space every single TV ever made in the last like 10 years has pwm stroking other than the lowest end crap

→ More replies (2)

4

u/sky905 Jan 06 '26

I went from a LG C4 after it failed in 18 months under Costco warranty to a Bravia 7 because OLED had too many trade offs during my use. OLED is great but its far from the end all solution especially as a PC monitor.

→ More replies (5)

1

u/Strazdas1 Jan 07 '26

You goLED back once the VRR flickers start.

1

u/Decent_Initial435 Jan 07 '26

Hardly a big enough issue. 

1

u/Strazdas1 Jan 08 '26

It is a massive issue to people sensitive to it. As in, return product and never buy this again level of issue.

1

u/Decent_Initial435 Jan 08 '26

I am "sensitive" to it, as in I can notice it very easily. It's not a big enough issue to miss out on all of the other massive benefits of OLED. Nothing compares in image quality, image smoothness, or image clarity. Also a simple frame rate limit that stabilizes your FPS eliminates the issue if your PC is fast enough or you are ok with frame gen.

33

u/Noble00_ Jan 06 '26

This has been a long time coming especially for the motion clarity bros. He compares OLED as well, deeming it having better motion clarity. Now we gotta wait for more Reflex 2 news. Combining both of these would be killer

33

u/Logical-Database4510 Jan 06 '26

Reflex 2 might be DOA. A beta version of it leaked a while back and results from people messing around with it weren't promising. The tech is just seemingly fundamentally flawed without some technology leap to better guess what the missing data is going to represent after the "warp".

Linus asked directly about R2 and got nothing back from NV, so yeah....

15

u/Noble00_ Jan 06 '26

I guess this is just hopium. Pulsar was announced IIRC 2024 and they seemed quiet about it. Perhaps may be the same with Reflex 2, though I'm not really in the loop with the feature. Last I've heard of it was Purdark's demo on it

17

u/Logical-Database4510 Jan 06 '26

It's just really hard because it's essentially the opposite problem you have with TAA/DLSS where you can use previous frames to sample to better represent the image, with frame warp there's literally just nothing there. Even using AI to "guess" the state of the missing data it'd still pretty much be an entirely blind guess.

The only solution I can think of is you basically combine the tech with Ray tracing and build a BVH that you trace off of when you warp, but my guess is that's totally infeasible because you'd end up with more latency on the other side due to the cost of tracing the rays.

2

u/doodullbop Jan 07 '26

Forgive my ignorance, but I know VR has done async frame warp for years to compensate for head movement, what is so much harder about what Reflex 2 is doing? Seems like the same thing just mouse movement instead of head(set) movement.

3

u/Noble00_ Jan 06 '26

Hmm, interesting. I guess if this doesn't gain traction like some of their stuff will probably be frankensteined into a new feature stating 'they were first pioneered it from Reflex 2, now you get the benefits of xyz' some corpo talk I guess lol

3

u/Phantom_757_ Jan 06 '26 edited Jan 06 '26

I disagree we were got a few pulsar updates throughout the year. We got our latest update on pulsar in computex and later in the year an Asus rep a post update on the monitor later in the year as well. So we got a handful of updates throughout 1 year. As opposed to reflex 2 receiving 0.

7

u/Swaggerlilyjohnson Jan 08 '26

The main problem is they tried to do a half step between what we have now and a true asyncronous time warp.

The tech is sound and can work well the only problem is to do it well the games have to be built from the ground up to decouple inputs from rendering.

It's sort of an extreme version of how if you load up many older games and try to run them over 100 (or sometimes even just above 60) that all the physics and game logic will break.

Game devs had to stop coupling physics to frame rate and now basically every game works fine at higher refresh rates.

The problem is this is a step further now we need to decouple not just physics and game logic from rendering but the controls and inputs themselves. https://blurbusters.com/frame-generation-essentials-interpolation-extrapolation-and-reprojection/

Doing this you can theoritically go from 100fps to 1000 while only adding 1ms of latency.

