NVIDIA G-Sync Pulsar monitor - Asus ROG Strix XG27AQNGV

[Shrimper]

This monitor is exceptional in ways that are seemingly subtle, but huge in reality. Ive been playing high skill, high motion games, and even with my 500hz oled, i would get overwhelmed and exhausted by too much onscreen. It's not that i couldn't play these games, its just that doing things like keeping things in sights, reading text, being aware of all enemies, knowing what's an explosion, what's someone moving to the left, what's a fire sprite, etc. All of those subtle things we just take for granted i would extend a microscopic amount of effort into tracking. Those 0.01% of efforts stacked up, and suddenly in 20 minutes you're like. Eh, i've had enough of this game.

But it was never a lack of interest. It was essentially you being tired of having to wait for text to settle before you can read it, predicting where an enemy is rather than observing him.

This pulsar monitor allows me to effortlessly track details without extending effort. And it means that you always feel comfortable engaging with content. Also, I really need to point out. This display is significantly less tiring than normal monitors for the eyes. Not just because of the motion, but rather because of the way the rolling scan tech works. Things look visually "Deeper" than a normal ips, and they don't start glaring even after extended use. The entire panel feels incredibly consistent. It's far easier for me to look at than an oled screen for general desktop use. The brightness is bright without feeling like it's creating glare.

Also, with this level of motion clarity you start to notice the strangest things. You can identify artwork of the models, you see specular detail on everything, you can see individual micro text on billboards, sprites and particles are so clear that you just observe them individually like they are assets. Because of the motion things just seem deeper. I can parse so much more detail than a 4k oled at 240hz.

Yes, well put - Pulsar is the first gaming gear in long time that made me seriously reconsider to re-play a few games. The superb motion handling in lower fpses (100-200) just makes games feel just that much more immersive - as much as I hate that word.

HDR support is always a big hit and miss. Good contrast is nice but at least my eyes sort of adapt really fast to the "bad contrast" of ips. Whereas, motion blur, will always be really annoying when it is there.

When everything remains sharp all the time I realized the same thing you did - all sorts of little details start to pop up without you having to "stop to admire" etc. And yeah, not just in high motion fps games but nearly any 1st/3rd person game.

[hammelgammler]

If we just had a variable duty cycle of 10-19% instead, then the clarity upgrade would be so large, that I would likely keep it just for some games. Also the latency increase with Pulsar would be less compared to 120Hz ULMB2 (which can achieve ~0.33 ms MPRT), but I would always just use Pulsar then, even with 120 FPS as a target.

As of now, it’s of course still a great improvement compared to no strobing at all and likely already really great for people that want 500 nits. But if I already loose the OLED benefits for improved clarity, I might as well fully commit and target the best achievable clarity with a minimum of 100 nits.

So if NVIDIA comes out with an extreme clarity Pulsar mode in the next 2 weeks, with of course less brightness, I will keep the monitor. But that’s certainly not gonna happen this quickly, if at all.

I’m still very grateful and happy for all people, that might even don’t want OLED in the first place, that now have such an already great monitor as an option!

[RonsonPL]

And that would be +1 to why I talk about the trap issues with correct assessment of motion clarity's importance

That would've been bad
But no, I didn't see the whitespider999's post before I wrote mine. I'm responding on the go - I read, respond, move to read next post/section.

About seeing frame pacing issues and frame drops on Pulsar and about not being able to do anything about it.

Well, if motion clarity is good, everyone who doesn't have eye problems, will notice a single frame drop even if it's 58 insted of 60 on 60Hz v-synced.

It's not "there are people who see this and people who don't". I've watched a Digital Foundry podcast recently and what John said there made me raise my eye brow. He said From Software has issues with frame pacing in their games cause they just don't see the problem. John mentiond that he knows people who just don't see a problem - suggesting it's kind of individual thing. As if people who demand normal (yes, NORMAL) motion quality, are somehow extremely demanding, genetically predisposed to see such things. Or like audiophiles.
Meanwhile the reality is much simpler: From Software devs simply don't have a display which would show them the difference between normal motion and a f...d one. I meant flawed there, of course.
Simple as that.

