escaping AW3423DWF's S&H

[Forrest57]

Hiya!

I love playing fast paced FPS and/or movement shooters, but the sample and hold blur is so strong that I just cannot play medium to long sessions without a huge headache.

I'd love to switch to a 27" 1440p display, possibly without losing too much on picture quality, but that's a plus and a tall ask in and of itself; the main point should be motion clarity.

I was waiting for the EU release for the P275ms pro, hoping that miniLED+DYDS 2.0 would be the call for me, but after lurking for a bit it seems to me that the consensus is "it's not that good".

Another pain point is that I run a full AMD build, so pulsar is out of the equation -- the performance is there to hit 300+ stable FPS in my main games though.

I did also delve into RTSS/SpecialK for minimizing 1% lows and while it does help, S&H seems inescapable with this monitor.

So what now? I was thinking to maybe go for a used PG27AQN for about 400$ or maybe a 27G1S, but to be honest I kind of feel like either I'm asking for too much or what I'm looking for is yet to release -- any suggestion is (and I cannot overstate this) greatly, greatly appreciated.

thanks in advance!

[RealNC]

I see people saying that Pulsar displays support ULMB2 on AMD cards (or anything else, like consoles) if you manage to convince the AMD GPU driver to disable FreeSync on the display. Right now it seems you need to use CRU to do it, by removing the VRR range.

This is because when the display is in VRR mode, it grays out the ULMB2 option and you can't enable it. But AMD provides no way to disable VRR on the display, so you need to use CRU to do it.

[kyube]

Another pain point is that I run a full AMD build, so pulsar is out of the equation -- the performance is there to hit 300+ stable FPS in my main games though.

Pulsar, on FW 1.1.8, isn't for you if you care about eliminating sample & hold for your "main games" within the frame rate range you've mentioned (≥300FPS)
I doubt that you'd like FW 1.1.10 either, but that's still unreleased thus far.

Be aware that PG27AQN has KSF fringing and it's compatibility with AMD GPUs is shoddy (requires a Nvidia GPU to set-up firmware update)
It is quite a good implementation in terms of achievable duty cycle & brightness.

Other than the AQN, the QHD sphere has is limited to:
• Upcoming TCL 25P2A Pro (QD-based, will have worse duty cycle than AQN)
• TCL 27P2A Pro (little is known, should be QD-based MiniLED as well)
• MSI X30MV (QD-based VA)
• Acer XB273UKF (QD-based IPS with VRB, successor to old XB273UGX; no data)
• BenQ XQ2566X (QD-based TN, targets ~30% duty on 360Hz and ~19% duty on 120Hz; mediocre but sadly in-line with what discrete rolling scan does)

If you're fine with KSF-based:
• AOC Q25G4SR (or it's successor coming next year very likely, sadly KSF)
• HP OMEN 27qs (KSF, but Omen has nice duty cycle choices)
• Lenovo 27Q-10 (KSF, but Lenovo offers nice duty cycle choices)

I suggest that you read into my rants found within the Pulsar thread or looking into my backlight strobing implementations post (in my signature) if you care about more concrete models.
I don't expect Titan Army to release their P245MS Pro to the EU... I emailed their customer service and they said they aren't planning on releasing any monitors anytime soon...

[Discorz]

I love playing fast paced FPS and/or movement shooters, but the sample and hold blur is so strong that I just cannot play medium to long sessions without a huge headache.

Can you record some footage of the sample & hold blur you're experiencing? I'd like to know in what type of gaming scenarios do see it the most.

[Forrest57]

I see people saying that Pulsar displays support ULMB2 on AMD cards (or anything else, like consoles) if you manage to convince the AMD GPU driver to disable FreeSync on the display. Right now it seems you need to use CRU to do it, by removing the VRR range.

This is because when the display is in VRR mode, it grays out the ULMB2 option and you can't enable it. But AMD provides no way to disable VRR on the display, so you need to use CRU to do it.

I thought pulsar was a nvidia firmware thing - if that's the case, wouldn't this allow ULMB while keeping pulsar out of the equation, so without VRR+BFI?