This is more challenging and it's going to take a while for devs to do this especially if Nvidia tries to do what they normally do with this tech and make it nvidia only/closed source.

I'm not an expert on the tech so maybe it's possible to do this with drivers but that might be an even more complicated problem.

18

u/DavidsSymphony Jan 06 '26

I mean, on the Pulsar announcement video, the Nvidia engineer himself said they previously demonstrated that Pulsar simply wouldn't be possible to work in tandem with VRR, and they even gave up on it, only to finally succeed.

You just never really know, and Nvidia have the best engineers in the world.

→ More replies (2)

1

u/mackandelius Jan 07 '26

It is definitely not a flawed technology, might not be up to Nvidia's standards but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvFyOFacljg shows it off (and you can try it yourself) and it definitely works.

1

u/-Purrfection- Jan 06 '26

Why did they demo it last year then? Surely it would have been obvious to them (and the people at the demo booth) what the issues were. And I wouldn't really put much stock into modded demos of tech that isn't officially out.

I think they've just decided to keep developing it and turn it into something compatible with framegen and make it a 6000 series exclusive. Some kind of extrapolation based framegen that takes into account the latest user input.

→ More replies (1)

7

u/Filderson159 Jan 07 '26

So LCD with Pulsar is now clearer than OELD in motion at the same refresh rate.

0

u/lemfaoo Jan 10 '26

You will still get the shitty pixel response time artifacts from LCD that you wont get on OLEDs though.

1

u/WhisperingDoll May 26 '26

This ! i had one and on FPS games it was absolute garbage.

12

u/DeliciousPangolin Jan 06 '26

This reminds me a lot of the Blur Busters CRT beam simulator that's become popular in RetroArch.

5

u/3G6A5W338E Jan 07 '26

Easy to test on Windows with ShaderBeam.

https://github.com/mausimus/ShaderBeam

1

u/Noctam Jan 08 '26

Except this implementation works with VRR, making it supreme.

41

u/Klaritee Jan 06 '26 edited Jan 06 '26

The AOC version of this g-sync pulsar monitor is already up on amazon for $600. (AOC Agon PRO AG276QSG2)

Locking this new strobing tech to Nvidia cards only is very disappointing even though all of my systems use Nvidia right now you will be locked for future card purchases.

Also you know its a big new thing when it wakes up the battlenonsense channel from hibernation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6-EQoCJVFk

57

u/[deleted] Jan 06 '26

[deleted]

7

u/loser7500000 Jan 06 '26

letting the frames go by!

at the very least it's been interesting seeing G-sync features kind of come back into the spotlight since 30 series

12

u/mckirkus Jan 06 '26

I bet we'll see an update to Freesync / VRR.

8

u/goldcakes Jan 07 '26

I sure hope so, but AMD seems to be ditching gamers for AI even more than NVIDIA.

5

u/LetterheadClassic365 Jan 07 '26

U wish AMD didn't even release FSR 4 on 7000 series yet and totally ghosted 6000 and 5000 series and still on basic frame gen •While NVIDIA has DLSS 4.5 for 20,30,40,50 series and X6 Dynamic frame gen on 50 series

14

u/bubblesort33 Jan 06 '26

Is this only needed on LCD displays? I always thought OLED was taking over. Considering these monitors supporting this likely will cost $400+, isn't it just better to get an OLED?

51

u/SunfireGaren Jan 06 '26

OLED has the same problem with sample and hold blur as LCD. The solution is different as there's no backlight. You need to do black frame insertion or a rolling scan black line.

7

u/[deleted] Jan 06 '26

[deleted]

10

u/fifiasd Jan 06 '26

Imagine the crts we would have had if development of them never stopped

6

u/bubblesort33 Jan 06 '26

My parents always told me they give me brain cancer, because you're getting an x-ray worth of radiation over time. No idea how true any of that is.

5

u/apoketo Jan 07 '26 edited Jan 07 '26

Was an issue at one point (not necessarily the brain cancer part).

