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ViewSonic XG2530 enters 240Hz eSports monitor market
Posted June 18, 2017 by Chief Blur Buster in Main

ViewSonic announces the XG2530, their 240 Hz monitor.

This is an eSports monitor, 1ms, 1920×1080 TN, and supports FreeSync.

Far above the maximum refresh rate of most FreeSync monitors, the future of 240 Hz is looking very bright.

If the FreeSync range actually goes up to 240, that would be quite neat. The range is not listed on the official product page though (unless I'm not seeing it.)

I reached out to Viewsonic. It's indeedy 48-240Hz FreeSync range.

450$, damn around here the cheapest listed price is 620$. Heard quite a lot of good things about Viewsonic gaming monitors, almost picked up a XG2401 before i found my XL2720Z. Guess i can hope the XG2530 might fall down in price here at some point.

Interesting monitor. No motion blur reduction, but apparently 5 overdrive levels and controls for gamma and saturation. Wonder whether the "Monitor Hertz Cap" control makes any sense though. The manual says: "Under Custom 1/2/3, you can adjust the Monitor Hertz Cap setting to fine-tune your response time. With 5 settings to choose from, gamers can precisely match the best fit for each scenario. Each setting will cap the outputted Hz of the monitor, allowing gamers the ability to match their PC and game type, creating a “best fit” scenario. If your GPU cannot reach 240Hz yet, users can save power and loading on their monitor by reducing their hertz output ...", the setting being Native (240), 60, 100, 144, and 180Hz - and mentioning that FreeSync can only be used at native 240Hz.

Yeah, I don't think there's anything really new there. You can switch between refresh rates on any monitor. What this actually seems to do is remove the higher Hz modes from the EDID and reboot the monitor. This is already done on some monitors that have an "Overclocking" option, where if you disable it, the higher refresh mode is deleted from the EDID. Here, it has been extended to also remove other modes from the EDID.

It does make some sense though. Kind of. If a game always forces the highest refresh rate and has no configuration option, then you're stuck with the highest refresh.

It makes no sense with freesync (for obvious reasons.) So yeah, probably not very useful, but for the rare situations it would be useful, it's nice to have.

RealNC wrote:It does make some sense though. Kind of. If a game always forces the highest refresh rate and has no configuration option, then you're stuck with the highest refresh.

You're right! If it is implemented in this way (rebooting monitor with changed EDID), it is basically a convenient way of switching the frequency outputted by the graphics card not via the operating system (or the graphics card control utility) but via the monitor (possibly along with other custom monitor settings being combined in one of the 3 available custom presets). So yes, actually nice to have.

Yes, a button on the monitor that changes refresh rate.

It's a little bit disruptive the way it does it, but it's quite neat how you can switch refresh rates using a button on the monitor.

The ASUS PG278Q has such a bezel button that switches between 60Hz, 100Hz, 120Hz and 144Hz. However, I suspect that one communicates to the graphics drivers, rather than the realtime "EDID change and reboot the display connection" technique.

This button is very useful when I play YouTube or Twitch video, as YouTube 60fps videos seem to play smoothest at 60Hz. Currently, web browsers are not yet variable-refresh-rate capable.

Chief Blur Buster wrote:This button is very useful when I play YouTube or Twitch video, as YouTube 60fps videos seem to play smoothest at 60Hz. Currently, web browsers are not yet variable-refresh-rate capable.

I solved that problem with SMPlayer+mpv as backend + specific youtube-dl configuration options. I just drag&drop the youtube video into the SMPlayer window

A bit involved to configure it the first time, but after that, it's plug'n'play by simply dragging videos (or links to videos) inside the player. Perfect video playback in g-sync mode.

You can go a step further even if you have a top-end GPU and use SVP (which supports mpv + smplayer) to convert to 120FPS and use ULMB.

RealNC wrote:Perfect video playback in g-sync mode.

(Aside: I wonder if SMPlayer works with variable-framerate H.264 videos. Normally designed for framerate transitions (24,30,60fps in the same file) it is apparently possible to format a video file that has a variable interval between frames. Possible future experimentation with GSYNC/FreeSync game recordings, perfectly preserving GSYNC/FreeSync cadence)