Back when GTA IV released, like 100 people jumped on me on a PC tech forum for saying the PC port has serious issues, and micro-stutter. They insulted me, laughed at me, pointed fingers at me for "imagining problems" or "being crazy and too demanding".
They were all on 60Hz LCDs. I was on a CRT.
Just that. Microstutter seemed to be a myth for people gaming on 60Hz LCD. Then a lot of people thought 120Hz monitors are a marketing gimmick, something which is just a thing on paper and nobody needs that.
Then there were console players who argued 30fps is fine and people demanding 60 are idiots or "special type of nerds who launch games to watch the FPS counter instead of focusing on having fun from playing the game".
There are no people saying 120Hz are only for e-sport players anymore. 120Hz monitors are now mainstream and that changed the opinion of the ignorant mob.
With PS5 generation having 30/60 switch in so many games, the amount of people saying "30fps is fine and if you want more, you're stupid" dropped to near zero.
One day in distant future, everyone will be bothered with microstutter and bad framepacing, if 90% of gamers use OLED successor, maybe MicroLED or maybe something else.


So that would be it about you "being that kind of person" - No. You're just normal and you're the type of person who is aware of the existence of something better, which means you don't want to settle for mediocrity or worse.
I'm baffled whenever I see/hear someone apologizing for valuing motin quality and quickly adding "maybe I'm just different" to avoid the pitchforks and torches carried by the angry mob.





And about not being able to do anything about games made with no respect for motion quality (or respect towards gamers, I'd add) - the games which have stutter no matter what you do. - There is a solution. Just don't play those.
Older games are much better than modern trash anyway.

But recently things stopped getting worse. And I might suffer from incurable optimism, but I hope we're seeing the industry heading towards the path of improvement. Or maybe that was just too much of bad PR in past year, with all the Borderlands IV,s Oblivion Remasters and Digital Foundry amplifying the voice of angry gamers. Epic did announce working on ways to mitigate shader compilation stutter. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

[hammelgammler]

Oh wow, just noticed something interesting! Apparently, OLEDs do have a natural 80-90% duty cycle and therefore have even less MPRT than the theoretical number I most read.

IMG_5683.jpeg (381.72 KiB) Viewed 502 times

As you can see, an OLED at 240Hz has an average MPRT of 3.35 ms instead of the theoretical 4.16 ms. I didn’t know that. 60Hz/120Hz is of course still way worse than with strobing, but I guess this explains why OLEDs have better motion clarity than non-strobed IPS, even with similar good enough response times for a given refresh rate.

[whitespider999]

I've also been testing the ULMB mode at duty cycle 10, and if anyone is daring enough to use that mode and willing to sacrifice a bit of colour accuracy (im a colour accuracy nut, so i understand if you aren't). Turn on hdr + rtx hdr + rtx dynamic vibrance, and play with those settings. You're obviously not getting true hdr due to the panel type, but it does help with creating the illusion of a bright image VERY well. Allowing the 10 pulse width to "feel" higher. Yes it's just Ai contrast tricks, but if it works it works right? And it certainly works a lot better for me than using reshade filters.

I was playing pickle pete and brotato, and they both felt very lively and strong with these applied in HDR mode. Whereas normal sdr the entire image felt out of reach in terms of dimness.

And for the record, No. In pulsar mode at max brightness i would never use HDR + rtx hdr + dynamic vibrance. But in this one case it feels very close to bringing back legit visibility.

[whitespider999]

One other thing, I would say a healthy amount of games don't properly scale fps beyond a certain point. (brotato being one example, many unity games do this as well). So while your fps might "read" as 240 or 360. It's not producing that output to the screen. So you'll notice motion blur. Pulsar or ulmb needs clearly paced frames to deliver the clarity.

For unity games, you sometimes need to cap the fps to 50, or 100 (bounty of one, alex kid DX, deep rock galactic survivor) and then use lossless scaling to generate the rest of the way to your desired output using dynamic mode's target fps. In such cases it's far better to cap at 50 rather than 100, since 100 has more pacing variables outside of that 100 cap.

