ViewSonic XG2703-GS (27" 165Hz 1440p IPS G-Sync) impressions

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ViewSonic XG2703-GS (27" 165Hz 1440p IPS G-Sync) impressions

Post by RealNC » 22 Apr 2017, 06:25

This is not a professional review of the XG2703-GS. I don't have any equipment for that. These are just my overall impressions. I bought this monitor myself; this is not a review unit or any other form of handout. A review of this monitor from a reviewer I trust can be found on PC Monitors. Tom's Hardware has also reviewed this monitor. Again, below are my personal impressions.

I upgraded to this monitor from a 27" 1080p 144Hz TN (AOC G2770PF.) Prior to that, I was using a 23" 60Hz 1080p TN (Samsung XL2370.) I only used the AOC for a month or so (it was rather abysmally bad,) which basically means that in reality, my upgrade path was rather from the 23" 60Hz display.

The first thing I noticed is that static image quality is much better. The colors, contrast and gamma don't change near the corners of the screen. With the TN, I had to put the monitor quite far away in order for the colors to not change near the corners. Looking at the AOC even slightly off-center would result in wrong colors and wrong gamma. With the ViewSonic, I could have my nose touch the screen when playing CS:GO if I wanted to, and everything still looks OK. I don't do that of course, but especially for CS:GO I like to pull the monitor closer to me. The IPS panel does a good job here to not ruin the image when doing that.

The image is overall darker on the IPS. Shadows do look more... "shadowy." On the TN, it had a bit of a "washed out" look. The ViewSonic has options to make the image washed out on purpose if you want that (it has 5 gamma settings to do that: 2.6, 2.4, 2.2, 2, 1.8.) On the TN, you couldn't do the reverse; trying to make shadows darker would ruin the bright areas. For games like CS:GO where you do want a wrong gamma on purpose in order to have better visibility of enemies in shadows, you can set the gamma to 1.8 and enable "Dark Boost". This actually works much better on the ViewSonic compared to the AOC. The ViewSonic's Dark Boost function only boosts shadows and leaves bright areas mostly intact. The AOC's equivalent function was just boosting gamma over the whole image, which was not helpful at all. It didn't even remotely try to separate bright from dark areas.

Overall colors are warmer on the IPS. The TN was "bluish", the IPS is "yellow-ish." This can be changed though on both monitors by changing the RGB values. Color performance is vastly superior on the IPS though. It passes all tests on the Lagon LCD Test site. The AOC (and all my previous TN monitors) failed many of them.

For the ViewSonic, if you don't like the warmer image, you can use an RGB of 99 red, 98 green and 100 blue, and get a less warm image, which might be preferable for some use cases (mostly games.) If you're used to most TN gaming monitors, the best calibration (at least for my unit), is 2.0 for the gamma setting, "Level 1" for the Dark Boost setting, along with the 99/98/100 RGB setting.

The ViewSonic does not only allow RGB calibration, but also 6-axis RGBCMY color calibration. I have no idea how to use that though. I suppose graphics-work geeks would know how to make use of it. I'm not one of them though :) In fact, I can't even find any information on what it's even used for.

The coating is not completely glossy, and not grainy either. I'd say it looks "semi-glossy." For my personal taste, it's a very good balance between the two. There's a hint of reflections visible, but it makes them just enough "fuzzy" as to not distract you. If you do shine a direct light into it though, it will reflect it. (But you wouldn't want to shine direct lighting into a display, regardless of coating type anyway.) Overall, the coating is just anti-glare enough as to not have a big impact on the image. Bright colors do not exhibit any graining whatsoever, and there's no coating-induced vertical or horizontal lines that you get with some types of heavy coating.

As for viewing angles: it's IPS. Enough said :D You can watch a movie or play a game with a friend and it doesn't matter where you or they are seated. Or you can sit very close to it and there's no image degradation near the corners. It just looks good regardless of where you place it or where you sit. Another big advantage here, at least for me, is the portrait mode. When you rotate the monitor 90 degrees for Pinball FX2 or portrait mode arcade games (through MAME) like Pac-Man, 1942, etc, it looks simply amazing. TN panels are especially bad at this, since they not only have bad horizontal viewing angles, but especially bad (borderline unusable) vertical viewing angles. Portrait mode on a TN means half the screen looks like it has inverted colors. The ViewSonic: perfect. If you're a fan of portrait mode games, you're gonna be very happy with the panel.

Image quality during motion is hugely superior on the ViewSonic. The AOC had severe "fattening/boldening" of pixels during motion. Moving a window around on the desktop for example would result in text appearing in bold. In games, fine lines appeared bold. This was very annoying in many games. The only way to get rid of that on the AOC was to turn off overdrive completely. There's none of that with the ViewSonic. Overdrive does not "fatten" anything and things look as they should, regardless of whether they're moving or are stationary. This is not to say that IPS panels have better motion characteristics than TN panels. It's just that the AOC monitor was really, really bad at this. But the conclusion here is simply that even though this is an IPS display, it has no motion quality issues. It looks best with the "Response Time" setting (that's how ViewSonic refers to overdrive in this monitor) in the OSD set to "Advanced" (which is the medium setting, with the other two being "Standard" and "Ultra Fast.") NVidia has done a very nice job here. (G-Sync monitors use an overdrive algorithm implemented by NVidia.)

