I got the ROG Swift (PG278Q) -- my tests

[rob_IDDQD]

Hi guys, hi Chief Blur Buster,
first of all: you really do a great job with this Website. Thx for sharing your knowledge with us.

I am from Germany and got my ROG Swift a week ago and testing it still for now. I want to share my impressions and my verdict with you.

When you gaming on an LCD panel, you normally have the problems of:
- Display Lag (Signal Processing[ms] + Pixel Respons Time[ms])
- Tearing
- Stutter
- Motion Blur

To solve this problems, this ROG Swift has been build. And i can tell you, its really amazing.

I tested a few games. In my opinion 3 Games are really interesting for you, to get an impression how this mointor works.
- Battlefield 4 - One of the best visual games still on the market, so you need a really high
performance CPU.
- Borderlands 2 - Unreal Engine, still fluid gameplay with 144 fps, but with Physx and a lot of enemys you get really high fps drops to 30 fps.
- Path of Exile - fluid gameplay with 144fps in every situation

My Testsetup is:
CPU: Intel Core i7 4770k@4Ghz
RAM: Corsair Dominator 8GB DDR3
GPU: EVGA Geforce 780Ti Superclocked @980Mhz

All games are running @2560x1440 with Ultra Settings.

Battlefield 4
This was my first game i tested on the ROG Swift. And holy crap. It was phenomeneal and still is.
Gaming @2560x1440 screen resoution with 4xMSAA is really a high impact of picture quality compared to 1080p. I still sitting in front of the monitor 50cm away. To get an higher immersion i put my nose on the screen and its still crisp and clean. I was near the bottom Tower of Shanghai, looking at the water and – awesome. It's for me something like getting a 3D effect, but still playing on 2D. I think i was there at this place.

Even picture quality getting far better, the gameplay of Battlefield 4 was more fluid than playing on my old Samsung SA950D@120Hz 1080p Monitor. You must see it to believe. So when you buying this monitor you get:
Far better picture quality in games than TN-Panels with 1080p beacuse of the 1440p screen resolution
Gameplay feels totally smooth and it seems you getting more FPS compared to my old screen with 1080p

To classify that:
I got a HD 7970 graphics card before i was buying a 780Ti. This was a performance impact of nearly 50% more FPS. But i don't get such an WOW-effect to this performance boost compared to playing with the same hardware but playing on the ROG-Swift. It's like 70-80% more FPS or something. And also with better graphics quality.

I use DXTory to show the FPS in the game, and i see that in Battlefield for i get about 60 fps, more less in some situations. On my Samsung 1080p Monitor i got about 100 Fps. But it feels the 60 fps on the ROG Swift is faster than 100fps on the Samsung Monitor. The answer: G-Sync. Even you playing above this 60fps you get an fluid gameplay with this new technology. I think lot of you guys with 120Hz monitors know it, when you playing with 90 fps on an 120 Hz monitor, you get sometimes stutter and the gaming experience is not so good, you should expect with this high framerate. But with G-Sync when you get 90fps the screen runs with 90Hz and graphics card and the monitor are in harmony with each other, and hell yeah, you can feel it.

For my expirence with G-Sync now, it worked really good when you play above 50 fps. Playing above 50fps, in every situation the gameplay feels fluid and jaw breaking awesome. No tearing, no input lag, no stutter, and still for me low motion blur. It's like playing constantly with 144fps on an 144Hz monitor. Getting lower than 50fps you can feel and performance impact. About 40-50 fps its still fluid, but you can feel fps drops compared to 50-144 fps. All lower than 40 fps are in my opinion not so good, but still better than playing on my old monitor.

For the first, i whould say for now: try to get above 50 fps every time and getting some game details down, because the fluidness of frames above 50fps are for me more important than some deatils you get in picture quality in the game.

Borderlands 2
In Borderlands you get normally really high fps, when nothing happens, but with Physx enabled and lots of enemys and COOP-playing, you get really high fps drops. Game runs so between all the range 25-144fps. With Borderlands 2 i tested the first time the ULMB (Ultra Low Motion Blur) Feature.

144 Hz with G-Sync:
It's like i described in Battlefield 4, no stutter, no tearing at all. When you get the fps drops because of the Physx-Effects, you can still feel an performance impact, and the fluidness is gone.

120Hz with ULMB (no G-Sync available)
ULMB works only when G-Sync is disabled. The ULMB pulse width is set to 100, to get the most brigthness out of the monitor. For me i notice some flickering when i turned ULMB on, but after a few seconds my eyes adapted to this feature with no problems anymore. I started the game at a point where i get around 100fps. With V-Sync enabled i get stutter, with V-Sync disabled i get tearing, so not a good gameplay experience. It was just beacuse the 100fps which where not perfect for the 120Hz monitor refresh rate.

