Do any 34" or 32" monitors come close vs XG2431? Or far from it?

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240p 1000fps
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Do any 34" or 32" monitors come close vs XG2431? Or far from it?

Post by 240p 1000fps » 17 May 2022, 11:46

Hello, I've been planning a multi-monitor set up and need suggestions. I created a visual plan using a website, please see the attachment below.
multi monitors plan.png
multi monitors plan.png (867.19 KiB) Viewed 1649 times
There is no single usecase, I wanted a set of different monitors for a variety of usecases. Mainly browsing, video editing, digital art, coding, watching videos (HDR, 4k, or 240fps (not at same time!)), and gaming (all kinds of games but no competitive FPS). As you can see below I've settled on 1. a 34" 1440p, 2. a 32" 4k, and 3. a 24" 1080p monitor. Before doing any research, I naively thought that I'd simply get a 34" monitor with 240hz and that would be my "high hz" monitor for gaming, high speed video etc. Then I stumbled across blur busters, read all the articles and discovered the vicious cycle and the fact that most high hz monitors are going to be in smaller 16:9 form factors.

So my primary question is are there any 34" UWQHD or 32" 4k monitors with decent strobing, at least 120hz native, that are sort-of-blur-busters-approved? Or do they pale in comparison to the XG2431?

Originally for monitor #3 I was just going to reuse my generic 24" monitor as it was just going to be for browsing. But if it is really worth it, I could get the XG2431 for it. The monitors will all be on arms, so when I play games I could just reposition #3 for gaming (or watching 240fps video).

Secondly, even if I get the XG2431 I still see myself wanting to play certain games in the 34" or 32" monitors. I like the idea of having the choice between all three depending on which game it is, so I'm willing to get high hz models for all instead of just one. Do you recommend any models for either form factor? For the 34" I was looking at the Asus XG349C, Asus VG34VQL1B, MSI Optix MAG342CQR, Dell S3422DWG, Coolermaster CMI-GM34-CW, and BenQ EX3415R. Haven't searched the 32's too much so far but I did find the Acer XB323QK.

For reference I have a 3080 12GB and i7 12700k. Open to Freesync instead of G-sync because I may want to switch to AMD in the next gen someday.

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Re: Do any 34" or 32" monitors come close vs XG2431? Or far from it?

Post by Chief Blur Buster » 17 May 2022, 17:26

240p 1000fps wrote:
17 May 2022, 11:46
Originally for monitor #3 I was just going to reuse my generic 24" monitor as it was just going to be for browsing. But if it is really worth it, I could get the XG2431 for it. The monitors will all be on arms, so when I play games I could just reposition #3 for gaming (or watching 240fps video).
I'd recommend your ultrawide to be one of the new OLED monitors that just came out, unless you can't afford it. They're rather impressive.

If you also get a 24" 1080p unit, I'd definitely consider the XG2431 as a great general-purpose 1080p display. 240Hz browser scrolling has 1/4th the motion blur of 60Hz, and you also gain access to PureXP and Blur Busters Strobe Utility for consumption of low-motion-blur content.

Another compromise is to merge your 4K and 1080p display into a 1440p 240Hz display, though that certainly entails some compromises.

Yet another compromise is to simply buy a single 42", 48" or 55" LG 4K 120Hz GSYNC OLED display, and forget about having 3 monitors. Many of us use these OLED TVs as a desktop monitor, and it checks almost all your boxes simultaneously on one panel, even though there are the compromises. Like a bit more input lag than an esports display, and the need for a beefy GPU for 4K. You can always use NVIDIA DLSS 2.0 to upscale your 1080p to 4K while also simultaneously increasing frame rates, though.

As a general rule of thumb, if you disable strobing -- then OLED of a specific Hz sometimes looks better than an LCD of twice the Hz, because of faster GtG. So you'd prefer a 240Hz OLED over 360Hz LCD, or a 120Hz OLED over a 165Hz LCD. (And in future, 480Hz OLEDs may have less motion blur than 1000Hz LCDs. The diminishing curve of returns is easier to see on an OLED, because it eliminates GtG as an error margin obscuring refresh rate differences.)

In this case, I'd just get a locally dimmed ultrawide (1500 zones ore more), and skip strobing. Enjoy the HDR beauty instead of blur-free beauty, since good HDR is easier to find than good strobing in any ultrawide (flat or curved), yet.

Also, in fact, a 120Hz OLED can have less motion blur than some of the crappier 240Hz monitors (albiet the XG2431 PureXP tunable to as low as ~0.1ms-0.5ms MPRT will have much less motion blur than even the best LG OLED C9 BFI mode (4ms MPRT).

