NVIDIA G-Sync Pulsar monitor - Asus ROG Strix XG27AQNGV

[shapaco]

Hi everyone,

I’m not sure if it’s appropriate to post this here, since I own the G-Sync Pulsar model from Acer (Predator XB273UF5).

I upgraded from a Lenovo IPS 60/75Hz monitor and chose the Pulsar model after experiencing the excellent motion clarity and responsiveness of an old CRT TV that I connected via a cheap SCART-to-HDMI adapter.

I bought the Pulsar without prior knowledge of how technologies like G-Sync or ULMB work. My first gripe with the Acer Pulsar was the lack of a proper booklet or setup instructions for configuring Pulsar or ULMB correctly. I had to spend hours reading through forum posts until I eventually found this forum, where the details were somewhat explained.

My second issue was that, after setting up Pulsar correctly, the motion clarity effect wasn’t nearly as noticeable as it had been on my CRT TV. However, when disabling Pulsar and making quick mouse flicks in-game, I noticed a slight but distinct annoyance — it feels as if the brain takes longer to process what’s happening on screen when the camera movement is blurrier. The improvement isn’t necessarily something you see, but rather something you feel. I process visual information about my in-game surroundings more quickly, which allows me to react faster. In that sense, Pulsar is a positive upgrade.

How I use the monitor:

I don’t play with a regular mouse but with a gyro controller, which causes more screen shake - better motion clarity helps to mitigate that.

My question:

Does it make sense to return the Pulsar and buy a ULMB2-only monitor with the same specifications, which is hopefully cheaper and offers the option to further narrow the strobe pulse width, potentially increasing motion clarity even more? Would such a monitor also use line strobing?

On the other hand, if a future firmware update were to allow a reduction of the strobe pulse width in ULMB2 mode, I might end up regretting returning the monitor...

[Mdruy1]

I’ve been testing the XG27AQNGV and came away disappointed. Pulsar does reduce perceived blur in certain scenarios, but in real gameplay I see little to no difference between it ON or OFF, especially above ~320 FPS where it often isn’t active anyway due to VRR limits. The core limitation remains the IPS panel itself. Pixel transitions are still relatively slow and inconsistent compared to OLED, which means motion clarity ends up being limited more by response behavior than by sample-and-hold blur.

With V-Sync ON + Reflex Ultra I consistently hit a hard ~320 FPS cap and latency jumps from roughly 4 ms to around 12 ms, along with worse 1% lows and less stable frametimes. That combination feels similar to buffered rendering and defeats the purpose of a 360 Hz panel. Running G-Sync with a manual 357 FPS cap and V-Sync OFF or Fast feels noticeably more responsive and consistent, with no meaningful loss in clarity. Above ~320–350 FPS, Pulsar also stops providing visible benefit and I begin noticing crosstalk and ghosting, likely tied to overdrive tuning and frame pacing limits.

Marketing suggests Pulsar delivers major competitive gains, but in practice it mainly reduces blur. That does not change panel speed, pixel accuracy, or transition consistency. Compared directly, OLED still looks smoother and reacts faster because of near-instant response times and higher contrast, which improves target visibility. In fast shooters, responsiveness and stability matter more than marginal blur reduction.

After a week of testing I returned the monitor and switched to a 540 Hz WOLED. The difference is immediately noticeable. Even at 240 FPS the OLED feels faster and cleaner in motion. IPS still depends heavily on refresh rate, overdrive behavior, and artifact trade-offs, while OLED avoids most of those constraints. For competitive gaming, I see no real advantage from Pulsar over a fast OLED panel.

[Supermodel_Evelynn]

So Pulsar is basically dog shit then? I knew it!!! Chief blur buster was right, this shit is extremely hard to do to enable VRR and Strobing at the same time, this is all sounding like it's just a better version of the shitty versions we currently have from ASUS and Gigabyte.

So this means there is now a greater chance that CRT will make a return seeing as Pulsar LCD and OLED has failed miserably in doing the most basic thing a 20th century device has been able to do for like 80 years now.

I will never forgive humanity for forcing this nasty garbage on us, we had CRT which was perfection and yet we saw the need to get rid of it to replace it with cheap plastic garbage that doesn't work. I blame the failed public education system for this, everyone of these Anti CRT people are highly ignorant of technology and they are very quick to believe in bat shit online conspiracy theories, they are anti vaxers and flat earthers among other things.