85Hz with ULMB (no G-Sync available)
So what i do i set the monitor refresh rate to 85Hz and let ULMB turned on. And what happend? Awesome. With V-Sync enabled i reached the 85fps easily (remeber: i get around 100 fps at this point) and than ULMB takes the cake. There was no tearing, input lag or stutter, beacuse the game reached 85 fps with 85Hz and there were no motion blur anymore i can see. When you fix a point a the monitor in the game, like a box, car or something like that, you can easily track it with your eyes. There is no motion blur anymore. That is really an awesome effect. Unfortunately i can't reach all the time the 85fps, so when the framerate drops, it was awful. There was again stutter there.

Path of Exile
In Path of Exile i get consantly max fps, with ULMB@120HZ 120 fps, with G-Sync@144Hz 144fps. So here is for me the case, turning G-Sync off and turning ULMB on, beacuse you will never have normally fps drops < 120 fps with my hardware setup.

And what could i say? It's like in Borderlands 2, you can easily track everything with your eyes. It's really an experience you have to see. I need to set V-Sync on, because with V-Sync off, i get more than 120 fps and than i got tearing at all. The gameplay with V-Sync off was awful, but with V-Sync on perfect, no tearing, no stutter, no input lag and no motion blur. Excellent.

So what i recommend by now, is following:
Perfect Gaming Experience:
A) Game reach every time >= 85 fps + Vsync on + ULMB@85Hz
B) Game reach every time >= 0 fps + Gsync on + 144Hz

So only when you get really powerful hardware, that guarantee you getting more than 85 fps every time, i whould turn ULMB on, otherwise G-Sync is the best option for me.
A) Battlefield 4 ==> G-Sync@144Hz
B) Borderlands 2 ==> G-Sync@144Hz
C) Path of Exile ==> ULMB@120Hz, alternative ULMB@85Hz or @100Hz

Verdict:
Is it worth to spend 800 EUR for this ROG Swift monitor? When you got so much money and the most you do with your pc is playing games beacuse you loving it, than in my opinion defenetly yes. It's a game changer. It's like buying a Titan Z so you can run every game with 2560x1440 with max 144fps, so you really don't need the G-Sync features (but still have no microstutter). But even without G-Sync this is the first monitor with 1440p running at 144Hz. Unfortanelty its only a TN panel, but colors are good, but not even perfect. The color shift is for me the problem. Thats the only disadvantage i see. On Windows desktop mode, this doesn't makes me happy, because you can really see the white area of the Explorer shifts to yellow, depending on the angle of view. In front of the monitor you can find your sweet spot. Turning the head up and down the color shift is there. But in gaming i don't need perfect colors and i dont see any color shift there. In Gaming i need stutter, tearing free fluid gameplay, with less motion blur and input lag. And that was this monitor offers. Unfortanelty you cannot run G-Sync + ULMB, maybe in the future we will see both technologies together. But running G-Sync with 144fps also has really low motion blur. So for fast past games, this is the monitor to go. When you only playing no fast pace games like Heartstone, i think maybe a IPS mointor with a very good color reproduction is better for you. But everytime i starting now playing a game, i have a big smile on my face, because of the buttery smooth gaming experience with 1440p screen resolution. Awesome.

[Chief Blur Buster]

Good findings!

You Europeans have a lovely head start on this monitor. North America (myself) currently is under media hold until mid August. Thanks for posting this review!

I agree that ULMB (or any strobing) looks most amazing with VSYNC ON when you are able to match framerate with the refreshrate at all times. This gives the "perfect clarity, perfect motion" blurfree experience. The lack of motion blur amplifies the visibility of tearing, so you either want GSYNC (for the low lag + tearfree + stutterfree), VSYNC OFF (for the low lag) or using ULMB + VSYNC ON (for the butter smooth "SEGA Arcade CRT" experience).

You should consider mouse Hz is very important for this monitor. See www.blurbusters.com/mouse-125hz-vs-500hz-vs-1000hz/ ... With ULMB + VSYNC ON, even a 500Hz mouse is way too microstuttery for my eyes, and setting 1000Hz (on a good 1000Hz mouse) makes a very noticeable smoothness improvement for ULMB + VSYNC ON.

I will be publishing my review around August 11th (subject to change).

[RealNC]

Thanks for sharing your impressions!

Just a small correction:

When you gaming on an LCD panel, you normally have the problems of:
...
- Tearing
- Stutter
...

