That's probably for 1080p. The BOM for the 1440p GSYNC is probably much higher at the moment. Also, the cargo transport & the stores have to take their margin so ASUS is grossing a lot less than $799 per monitor.vhn wrote:It costs the monitor manufacturers about 50 dollars to buy the g-sync module from Nvidia and install it in their own product. But whatever they decide to charge the consumer is of course another story.
That said, it's certianly high -- but not too stratospheric when you consider the ROG PG278H is the computer monitor equivalent of a high-end LED HDTV with enhanced "960Hz emulation" and ultrahigh-quality interpolation (more-flawless-looking interpolation) costing $3000+. There's a huge ton of motion quality enhancing technology. This isn't your plain QNIX overclockable monitor (a shining deal, but they are motion blur messes in comparision). In a few years, GSYNC/FreeSync will be cheap additions, but it won't be this year...
The race-to-bottom (mass manufactured cheap LCD monitors) means that 60Hz monitors are finally now super cheap, often piggybacked off TV/tablet/laptop/monitor/etc manufacturing with boilerplate/stock firmwares that only need minor tweaks. While the "Better Than 60Hz" technologies significantly diverges from this, requiring lots of custom firmware design, and sometimes custom FPGA/ASIC design that has become horrendously expensive. Due to niche market, we got lucky that 120Hz even became available for under $300 as quickly as it did (the venerable VG248QE) -- only 2 years after the first 120Hz LCD gaming monitor hit the market.
That said, I agree $799 is a lot. It's premium territory, certainly worthy of the elite ROG label.
But still a bargain compared to my $500 LCD monitor less than a decade ago.
I might split this post to a separate "Monitor Pricing Talk" thread -- it's a useful separate topic -- worthy of interesting discussion -- but let's remember that practical 120Hz LCD computer monitors hit the market only about three years ago, and look at how quickly we've come this far (LightBoost, ULMB, GSYNC, etc), manufacturers (thanks in no small part to Blur Busters and their friends such as TFTCentral, etc) have recognized the importance of many of these technologies including strobe backlights.