No one can convince me that there isn't a demand for CRT today, there has to be a way to pack an electron gun into something lighter.
How did humanity devolve into this stupidity?

I would happily pay $1500 USD for a wide screen CRT monitor that can do 120HZ and 1440P resolution at 27" because CRT doesn't need anything above 120 HZ anyways.Think about it a 60HZ CRT can beat a 1000 HZ OLED.

[Ferdin]

I’ve been testing the XG27AQNGV and came away disappointed. Pulsar does reduce perceived blur in certain scenarios, but in real gameplay I see little to no difference between it ON or OFF, especially above ~320 FPS where it often isn’t active anyway due to VRR limits. The core limitation remains the IPS panel itself. Pixel transitions are still relatively slow and inconsistent compared to OLED, which means motion clarity ends up being limited more by response behavior than by sample-and-hold blur.

With V-Sync ON + Reflex Ultra I consistently hit a hard ~320 FPS cap and latency jumps from roughly 4 ms to around 12 ms, along with worse 1% lows and less stable frametimes. That combination feels similar to buffered rendering and defeats the purpose of a 360 Hz panel. Running G-Sync with a manual 357 FPS cap and V-Sync OFF or Fast feels noticeably more responsive and consistent, with no meaningful loss in clarity. Above ~320–350 FPS, Pulsar also stops providing visible benefit and I begin noticing crosstalk and ghosting, likely tied to overdrive tuning and frame pacing limits.

Marketing suggests Pulsar delivers major competitive gains, but in practice it mainly reduces blur. That does not change panel speed, pixel accuracy, or transition consistency. Compared directly, OLED still looks smoother and reacts faster because of near-instant response times and higher contrast, which improves target visibility. In fast shooters, responsiveness and stability matter more than marginal blur reduction.

After a week of testing I returned the monitor and switched to a 540 Hz WOLED. The difference is immediately noticeable. Even at 240 FPS the OLED feels faster and cleaner in motion. IPS still depends heavily on refresh rate, overdrive behavior, and artifact trade-offs, while OLED avoids most of those constraints. For competitive gaming, I see no real advantage from Pulsar over a fast OLED panel.

Have you tested Pulsar side by side with OLED, both at 90/120hz, in single player titles?

I don't compete or play those kinds of games, and my hardware isn't designed to fire off hundreds of frames per second. Smooth clarity of display is what's most important to me right now.

[Supermodel_Evelynn]

-ignorant crt nostalgia shilling-

CRTs are obsolete since Lightboost (~2012) came to the market. Even more so with the arrival of the Blurbusters Utility for DyAc & PureXP displays.
They're ewaste, just stop.

This is a flat out LIE, disinformation and misinformation the likes of which Putin could only dream of concocting.

Go look at any light boost FULL SCREEN UFO test they stink at top and bottom of the screen only the middle actually looks good, there is a trick you can use known as Quick Frame Transport where you have to manually tune the strobing at 60 HZ by adjusting phase and pulse to use available bandwidth on the display cable to push the cross talk outside of the viewable screen and to do that you need to manually adjust the vertical totals value. Most people have not a clue how to do any of this, and it requires a lot of technical knowledge.

Even after all that drama you still have to deal with the fact that the LCD suffers from nasty matte coating and nasty backlight bleed nasty IPS glow etc. Ontop of that most of these backlight strobing monitors are using a terrible basic on and off flicker as opposed to a rolling scan this makes it very hard on the eyes especially at 60hz the flicker is real.

CRT can display a picture perfect pixel perfect image much like an OLED can, all the while producing an easy on the eyes rolling scan with an MPRT at 60HZ that destroys any OLED at 500 HZ. For OLED to match 60HZ CRT it needs to be 1000 FPS.

And this isn't even counting the fact that nobody is going to be running 1000 FPS on a 1000HZ OLED to begin with unless they have a NASA Computer and their own power plant to run that shit. A 120 HZ CRT at 120 FPS is very realistic to produce native image without shitty AI slop they call frame generation which introduces artifacts and input delay.

Frame generation is such a scam, it literally lowers your base FPS, drastically increase input delay while giving you fake shitty frames.

No sane person with an ounce of basic education in science would ever agree to any of this AI garbage insanity that is being forced on us to give us fake shitty frames and high input delay to reach 1000 FPS over a real modern 120HZ wide screen CRT at 1440P with VRR capability.