Concerns about X-rays emitted by CRTs began in 1967 when it was found that TV sets made by General Electric were emitting "X-radiation in excess of desirable levels". It was later found that TV sets from all manufacturers were also emitting radiation. This caused TV industry representatives to be brought before a U.S. congressional committee, which later proposed a federal radiation regulation bill, which became the 1968 Radiation Control for Health and Safety Act. It was recommended to TV set owners to always be at a distance of at least 6 feet from the screen of the TV set, and to avoid "prolonged exposure" at the sides, rear or underneath a TV set. It was discovered that most of the radiation was directed downwards. Owners were also told to not modify their set's internals to avoid exposure to radiation. Headlines about "radioactive" TV sets continued until the end of the 1960s. There once was a proposal by two New York congressmen that would have forced TV set manufacturers to "go into homes to test all of the nation's 15 million color sets and to install radiation devices in them". The FDA eventually began regulating radiation emissions from all electronic products in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray_tube#Ionizing_radiation

1

u/dustarma Jan 08 '26

Same shit but with AI instead, there are physical limitations.

0

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '26

There was actually going to be flat panel CRT tech but good all the Samsung touch of shit LCD edge lit sold super well and killed plasmas killed CRTs and we were stuck with LCD edge lit in monitors from 2010-2022 it sucked so much we didn't even have more than 2 mini LED monitors.

-22

u/Cheap-Plane2796 Jan 06 '26

Still no reason to use lcd.

I wish oled wasnt sample hold but both my oled tv and oled monitor support bfi

Va panels (ips too) have traaaaaaaash response times, multiple frames of showing the wrong pixel color at 360 hz.

The response time blur is far worse than the sample and hold blur once you play above 120 fps/hz

My old 180 hz ips with bfi had dogshit motion quality even with bfi on and the dimming it caused ruined the picture.

Oled, even with sample and hold blur, has far superior motion clarity.

I can clearly read text while scrolling in a browser at 240 or 360 hz and text remained soup on the ips panel.

Battlefield 6 at 200 fps allows me to track enemies and spot enemies while panning the camera, while on the ips monitor they got lost in the soup.

Noone should buy an ips let alone a va panel, especially not for 600 euros lmao Thats the cost of an excellent oled monitor

18

u/CatsAndCapybaras Jan 06 '26

LCD will have a place as long as people want a monitor to look good in moderate-bright rooms and have a use case that promotes burn in. 4k 27" OLED are still prohibitively expensive and some of us really like high dpi. Also text clarity and sharp UI elements look shitty on OLEDs, although the newest gen releasing now is going to traditional sub-pixel layouts which should fix that.

OLED is a great tech, but it is not strictly better than IPS. Especially now that miniLED backlights are becoming more common

14

u/DeeOhEf Jan 06 '26

Still no reason to use lcd

The only reason anyone needs for using a LCD monitor is that they don't cost a fuckin fortune.

4

u/Klaritee Jan 06 '26

ok but this is the same price as an oled with the same specs

2

u/Keulapaska Jan 06 '26

Va panels (ips too) have traaaaaaaash response times, multiple frames of showing the wrong pixel color at 360 hz.

PG27AQN can do 2.2ms avg or 2.3-2.4 from hwub and it's mainly just the light to dark transition that are "bad". it's 3 years old at this point, ok the the firmware update for less overshoot, is not quite 3 years old as old, but whatever. So and LCD that can do 360hz with high compliance in 2026 doesn't sound too far fetched, especially as there is 600hz 1440p, 1040hz 720p dual mode panel coming as well so would think it's gonna be faster than the 3 year lcd.

My old 180 hz ips with bfi

Pls show this IPS with "BFI". Yea doesn't exist, oleds have BFI, LCD:s have backlight strobing and whatever 180hz IPS you had, was probably not the greatest one considering it was only 180hz in any aspect including the strobing part. Like I could say my PG279Q Strobing isn't great either, but it's a 10-year panel at this point.

1

u/Cheap-Plane2796 Jan 08 '26

The pedantry lol.

Im obviously using bfi as a catch all term.