In other cases a game just has weird pacing outside of a specific framerate (often 60, such as brotato, which uses gadot). In these cases you need to use dynamic framegen with lossless to bring it up to your desired fps. These games are not uncommon, about 1 in about 10 games will have a serious pacing quirk. Most of which can be resolved with understanding.

Lossless does contribute some issues to the image, but it does allow far more temporal resolution than if you simply forced the higher framerate presuming that more fps = better quality clarity. That is most certainly not always the case.

[hammelgammler]

Hm interesting, maybe if has to do with the higher resolution (2560x1440 vs 1920x1212), but in Satisfactory at higher panning speeds, the motion clarity of my Sony W900 CRT @60Hz was subjectively better than ULMB2 120Hz 10% PW, but I can’t imagine the W900 has less than ~0.5 ms MPRT.

That’s not something I expected, because at least on lower speeds where I could still track the UFO, ULMB2 120Hz 10% PW was clearly better.

Is there an explanation for this? In both cases, I had a proper FPS sync lock with enough CPU/GPU to spare.

Edit: Okay that’s strange to me. I switched to 60Hz ULMB2 10% PW and now it looks as good, or even better than the CRT. Is it normal to perceive a lower frame rate as sharper in motion? I can only imagine because there are less (sharp) images so each one has more time for the human brain to actually see?

[whitespider999]

Hm interesting, maybe if has to do with the higher resolution (2560x1440 vs 1920x1212), but in Satisfactory at higher panning speeds, the motion clarity of my Sony W900 CRT @60Hz was subjectively better than ULMB2 120Hz 10% PW, but I can’t imagine the W900 has less than ~0.5 ms MPRT.

That’s not something I expected, because at least on lower speeds where I could still track the UFO, ULMB2 120Hz 10% PW was clearly better.

Is there an explanation for this? In both cases, I had a proper FPS sync lock with enough CPU/GPU to spare.

Edit: Okay that’s strange to me. I switched to 60Hz ULMB2 10% PW and now it looks as good, or even better than the CRT. Is it normal to perceive a lower frame rate as sharper in motion? I can only imagine because there are less (sharp) images so each one has more time for the human brain to actually see?

In ulmb mode, 360hz, 10 pulse width. Perfectly stable fps. I notice significantly more double images on fast rotations compared to normal pulsar mode in a variable refresh config. Or even 60hz with all that crazy flickering. Raw variable pulsar mode i can rapidly move around and its "on paper" giving me far less motion clarity compared to ulmb. But in reality, im seeing far less of that doubling.

(to discribe the doubling, you know how you see lots of mouse trails when you move your mouse around? like that except the whole image.

With pulsar mode in full brightness, i notice hardly any of that even with hugely responsive movements. Can't explain why, but what you mention seems to at least in some way line up. It's not as simple as it objectively looking worse than pulsar mode though, there's areas where more still objects on screen look clearer than pulsar. But camera rotations or lots of movement it looks quite a bit worse to me.

Another example, if i scroll down this page using smooth scrolling in ulmb 2. its silky and everything is tracking flawless, but if i grab the window and thrust it around while keeping my eyes on the text it turns into a trailing mess. Less so with pulsar on. Something about high-degree-movements seems to track less well in ulmb. Even in it's highest motion 10 pulse config.

Might be repeatable using UFO at highest speeds.

[Ziehesh]

Who have rtings account,can a give screenshot with input lag on this monitor please ?

[hammelgammler]

Does someone know a trick to have the lowest latency but still no tearing with 120Hz ULMB2?

I tried various forms of scanline sync, but in all cases I can’t seem to get it to work flawlessly, at one point the tear line is back. Also moving the line up/down does not really work as expected, neither with SpecialK nor RTSS. When I move the line 1 up/down, the tool syncs again and the line is at a random spot again.

I saw that fast sync with a (actual Hz - 0.01) limit seemingly has the lowest latency and still no tearing? Interestingly enough, it seems to work in some games, but not with all. Is that normal?

Besides that, low-lag V-Sync does work pretty reliable, but it stutters a bit, which is of course way more obvious with great motion clarity.