An old electron gun is superior to anything we currently have, just imagine what modern technological advancements could have done for electron guns and flyback transformers. The only reason humanity traded CRT for these shitty sample and hold technology is because all of them failed at basic science in school, it has little to do with weight of the CRT, it's a failed public education problem because the general public is easy to trick with marketing.

[hamza_tm]

With V-Sync ON + Reflex Ultra I consistently hit a hard ~320 FPS cap and latency jumps from roughly 4 ms to around 12 ms, along with worse 1% lows and less stable frametimes. That combination feels similar to buffered rendering and defeats the purpose of a 360 Hz panel. Running G-Sync with a manual 357 FPS cap and V-Sync OFF or Fast feels noticeably more responsive and consistent, with no meaningful loss in clarity. Above ~320–350 FPS, Pulsar also stops providing visible benefit and I begin noticing crosstalk and ghosting, likely tied to overdrive tuning and frame pacing limits.

Marketing suggests Pulsar delivers major competitive gains, but in practice it mainly reduces blur. That does not change panel speed, pixel accuracy, or transition consistency. Compared directly, OLED still looks smoother and reacts faster because of near-instant response times and higher contrast, which improves target visibility. In fast shooters, responsiveness and stability matter more than marginal blur reduction.

After a week of testing I returned the monitor and switched to a 540 Hz WOLED. The difference is immediately noticeable. Even at 240 FPS the OLED feels faster and cleaner in motion. IPS still depends heavily on refresh rate, overdrive behavior, and artifact trade-offs, while OLED avoids most of those constraints. For competitive gaming, I see no real advantage from Pulsar over a fast OLED panel.

I mean... you're basically saying blur reduction is not as important as blah blah blah other aspects, to which: yeah if you don't want blur reduction why the hell would you be using a technology specifically designed for blur reduction?

Enjoy the OLED.

I on the other hand value blur reduction more than latency and Pulsar is night and day better than the 240Hz QD OLED I have sitting next to it. My take might change over time, but that's what it is today.

[Supermodel_Evelynn]

You haven't tried a single good backlight strobing implementation and then cry about mediocre ones...
Ignorance is bliss
There are currently +380 / 8k games on the market (2000–2026) which are capable of +500FPS on modern hardware FYI

I owned a XG2431 blur buster 2.0 I even was able to overclock the backlight I have a guide on it right here on this forum just how to do it.

The XG2431 is considered one of the best strobing IPS monitor ever made it is also the only Blur Buster 2.0 approved monitor as well.

It loses big when you enable strobing, it has very low brightness like 100 nits if you want excellent results, unless you overclock LED voltage, you get 120 nits, still low.

The other big issue is the colors turn to shit when you enable strobing,

The absolute biggest issue is the matte coating is horrible it is extremely harsh like those shitty Zowie monitors, it also has IPS glow, absolutely awful in anything dark.

All of the strobing monitors have the same nasty Vaseline smeared shit (Matte coating) applied over the monitor to ruin the image.

CRT has absolutely not a single one of these issues, it is GLASS, so no nasty matte coating. It doesn't even need strobing it simply is naturally perfect at motion clarity, it has no nasty backlight bleed or IPS glow since it operates like an OLED, it also has that GLOW that you really can't reproduce with LCD because it is after all a literal light bulb.

An electron gun is objectively superior to LCD or OLED by any metric. (I don't count brightness since innovation stopped decades ago)

[mcnabb05]

Hows the ulmb2 on it if youre above 360 fps? Is there a use case for that?

[purplemelon1]

The XG2431 is considered one of the best strobing IPS monitor ever made it is also the only Blur Buster 2.0 approved monitor as well.

The monitor is "approved" due to 60hz strobing, nothing else. <100Hz backlight strobing is a useless target in the first place.
The performance is grossly inferior compared to ULMB or DyAc. It's not "one of the best" in the slightest.

Display coatings are a solved topic, get a adequate screen protector.

CRTs are ewaste =) As I've mentioned here: viewtopic.php?p=122286#p122286

That is a pretty harsh opinion. Most legacy content is 60hz and lower. Consoles only have like 100 games that even go above 100hz.

