OLED vs. IPS for Gaming – Which One Wins?

[madprice88]

I'm currently looking to upgrade my monitor and torn between OLED and high-refresh IPS panels. OLED offers deep blacks and incredible contrast, but IPS still has advantages in brightness and longevity. For gaming, especially fast-paced shooters, which one do you think is the better choice?

[kyube]

I'm currently looking to upgrade my monitor and torn between OLED and high-refresh IPS panels. OLED offers deep blacks and incredible contrast, but IPS still has advantages in brightness and longevity. For gaming, especially fast-paced shooters, which one do you think is the better choice?

If you are looking for the best sample & hold experience and don't mind the issues (light flicker, subpixel layout), 480Hz WOLED is the best experience for any type of use, be it casual desktop use or gaming.
If you are looking for the best strobing experience, the XG2431, XL2566K & the E-TN's would very likely be adequate for your use-case.

There's much more nuance to this topic, especially in games which have a hard-locked frame rate limit.
If this is the case, only strobed displays would help you achieve the best motion clarity possible.

There are also the topics of eye-tracked vs static-gaze motion blur, stroboscopic effect...
There are many topics on Blurbusters about this, feel free to do your research.

[purplemelon1]

I'm currently looking to upgrade my monitor and torn between OLED and high-refresh IPS panels. OLED offers deep blacks and incredible contrast, but IPS still has advantages in brightness and longevity. For gaming, especially fast-paced shooters, which one do you think is the better choice?

You shouldn't misunderstand the brightness. Nits are not linear so 200 nits to 400 nits does not mean twice as bright. It's more like 50% appearance. I can't explain the math.
Don't go in thinking strobing is only a plus thing. Make sure you know what the costs of it are. There is a guy in the strobing section wondering if his 600hz monitor is suppose to look like how it does.

I recommend going for one of the 360hz oleds if you want one of the cheaper options. You might be concerned about longetivity. But even long after you get burn in, you are not going to notice the brightness loss and colour shift until you get a new display.
Tcl already showed off a 4k 1000hz last year. Even if it takes another 4 years to arrive. Are you sure you want a display that lasts 15 years if motion clarity is that important to you?

[mbm]

As alot of us are used to LCD... I my self have a hard time to get used to OLED as a gaming monitor.
I think OLEDS are too dim and too "black".... not always good for competitive gaming.... but panelspeed offcouse OLED is a winner.

[yuri]

OLED, is horrible because of stroboscopic effect.

If someday with find a solution for that, OLED will win.


But for now IPS is better.

[DeltaForCain]

As someone who made the exact switch in 2022: If you can afford it, go for OLED. The colour quality alone blows LCD out of the water, and the perfect contrast is great in games, especially coupled with the fact that you see details like specular highlights much better since every Diode is self-emitting. They also have great motion clarity.

Downsides are risk of burn-in (so far, not a hint, after ~2.5 years, but I also always let it do its pixel refreshes regularly). As for brightness: I use the HDR True Black mode exclusively (I never switch to SDR mode any more) and despite the specs saying it peaks out at 400 nits in that mode, white webpages are like a flashbang. That being said, I also don’t sit near a window, so I have full control over what light shines on the screen. If you regularly sit in sunlight, an OLED will suck for you.

Motion clarity and fluidity are amazing, especially if you set it all up properly (Gsync + Vsync, Reflex On).

[pawel86ck]

My Gigabyte FO32U2 QD-OLED has around 250 nits in SDR with uniform brigthness, but to he honest that's not good enough and not even my old panasonic GT60 plasma was so dimm. Fortunately, with the APL stabilisation function, I can increase the brightness to 400 nits in SDR mode, and even up to 1,000 nits for peak brightness. With these settings, the SDR picture is incredibly bright, even compared to my previous 400 HDR LCD monitor. The contrast and colours also look much better now.

4K QD-OLED display has transformed my gaming experience, even with old games like GTA: San Andreas and modern games with HDR support look even better. I was blown away when I saw Shadow Of The Tomb Raider at 4K in HDR. The lighting no longer looked flat and colours just popped.

I was afraid of VRR flicker, but I can only see in if I use DLSS FG at low base framerate (below 40fps). Without DLSS FG I didnt saw thar flicker except for loading screens.

I can't see myself ever going back to an LCD screen, but if I recommend OLED with DP2.1, becasue DSC isnt so great. Blacks screens are to be expected, and latency is perfect despite popular belief that DSC doesnt affect input lag. Depending on the settings that DSC affected my aiming to a different degree. The DSC on the DP1.4 was laggy, but I was able to achieve a decent experience at 4K 240Hz using an HDMI 2.1 connection with the RGB range set to automatic. For some strange reason, when I set RGB range manually, there was a very noticeable input lag with DSC.

[Kachou]

I would wait atleast for the new gysnc pulsar monitors, they Q3 now.

[Supermodel_Evelynn]

How is this even a question? OLED is better than Any IPS LCD or TN LCD by a mile when it comes to gaming the pixel response time on OLED is instantaneous where even the fastest TN is slow like ass in comparison.

[stolen]

I have come to a very heretical opinion on current OLED displays.

I was all in on OLED for many many years, TVs, and monitors as soon as they became available. Now I am fully back on LCD on all my screens and I don't see myself ever going back to current OLED tech. I imagine true RGB OLEDs might change this someday though.

Color fringing is a big issue, especially for monitor use. QD-OLED is the best here, but that panel type gives me eye strain after a while, WOLED is a lot better in regards to eye comfort but the color fringing is so bad I consider them unusable, and yes the fringing is very noticeable while gaming.

My main gripe with OLEDs however is the abysmal sample and hold motion and the fact that you need to pump frame rates to get any sort of respectable looking motion. BFI is just not good enough on current models. It dims the displays way to much, and on lower FPS the hard on/off flicker is really not pleasant.

What I have now is a TN 540hz monitor for FPS games, and a 120hz+ VA monitor and TV for everything else. Running with strobing enabled most of the time.

Having said that, the absolute worst display I have used in terms of eye strain and general discomfort was a newer fast IPS panel (ROG Swift 360Hz PG27AQN), which is strange because I use office IPS monitors all day at work without any issues. TN and VA I can use without issue for any length of time.

OLEDs I have used extensively and dropped in favour of LCDs includes: LG C2, asus xg27aqdmg, asus pg27aqdp, msi mpg 271qrx