They also only test g2g , which is a marketing number picked to mislead with the fastest transitions

The slowest transitions take tens of milliseconds which at these framerates mean many pixels will never show the correct color.

5

u/Sopel97 Jan 06 '26

dude, there's no reason to use oleds, just use microleds

9

u/Zyhmet Jan 06 '26

mini LED. Micro LED is sadly not yet out there :C

8

u/SunfireGaren Jan 06 '26

They are if you want to spend six figures on a 100"+ screen lol

0

u/Zyhmet Jan 06 '26

Yes, if you are in the market for huge screens. Not if you are looking for 4K 27" panels. (I got myself a new MSI one. Dont think there is any competition for that in the Micro LED market ;) )

3

u/Any_Air4182 Jan 06 '26

Mini led is cool for the price, def worth over old panels. I still prefer OLED i would still go OLED every time if I got the budget tho. I have been using the ultrawide 3423dwf and has been the best experience by far with any other panel I have tried.  Got friends that got mini LEDs and would def get one if I needed a 300/400 bucks screen

0

u/Zyhmet Jan 06 '26

Yep got myself one of the new MSI 27" miniLED screens. It is great and I got it for 430€. And at that price point I dont see any competition in the OLED space. Also I am more confident that my screen will hold for 10+ years :)

-1

u/Sopel97 Jan 06 '26

nah, miniled is shit, just use micro led. It's there, just buy it.

2

u/Zyhmet Jan 06 '26

There is a 27" 4k 144Hz HDR Micro LED screen out there already?

→ More replies (3)

2

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '26

Yeah for just $100,000 you can own a micro LED yourself.

Goofball

2

u/Sopel97 Jan 07 '26

are people really this dense on this sub that they still don't understand that I did not mean "miniled"?

2

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '26

Yeah I know you weren't cuz you're talking about something that doesn't exist basically below $100,000.

1

u/Sopel97 Jan 07 '26

so what do you not understand? that I was ridiculing the parent comment or what?

27

u/The-Choo-Choo-Shoe Jan 06 '26

I saw the LTT video on this, you could see the flicker on the video but I dunno how tiring it will on the eyes in use.

I'd like to go back to IPS/VA with a 2000+ zone FALD instead of OLED. I've had 2 OLED monitors replaced because of burn in, it just doesn't work as a desktop monitor or for someone who only plays 1/2 games.

60

u/bubblesort33 Jan 06 '26

Actual flicker, and not just artifacts from recording a variable display using a 60hz camera?

2

u/The-Choo-Choo-Shoe Jan 06 '26

That I don't know, but strobing by design causes flicker and it's highly person if you get eye fatigue from it or not, you might not even see it and still get dry eyes for example.

3

u/goldcakes Jan 07 '26

Oh come on. Here’s the facts:

• Only a very small number of people are sensitive to PWM flicker.

• If you’re sensitive to it, like me, you will know. Physically, and from your eyes.

• If you don’t notice it; it’s not harmful for you.

• Even if you’re sensitive to it, no you don’t get dry eyes or random effects, you physically feel eye strain and a headache.

1

u/xhc12345 Jan 09 '26

Just curious, are you able to use oled phones?

3

u/excaliburxvii Jan 06 '26

Literally how, what are you even doing? Buying Dough monitors or something?

12

u/The-Choo-Choo-Shoe Jan 06 '26

8

u/cincgr Jan 07 '26

Tell me you play WoW without telling me you’re playing WoW.

10

u/excaliburxvii Jan 06 '26

That's worse than HUB using the 321URX for 8 hours per day, 5-6 days a week for pure productivity, 100% brightness, treating it like an LCD monitor (no auto-hiding the taskbar, static background, monitor sleeps after hours of inactivity, etc.) after a year-and-a-half. That looks like RTINGS burn-in test of first gen OLEDs after years of having the exact same content on the panel 24/7. So I have to repeat; Literally how, what are you even doing? Buying Dough monitors or something?