You mention in that ewaste post that you were talking about high performance esports gaming. Can you expand on what your priorities are with pulsar? I'd like to say alot but for the sake of summary. Isn't this kind of agreeing with evelynn here? You wouldn't use ulmb 1 (or __) to play resident evil 9?

I myself am looking forward to re9 pathtraced on a steam frame. Ill mirror it to an oled tv so i can have the best of both worlds

[Chief Blur Buster]

This post is fair and polite

viewtopic.php?p=122286#p122286 (post made by kyube)
- It simply claims CRTs are obsolete.
- This is correct, but they are still delightful non-ewaste obsoleteness.
- It does not bash people who decide to continue to have CRTs
- It respects the boundaries of criticizing CRTs

Criticizing CRTs are fine. Thus, this post is fair and honest.
It does not namecall people who use them + does not namecall CRTs in any derogatory manner.
I do not conflate the "fair" CRT posts with the "violation" CRT posts.

The below posts create a forum violation

CRTs are ewaste =) As I've mentioned here: viewtopic.php?p=122286#p122286

-ignorant crt nostalgia shilling [kyube's edit of Supermodel_Evelynn post]-

CRTs are obsolete since Lightboost (~2012) came to the market. Even more so with the arrival of the Blurbusters Utility for DyAc & PureXP displays.
They're ewaste, just stop.

[Partial quotes only. These are just only the tame-rudeness ones. There were several more even-ruder posts about CRTs were deleted before they were quoted. The worst posts are not going to be re-quoted here]

- This flame bait is as dangerous as calling "FIRE" in a theater
- This flame bait is as dangerous as calling "B**B" on an airplane

1. It's fine to give up your CRT, but you have to respect others who use CRTs
2. There's too many CRT lovers at Blur Busters.
3. They are by loved by Blur Busters & retro enthusiasts
4. I write CRT simulators like www.blurbusters.com/crt
5. Inside the halls of Blur Busters, never bash others who use CRTs.
6. Inside the halls of Blur Busters, never name call users who use CRTs.

Blur Busters was born partially to be inspired to duplicate the best part of CRTs (motion clarity!!!). And CRTs have been kind of the deity of a gold standard to attempt to duplicate in blur busting. They have been kind of the gold standard for almost 100 years in low motion blur, and the introduction of 60Hz flat panels added a lot of motion blur.

While CRTs are obsolete, they are not ewaste, nor you should bash the CRT users. Yes, you can persuade them to switch (and I even do too while respecting CRTs), but you must respect the boundaries. This is not "Red vs Blue" government politics here. We don't allow that shit in these forums.

This Canadian (me) rarely use four letter words, but I'm permitting myself now:
Go elsewhere if you want to polarizing shit. You know, we Canadians are known to be nice people, but you've upset this Canadian (me) when I got multiple PMs/emails complaining about the offensivity of the flamebait.

Since I got hate mail in my box, you made a few users angry at Chief Blur Buster for allowing your post to stand. Is that what you want, kyube?

Any CRT bashers here needs to spend an hour studying https://www.facebook.com/groups/444560212348840 - Once you start respecting the museum/retro hobby mandatorily stopping laughing and stopping rolling eyes before you open your mouth again about CRTs around here after getting detoxed from CRT hate by spending a minimum of an hour doomscrolling those Facebook Group museum posts and finally truly non-fake calmly respecting the museum/retro angle. Even if they are ignorant of gaming monitor progress; the passion is to be respected around here, full stop. You will realize that you just opened a hornet nest Pandora Box on Blur Busters etymology/lore.

Note: CRT-hate posts have been deleted from Blur Busters Forums

For those unfamiliar with Blur Busters Forums rules, please see viewtopic.php?t=183

- No trouble making, no wanton flame baiting, no major controversy that sparks impolite argument/escalation.

While this forum rule is obviously inconsistently enforced because -- well, moderation is woefully imperfect science.
When a specific situation (like this) triggers multiple forum members to send me PMs and emails (which just happened) -- I have no choice but to declare that this rule bullet was definitely violated. An expedited forum-rule-enforcement occurs here is when we suddenly get many complaint letters sent to private emails and PM mailboxes. This is why I enforced this specific forum rule.

Other Blur Busters fans were offended.
So, this was so clearly out-of-line for Blur Busters, given CRTs are sort of a diety of Blur Busters as a "motion clarity benchmark to measure to".

I sometimes do the famous Linus Torvalds attitude on occasion. This is one of those.