Now that being said, if you use strobing, LCD will beat the best OLED in motion blur. But your ultrawide -- and most ultrawides are curved. Strobing always has ghosting on curved ultrawides, because they are all VA, and the VA panels are too slow for crosstalk-free strobing. To the point where 120Hz non-strobed IPS can sometimes be better than a 175 Hz VA strobed LCD. Your mileage will vary obviously. If stuck without strobing, you might as well try to choose the only curved non-VA options, such as the curved OLED ultrawide monitor -- Dell Alienware, or other upcoming.

LCD will be around for a long time, but suddenly, new high-Hz OLEDs are now a contender today -- either as an Ultrawide or as a small TV repurposed as a monitor.

For a 48"-55" OLED, use a 1-meter view distance, about twice the viewing distance you'd normally use for a 24"-27" LCD. However, some can just get by with slightly under 1-meter, especially if you use the 42"-48" models. You can use a deep desk, or put a wood-expander on top of your desk (enlarge desk surface), or mount TV on the wall behind desk, to get the needed 3-4 foot view distance you'd use for an LG OLED TV repurposed as a computer monitor.

I only mention OLED because your use case may call for either type of OLED now available on the market (the new 34" ultrawide OLEDs such as Alienware or the others, or the LG 42", 48" or 55" 4K TVs). Going left-field like an OLED TV can simplify a complicated multimonitor setup, since it's very common.
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Re: Do any 34" or 32" monitors come close vs XG2431? Or far from it?

Post by 240p 1000fps » 17 May 2022, 19:45

Thanks for the info!

I would want the Alienware QD-OLED but don't want to wait til July. What other ultrawide OLED is out right now? I can't seem to find any.

I have considered a 42" OLED, it would tick a lot of boxes but the main problem is I don't want to sit that far from the screen. I'm sold on the expanded field of view and curve of an ultrawide. Also slightly concerned about burn-in, does auto-refresh software truly prevent it?

Picking up the XG2431 or settling for a 27" 240hz display both sound decent as well, would have to think about it. If I got either of these, I would want to use strobing. But if available I would probably prioritize the Alienware or similar display, I think it would come close enough and has other benefits (brightness). Also leaves room for a 24" on the side.

So it sounds like you don't recommend the current gen IPS 2k ultrawide's, or 4k 32" displays for motion blur reduction? Are they not worth the money for it?

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Re: Do any 34" or 32" monitors come close vs XG2431? Or far from it?

Post by Chief Blur Buster » 17 May 2022, 20:27

240p 1000fps wrote:
17 May 2022, 19:45
I would want the Alienware QD-OLED but don't want to wait til July. What other ultrawide OLED is out right now? I can't seem to find any.
Up to you. I'd get a dummy monitor and sell it, and get the OLED in a few months.

Get some used ultrawide, maybe? I've seen the Alienware. If I got a curved monitor at any price -- that's the one worth waiting months for. High Hz OLED is purty nice as none of the ultrawides has good quality strobing anyway. It's kind of a "sell my 3 month old ultrawide and buy it, period" type of purchase if your priority is best visual quality in gaming. Unless you're getting a locally-dimmed MiniLED-backlit ultrawide today, then it may last long enough to hold off on the OLED. But at that spend, you might as well wait for the OLED ultrawide, unless you need a super-bright image.

Strobing on a good non-curved monitor is superior, but I have never found a curved IPS with well-tuned strobing yet. IPS could probably be well-tuned, but there's very few models of IPS, and not all IPS are well-strobe-tuned (if they have strobing yet). The best ultrawide for strobing would be the native GSYNC IPS panels that are not based on KSF phosphor (ghosting).

So I'd instead use brute refresh rate as the blur reduction method if I had an ultrawide.... at least for now. That'd be where your cherrypicked non-ultrawide would be for (good 24" or 27" strobed options are available)
240p 1000fps wrote:
17 May 2022, 19:45
I have considered a 42" OLED, it would tick a lot of boxes but the main problem is I don't want to sit that far from the screen. I'm sold on the expanded field of view and curve of an ultrawide. Also slightly concerned about burn-in, does auto-refresh software truly prevent it?
Sounds like you never visited the desktop-PC-OLED forum communities!

Overblown panic hysteria in mainstream media </eyeroll>

- Reduce OLED brightness to similar brightness as CRT. Don't use OLED Light 100%, don't use Brightness 100%
- Use taskbar autohide
- Optionally, use dark mode + orbiting if you're extra-worried about your contrasty code windows / command-line windows.

You can turn 1 year burnin to 10 year burnin because burn-in is geometric.

Double the brightness can speed up burn-in by 4x or more on some OLED panels. So 1/4th the brightness can add an order-of-magnitude of lifetime of hours on-time before the same intensity of burnin is noticed. 100nits versus 400nits is plenty bright for many Adobe Photoshoppers -- many calibrate to 120nits with a colorimeter, for example! When an OLED is adequately under-driven, burn-in ceases to be a within-lifetime-of-monitor fuss.