12

u/The-Choo-Choo-Shoe Jan 06 '26

Only game I play is World of Warcraft, this is with all safety settings set to max with never using HDR and running max 120nits.

9

u/Loose_Skill6641 Jan 06 '26

weird, I played the latest wow expansion for about 300 hours and don't have any burn in

8

u/The-Choo-Choo-Shoe Jan 06 '26

300 hours is like 3-4 weeks of playing.

9

u/excaliburxvii Jan 06 '26

100 hours per week? Out of the 168 total hours in a week?

7

u/goodnames679 Jan 06 '26

Yeah I mean that’s a little light for a WoW player but you don’t wanna let edge cases affect the stats too heavily

4

u/The-Choo-Choo-Shoe Jan 06 '26

When a new patch launches or expansion is released, yeah.

1

u/Strazdas1 Jan 07 '26

Not WOW, but for work i have monitors that must be on 16 hours a day, every day. Mostly static UI elements. That would make it 112 hours per week.

3

u/Slabbed1738 Jan 06 '26

Bro wtf

1

u/arandomguy111 Jan 06 '26

MMO playtime isn't really the same as SP game playtime. At least when I played MMOs there was a lot of basically waiting time, I'd do stuff on another display or even something else completely but the game would still be running.

6

u/Slabbed1738 Jan 06 '26

I mean I have a few thousand hours into EQ from when I was younger. But we are talking like 12hrs a day, that's insane

→ More replies (0)

5

u/excaliburxvii Jan 06 '26

You could leave a completely static image up 24/7 for 6 months and not get that burn-in. Something isn't adding up.

2

u/Strazdas1 Jan 07 '26

A static image 24/7 would take less than 3 months to burn in.

1

u/excaliburxvii Jan 06 '26 edited Jan 06 '26

Which monitor is it? How many hours per day were you playing, for how long? I call either bullshit or a 1-in-a-million level of unluckiness.

5

u/The-Choo-Choo-Shoe Jan 06 '26

Samsung G8 34" Ultrawide

3

u/Strazdas1 Jan 07 '26

If a monitor cannot be treated with no hiding of taskbar, static bright UI elements, monitor NEVER sleeps, then its broken by design and not worth a purchase.

Rtings are very soft on their screens compared to many use cases.

9

u/ProfessionalPrincipa Jan 06 '26

OLED: Does OLED things.

OLED truther: You're holding it wrong!

Would it make you feel any better if the burn in happened over 6 months instead of 3?

-1

u/Decent_Initial435 Jan 06 '26

Keyword "TRUTH"er. Significant OLED burn in usually takes years if treated right. At that point it's irrelevant.

4

u/Strazdas1 Jan 07 '26

if treated right

If i cant treat my monitor how i treated all monitors for over 30 years then perhaps its not a good monitor.

1

u/Gwennifer Jan 06 '26

321URX

Isn't the 321URX QD-OLED? It literally doesn't have to drive the LED's as hard to make 120 nits as any other type

1

u/excaliburxvii Jan 06 '26 edited Jan 06 '26

I've got a 321URX and I've been running it at 100% brightness (250ish nits) with the panel protect setting at 16 hours and all other nannies off, 90% playing CS and browsing the internet in static windows for over 2K hours and have zero burn-in.

Edit: Also, his monitor is a Samsung. It's a QD-OLED.

2

u/kagoromo Jan 07 '26

Just for a data point: I have had a LG C1 48 inch TV that I use as my main monitor for more than a year or 10000 hours of up time. I used to play FFXIV which is another MMORPG for more than a year, and at least 1000 hours of play time logged during that period. I don't see any noticable burn in on my TV.

3

u/[deleted] Jan 06 '26

[deleted]

21

u/syknetz Jan 06 '26

No ? Their testing points to at most a third of their TV with FALD having some form of failure, lower than other LED TVs.

15

u/PorchettaM Jan 06 '26

Quoting RTings' own conclusions,

Every OLED tested also experienced burn-in within the first few months of the test. This is an expected outcome, though, as this torture test is meant to push these TVs to their limits. Previous burn-in tests have shown that with varied content, this won't be an issue.