These problems are there with all displays, not just LCDs. A CRT tears and stutters just the same as an LCD. There's no difference.

[Chief Blur Buster]

These problems are there with all displays, not just LCDs. A CRT tears and stutters just the same as an LCD. There's no difference.

Correct.
In addition, visibility of tearing (that's always there) can be affected by motion clarity. The clear motion of CRT and strobing(ULMB/LightBoost) can make it easier to see the tearing even at high Hz. No longer obscured by motion blur of old LCDs.

[omgBlur]

It's great to see a personal review here on the forums!

Just like Chief, I live in the States and am anxious to get this monitor!!!

[Mals]

Good findings!

You Europeans have a lovely head start on this monitor. North America (myself) currently is under media hold until mid August. Thanks for posting this review!

I agree that ULMB (or any strobing) looks most amazing with VSYNC ON when you are able to match framerate with the refreshrate at all times. This gives the "perfect clarity, perfect motion" blurfree experience. The lack of motion blur amplifies the visibility of tearing, so you either want GSYNC (for the low lag + tearfree + stutterfree), VSYNC OFF (for the low lag) or using ULMB + VSYNC ON (for the butter smooth "SEGA Arcade CRT" experience).

You should consider mouse Hz is very important for this monitor. See www.blurbusters.com/mouse-125hz-vs-500hz-vs-1000hz/ ... With ULMB + VSYNC ON, even a 500Hz mouse is way too microstuttery for my eyes, and setting 1000Hz (on a good 1000Hz mouse) makes a very noticeable smoothness improvement for ULMB + VSYNC ON.

I will be publishing my review around August 11th (subject to change).

Quick question... on ULMB + Vsync, are you getting the input lag associated with Vsync? I've tried turning Vsync on a lot of times and it always makes my mouse inputs horridly slow

[RealNC]

Quick question... on ULMB + Vsync, are you getting the input lag associated with Vsync? I've tried turning Vsync on a lot of times and it always makes my mouse inputs horridly slow

This is always going to happen with vsync (unless the game itself implements some form of low-latency vsync; the vast majority of games don't do this.)

But of course with higher refresh rates, the vsync lag gets reduced. Also, make sure that you set a value of "1" for the "Max pre-rendered frames" setting in the NVidia Control Panel's 3D settings. Without this setting, you are going to have pretty massive input lag when vsync is enabled.

[nimbulan]

It's good to see these monitors are finally becoming available, if quite a few months late. It sounds like it works as well as the VG248QE upgrade kit and finally 1440p users have a G-sync option. I'm glad you're liking it!

Personally, I've tried ULMB briefly and didn't like it since it causes noticable overdrive artifacting, mostly in the lower half of the display. Has this problem been fixed with the new PG278Q?

[Chief Blur Buster]

Quick question... on ULMB + Vsync, are you getting the input lag associated with Vsync? I've tried turning Vsync on a lot of times and it always makes my mouse inputs horridly slow

VSYNC ON Input lag goes down significantly when:
- Using a higher refresh rate such as 120Hz instead of 60Hz
- Set "Max pre-rendered frames" to 1
- Setting an in-game framerate cap a very tiny bit below Hz
Example: In Counter Strike:GO, enter "fps_max 119" or even "fps_max 119.8" at the console
(Important note: Driver capping, or any other external capping, will always have more lag than in-game capping, due to the way things work).

Doing all the above massively reduces input lag for VSYNC ON (and even helps GSYNC a bit too, for the capped-out situations). It does not eliminate all of it. But 80% to 90% of the VSYNC ON lag penalty disappears when all three techniques are done simultaneously.

Competitive players who play for money will prefer VSYNC OFF, and the very-lag-sensitive too, but for those of us seeking maximum possible motion clarity for motion enjoyment, the VSYNC ON setting (when able to maintain max framerate) helps makes strobing top-notch in motion quality. A good example is sliding on the rails in Bioshock Infinite, really spetacularly benefits from strobing during VSYNC ON double buffered at full refreshrate exactly matching framerate, if you use a powerful GPU and/or reduce details/shadows/AA to keep framerates capped out to refresh rate.

Lag prioritization favors VSYNC OFF, but motion clarity prioritization favors VSYNC ON. To combine the two, we would need strobed rolling-scan GSYNC OLED, for simultaneously zero lag, zero blur, zero stutter, and zero tearing. OLED strobing via rolling scan, can be CRT identical in input lag (zero signal lag). Oculus DK2 (which is strobed) combined with GSYNC would be golden!

[Mals]

Cool thanks Chief. I gotta admit, that last perfect storm of tech you put at the end sounds.. a tad bit down the line technologically speaking haha.