10 years is essentially beyond lifetime of monitor. Remember, LCDs also wear-and-tear (e.g. GtG slowdowns after 10 years, or blotchy/dusty backlight, or backlight LEDs dimmed by years of wear and tear), so YMMV. Make sure to optimize your OLED for desktop use. And you can use the pixel refresh feature (very sparingly -- let it use the auto schedule, not done manually) to auto-equallize ultrafaint burn-in.

If you want, you can sparingly enable super bright HDR mode for flagship games you play (since it will automatically make pixels bright only for up to 10% of the pixels), since you're always moving around in a game. Just make sure the static HUD is not HDR-bright pixels, or disable HUD. But you won't need to do this for plain old coding tasks.

In reality it's possible you might get some faint blotchiness after 3 years of underdriving, but the blotchiness will be less noticeable than the blotchy 5-IRE and 10-IRE and 20-IRE gray fields of a VA-based ultrawide (panel manufacturing imperfections) and the hugely distracting LCD ghosting that many VA-based ultrawides has. The IPS ultrawides are definitely better nowadays though, but many of them are flat rather than curved -- the curveds mainly come in VA which blurs/ghost more at the same Hz than IPS/TN does, which in turn blurs/ghosts more than OLED.

Common sense stuff well-known in PC OLED forum communities with happy Visual Studio users, command line users, and Adobe Photoshop users using 4K OLED's as PC monitors.

Curve is lovely, but the extra monitors are somewhat distracting in peripheral vision, and the surface area of a 4K OLED TV covers all 3 monitors simultaneously.

I do know some people set a 2 or 2.5 foot view distance to a 42" or 48" OLED, it's doable (not too different from 4-monitor 24" matrix in 2x2 layout, same DPI too!), so you can get by with similar view distance. You can just use a keyboard drawer (with locking notches) and computer-chair-on-wheels to dynamically adjust your view distance as needed.

The OLED is as wide as an ultrawide, but pretty much literally twice as tall. So more of your peripheral vision is now undistracted by spare monitors in your peripheral vision. And you don't have the refresh-rate-stutter-interference of different-Hz multimonitor that makes computing a little bit more of a hassle.

In my experience, eliminating distraction of multiple monitors is a bigger win than the curve you will lose. It's still much more immersive without the curve, thanks to a single panel surface that's larger than all your 3 monitors combined in square-inchage.

Sure, you can turn off unused monitors (with the help of apps such as DisplayFusion to temporarily disconnect unused monitors, via a hotkey or click), and just play only on the ultrawide. But it's a bit more of a hassle to keep switching monitors just to solve the immersion-problem and solve the different-refresh-rate-interference problem. A single 48" 4K 120Hz GSYNC VRR OLED television just clears all those inconveniences aside. Sure, there's the minor glitches (e.g. gamma udulations in VRR OLED), but this is relatively minor in most games compared to VA ghosting effects, anyway.

You are correct though -- it's impossible to get a jack-of-all-trades monitor yet. Going 2 and 3 monitors is a tactic many of us do to get compromises. However, some of us found "good enough unifying" models already, and for your case, it'd be a 42" or 48" OLED TV as a workflow/quality-simplifying compromise.
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Re: Do any 34" or 32" monitors come close vs XG2431? Or far from it?

Post by 240p 1000fps » 14 Jun 2022, 23:59

If I got a curved monitor at any price -- that's the one worth waiting months for. High Hz OLED is purty nice as none of the ultrawides has good quality strobing anyway. It's kind of a "sell my 3 month old ultrawide and buy it, period" type of purchase if your priority is best visual quality in gaming.
Super late reply but thanks a ton for all your advice. I thought about it a good deal and put in the order for the Alienware a few weeks ago. With your recc I just decided to be patient and wait for it, I believe it will be worth it.
Sounds like you never visited the desktop-PC-OLED forum communities!
You are correct I never have! Just heard these things from Linus vids and angry amazon reviews. That's good to hear that the burn-in risk is so overblown with the proper care, but I'm sad for all the unnecessary burn-in that happened to those amazon customers because of these measures not being widely known.

As for the large TV vs multiple distracting monitors debate, I thought hard about this too and I'll take the hassle/risks with multiple monitors. I like the idea of having explicitly separate domains for different apps that I can also physically move around (they'll all be on arms). I'll also be able to turn the others off, bring one closer to me and focus only on that. I'm betting that I may not like being locked in to just one massive screen. I also saw a couple reviews of people using it for their solo monitor, there were complaints of headaches or eye strain as well which I'd rather avoid.

So for the 32" I just went with a cheap Z-edge 4k screen which has already arrived and works fine. I haven't replaced my 24" screen yet, still thinking about it but will probably buy the XG2431. Just waiting on a few things to fall in place first.

I want to say, I really appreciate all the education you put into the blogs. I made a point to turn off all my adblockers for the site a while ago, and will use your referral if/when I buy the XG2431.

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