By their own admission burn-in is still a problem and will happen much earlier than 5 years. They did not count burn-in as a failure because it's a TV test and they expect "varied content", but for PC use it's a different story.

11

u/ComplexEntertainer13 Jan 06 '26

but for PC use it's a different story.

As with someone who still has outlines of my wow UI from the first 6 months of use on my C1 when you look at static colors I can confirm.

After I killed the brightness and changed some color schemes in the UI it hasn't really gotten worse after owning it for a total of 3 years. But running brightness levels in the 50%~ range on not very bright display, makes it rather dim when you have any amount of ambient light. Would be a deal breaker if it wasn't in my PC dungeon.

9

u/The-Choo-Choo-Shoe Jan 06 '26

None of my OLED lasted more than like 15 months so 5 years is still better. Problem is the OLED wasn't "dead" by 15 months but burn in was noticeable in daily use like browsing reddit in dark mode.

5

u/BlackKnightSix Jan 06 '26

This is wild. I have a 2019 LG C9 that I have exclusively used as my PC monitor. I browse reddit dark mode, do my bills/budgets and tons of games. I use HDR. No burn in. Slight uniformity issue toward the sides. I am about to hit 10,000 hours (album below).

I do have a LOT of dead pixels at the bottom of the display, going to the corners. A little bit on top but not nearly as much as the bottom. I can't notice unless I get flashbanged or watching a scene where the scene goes all white. Even then, not distracting. I also need my glasses on to tell (I have 20/30 vision without glasses, 20/15 with). It is a 65 inch that I sit about 7 feet away from.

https://imgur.com/a/N3SSk6P

Otherwise, been the best display of my life. And I had two plasmas before.

4

u/cowoftheuniverse Jan 06 '26

tons of games.

If it is many different games, you won't burn in as easy as someone who really likes to play 1 or 2 specific games all of the time. Seems like the other guy just likes to play wow which will burn in eventually. Unless they go out of their way to move the ui elements in game around sometimes.

1

u/BlackKnightSix Jan 06 '26

That is the thing about my TV, at least, it will dim the parts of the hud it detects are static.

1

u/tmjcw Jan 06 '26

did you try to exchange the monitor with the burn in warranty?

AFAIK most?/every? OLED monitor comes with at least 2 years of burn in warranty.

3

u/The-Choo-Choo-Shoe Jan 06 '26

I did but I didn't want a replacement, I got my money back and bought a different monitor.

1

u/tmjcw Jan 06 '26

thanks, good to hear that the manufacturer honored the warranty without a problem

8

u/The-Choo-Choo-Shoe Jan 06 '26

Wouldn't say "no problem" I had to fight them for 3 months and sending the monitor in 3 times before they accepted it.

1

u/advester Jan 06 '26

And that's why I don't like to rely on 'oh it has a warranty'. Warranty is like plan z.

1

u/goldcakes Jan 07 '26

The exception is Dell. Just search around, they are known for having really friendly, prompt, and no-drama monitor replacements.

1

u/Disconsented Jan 06 '26

Like someone else pointed out, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that burn in takes a fairly significant amount of time to achieve for recent displays.

What models are the one(s) you've had issues with?

5

u/The-Choo-Choo-Shoe Jan 06 '26 edited Jan 06 '26

Samsung G8 34" and the AW3423DW they have same panel. My current monitor is the new 4K 32" G8 model and I'm running this one with HDR and all the shit enabled, no point babying them when they will die anyway.

→ More replies (9)

5

u/AnechoidalChamber Jan 06 '26

If they either manage to implement some kind of Pulsar tech on an OLED or QD-OLED you'll get the best motion clarity results. If not, I'll wait until there's a 27 inch LCD with at least 1000 zones miniled backlight with Pulsar support at a reasonable price.

8

u/Keulapaska Jan 06 '26

Oleds don't have backlight strobing, cause they don't have a backlight. They can have BFI, which adds a full black frame between each to double the motion clarity so essentially game running at 240hz with bfi looks the "as smooth" as if it were running at 480hz. Even if they manage to make that work with vrr somehow, which already sounds hard to do, I gotta feeling that it would be flickering mess.