I did play around with CRU, but never had a pulsar monitor; but if that's how it is and I can just use fixed refresh+BFI on those, then a bunch of new options show up -- thanks!

[Forrest57]

Another pain point is that I run a full AMD build, so pulsar is out of the equation -- the performance is there to hit 300+ stable FPS in my main games though.

Pulsar, on FW 1.1.8, isn't for you if you care about eliminating sample & hold for your "main games" within the frame rate range you've mentioned (≥300FPS)
I doubt that you'd like FW 1.1.10 either, but that's still unreleased thus far.

Be aware that PG27AQN has KSF fringing and it's compatibility with AMD GPUs is shoddy (requires a Nvidia GPU to set-up firmware update)
It is quite a good implementation in terms of achievable duty cycle & brightness.

Other than the AQN, the QHD sphere has is limited to:
• Upcoming TCL 25P2A Pro (QD-based, will have worse duty cycle than AQN)
• TCL 27P2A Pro (little is known, should be QD-based MiniLED as well)
• MSI X30MV (QD-based VA)
• Acer XB273UKF (QD-based IPS with VRB, successor to old XB273UGX; no data)
• BenQ XQ2566X (QD-based TN, targets ~30% duty on 360Hz and ~19% duty on 120Hz; mediocre but sadly in-line with what discrete rolling scan does)

If you're fine with KSF-based:
• AOC Q25G4SR (or it's successor coming next year very likely, sadly KSF)
• HP OMEN 27qs (KSF, but Omen has nice duty cycle choices)
• Lenovo 27Q-10 (KSF, but Lenovo offers nice duty cycle choices)

I suggest that you read into my rants found within the Pulsar thread or looking into my backlight strobing implementations post (in my signature) if you care about more concrete models.
I don't expect Titan Army to release their P245MS Pro to the EU... I emailed their customer service and they said they aren't planning on releasing any monitors anytime soon...

First of all, thank you very much for the huge amount of info!

I don't think I ever tried KSF based monitors for semi-extended amounts of time, but am usually pretty sensitive to various kinds of artifacts, and do also use the same screen at work every day, so I think the safer bet is to go for non-KSF choices.

I did hear the X30MV around and see it often in your posts, but I can't really find a straight consensus on whether it could actually be a solid choice, but it most likely would offer a better experience than ~2022 160HZ oled panel, so it does look appetizing; what do you think?

also thanks again, I'm sure that posts like mine sound like a broken record after a while

[Forrest57]

I love playing fast paced FPS and/or movement shooters, but the sample and hold blur is so strong that I just cannot play medium to long sessions without a huge headache.

Can you record some footage of the sample & hold blur you're experiencing? I'd like to know in what type of gaming scenarios do see it the most.

It appears in high speed flicks, especially in high contrast/brightness scenarios, with OW2 being the worst offender.
I'm pretty sure it's S&H? I've been in a rabbithole for the past year trying to find out what it was between here, reddit and AI, and that seems to be my conclusion.

What happens is that images appear duplicated or tripled during fast mouse movements, which became most visible when I switched from 70CM/360 to about 35-40.


I did record a clip and went frame to frame on it using VLC to check if I was going crazy, and confirmed it can only be seen during playback (and not seen on my secondary burner philips 241E), so to sanity check again I recorded a 120FPS video of the screen during playback and did the same; it does appear there as well, but camera shutter may be at play here, at this point I don't even know anymore.

testUfo does also show similar results, especially when going over 1440 px/s, but again could very well be shutter speed.

I never uploaded videos, so I hope this works

WhatsApp Video 2026-09-05 at 16.28.31.mp4

(4.08 MiB) Downloaded 1 time

[RealNC]

I thought pulsar was a nvidia firmware thing - if that's the case, wouldn't this allow ULMB while keeping pulsar out of the equation, so without VRR+BFI?

Yes. The problem is that the monitor doesn't allow you to enable ULMB if it's currently in VRR mode. AMD drivers don't allow you to disable VRR mode, so you have to use CRU to do it.

Note that "VRR mode" doesn't mean that VRR is active or not. VRR mode is always active even if it's not currently engaged. It's a different video mode.