The bump in resolution (from 27" 1920x1080 to 27" 2560x1440) is very noticeable. Everything is sharper and more defined. 1440p is a 78% higher resolution compared to 1080p when both monitors have the same size (27" in my case), and it really shows. However, if the GPU is not able to run high frame rates at that resolution and you have to upscale, it's gonna be blurry. Running 1080p on the ViewSonic means you get GPU upscaling (G-Sync monitors don't upscale themselves; that's a limitation of having G-Sync support), and NVidia's GPU upscaling is abysmally bad.

You can tweak the monitor's EDID to force the monitor to do its own scaling (which is not too bad) and avoid GPU scaling, but it doesn't work with high refresh rates, so it doesn't really solve the problem; if you use low refresh rates, you have no reason to run 1080p to begin with. You want 1080p to reach high frame rates.

So make sure your GPU can run 1440p at acceptable frame rates, otherwise it's gonna be a bad experience.

For non-gaming purposes, the higher resolution means better appearance of text and more screen space. I work as a software developer, and the better text appearance along with more screen real estate makes working with this monitor more comfortable and fun. I can see more of my code at the same time without the text being pixelated and/or grainy, and have stuff like an API reference open at the same time without running into text-line length issues. Reading articles on the web is also better, simply due to the much better text/font appearance.

Weirdly, the AOC had more ghosting too, even though it used a TN panel. The ViewSonic, even though it's IPS, is much better at that. This is probably due to the spotless overdrive implementation by the G-Sync module (G-Sync monitors use NVidia's overdrive implementation, which is generally very good and reduces ghosting to very low levels.) There is no ghosting to be seen anywhere during normal use. The only way I can spot a slight hint of ghosting is on the TestUFO Ghosting Test. And even there, it's very, very low. In comparison, the AOC with its "1ms TN panel" did worse on that test.

The ViewSonic has "IPS glow". This is visible on the bottom corners of the screen if the image is dark and I'm using the monitor at night with dim lights in the room and when sitting close to the monitor (~30cm.) However, I find this effect to be preferable compared to the TN's color and gamma shift. It's a trade-off. Note that like TN color/gamma shift, IPS glow is angle dependent. It appears when looking at the monitor from an angle. That means that, just like TN color/gamma shift, if you like your monitor to be further away from you (60cm or more), IPS glow will be virtually zero.

G-Sync is a godsent. Previously, I was tweaking refresh rates and frame cappers all the time to get an acceptable level of input lag with vsync. With the ViewSonic and G-Sync enabled, I just cap FPS to 4FPS below max refresh (161FPS here) and everything runs like a dream. No input lag, no tearing, no stutter. It's like "this is how it was always supposed to be."

ULMB (motion blur reduction) can't be used together with G-Sync by default. However, when you don't need G-Sync (for example for games that NEVER fall below the refresh rate), using ULMB gives a super-clear image. It works at 85Hz, 100Hz and 120Hz only. Other refresh rates can NOT be used with ULMB, unless you apply custom EDID tweaks using CRU. See this post for more info on that.

You can use G-Sync + ULMB at the same time if you want using a tweak described here, but the result is not that good. There's gonna be flickering and "crosstalk" (exaggerated ghosting.) This is not a mode intended for end-users, mind you. The tweak tricks the G-Sync module into a mode of operation it was not designed for.

One thing should be said though: if ULMB is important to you, a monitor with a TN panel is going to do it better. IPS panels have more crosstalk when using ULMB when compared to TN.

Other things like backlight bleed or dead pixels differ between units. In my case, very little bleed, no dead pixels. But if you happen to get a unit with these issues, it will be aggravating and involve sending it back and whatnot. Some shops will not actually accept this. In the US, I think you can send things back "just because", but overseas, this might not be the case. If you get BLB or dead pixels, you might have to live with it. ViewSonic does NOT provide a zero-pixels guarantee for this monitor. Dead pixels, unless there's LOTS of them, do not qualify for RMA. Which is a bit disappointing given the price premium of this monitor.

And these are my thoughts after about 2 months using this monitor. And again, before people complain: this is NOT a review. I'm neither qualified nor equipped to review monitors! These are end-user impressions.
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Re: ViewSonic XG2703-GS (27" 165Hz 1440p IPS G-Sync) impress

Post by Chief Blur Buster » 22 Apr 2017, 10:42

Thanks for posting this user experience of the XG2703-GS!

Maybe we will need to buy/procure one for us to test.
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