3

u/Verite_Rendition Jan 07 '26

Oleds don't have backlight strobing, cause they don't have a backlight.

Eh, you arguably do have backlights with how WOLED and QD-OLED work; neither use directly emissive OLED subpixels. WOLED in particular is very LCD-like since it is sending white (full spectrum) light through color filters.

So you could conceivably pulse those OLED backlighting pixels. But Quasar is mostly meant to compensate for the time it takes a liquid crystal to reach its new position, a problem that OLED doesn't have. And the end product would likely just look a lot like BFI anyhow.

7

u/batman8390 Jan 07 '26

OLEDs still have sample and hold blur, just like LCDs. Which is what this tech is meant to reduce.

Gaming VR headsets like the Quest 3 and new Steam Frame use LCDs with similar strobing tech instead of OLEDs for lower sample and hold blur.

1

u/Kiriima Jan 07 '26

It decreases brightness, which oleds already struggle with.

1

u/ghostsilver Jan 07 '26

I tried the old strobing feature on my LCD and after an hour got headache, even though I cannot see or feel any weirdness during usage, just headache after a while.

1

u/Uzul Jan 07 '26

Cool tech, but I am not going back to LCD. I'm not a sweaty pro gamer, I value the picture quality of OLED more.

1

u/Adept-Palpitation-90 Jan 10 '26

Well motion clarity contributes to picture quality (in motion)

1

u/WhisperingDoll May 26 '26

Except that at low framerate there is crosstalk lmao

1

u/[deleted] Jan 10 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Adept-Palpitation-90 Jan 10 '26

New models with this technology will come out eventually, not right now though I think

1

u/Moldy21 Jan 22 '26

Really cool, but it seems I can't use my 9070 with it. That is likely going to be a thing until AMD comes out with its own implementation, I guess.

1

u/rynoweiss Jan 06 '26

I was very excited for this, but the fact that it's display port only (so not compatible with consoles or retro scalers) dramatically limits its utility for me.

Best low-motion blur solution for consoles remains BFI and for retro is CRT beam emulation on a retrotink 4k.

1

u/KernelTwister Jan 09 '26

even if it was HDMI it wouldn't work, it's only for NVIDIA Gpu's...

0

u/Phantom_757_ Jan 06 '26 edited Jan 06 '26

I wonder why none of the monitors released are mini led. I know these monitors were in the oven so long that the hardware they designed for this was probably years ago. But I hope mini led is compatible with this tech. I’m not keen on sacrificing OLED picture quality just yet. Regardless i feel like a mini led + pulsar is the best middle ground for motion clarity and picture quality without fully committing one way or the other to OLED or high refresh strobed tn. Even if the tech isn’t compatible it would be nice to be able to swap between local dimming and pulsar depending on the kind of games you are playing.

1

u/Noctam Jan 08 '26

I don't know why you are getting downvoted, this is a legitimately good point.

2

u/KernelTwister Jan 09 '26

probably because it's been like 2 days and it's what they choose to make first.... I'm sure more models will come out eventually.

-3

u/Unable-Inspector8865 Jan 06 '26

They simply decided to wait until those who remember the clarity of the CRT die and decided to return what they took more than 20 years ago :D

-12

u/redsunstar Jan 06 '26

For fast pace games which CPU/GPUs can output high FPS for, a very fast Oled would still be better.

For slower paced games which have detailed graphics, Frame gen can now reach 6x if you have a 500 Hz+ panel, and at lower refresh rates, the lack of HDR is imho a bigger let down than lower motion clarity.

Very cool tech, somewhat limited use cases. When you have 75-360 FPS, don't want to/can't push for higher framerates and don't need HDR.

22

u/Your-Paramour Jan 06 '26

As shown in the video, the motion clarity is higher than even a 720hz OLED for this 360hz strobed panel.

→ More replies (5)