I am coming off an at this point 10 year old Asus PG279Q Native G-sync 1440P AHVA-IPS 165Hz panel, which I've always set on Normal OD which seemed to be the most optimal, even though the pixel response tests were slightly less according to tftcentral when it came to 144Hz to 165Hz but I'll take that little extra smoothness in frames with Normal OD set and it has been a good time.
But recently since the 7th of March I've switched the PG279Q out for the new Asus Pulsar model and thus far my experiences have been amazing, I've been keeping an eye on this thread and places like overclockers uk forums as well to win in some information and experiences from the early-adopters because I couldn't get hold of one until two months later (and the other brands here still appear absent)
At first I had the old firmware and noticed some oddities with ghosting trails at lower framerates with the lower limit set to 75Hz and sometimes random bright flashes, probably from big fps fluctuations, I was panning around the camera in Planet Coaster 2 where I noticed this as the only easy reproducible game. But after the new firmware update it appears to have improved, though the aforementioned double-ghosting image trail is very much noticeable in games in the framerate ranges mentioned, I could definitely see it in smooth frog too.
I can still see the Pulsar flicker slightly at 100-120 fps when I look at the blue bright sky with some clouds in a game like Just Cause 2 but what I noticed is that when the lower limit is set at 75Hz the flicker seems more noticeable in these FPS-ranges than where it was set at 90Hz lower limit, not sure why, maybe some pulse width or compensation behavior changes when changing the limit but it was something I noticed, I am very sensitive to this though and not all may see this, the flicker is also really faint.
I was hoping to see the 48Hz lower limit but I can fully understand that it gets too much, I tried the 60Hz ULMB2 mode with the default 24 PWM and wow I am not someone who can handle that kind of black-frame flashing for a very long time, but the picture was definitely clear and for the people who want this perfect motion-blur-less 60Hz content that is perfect. I am okay with it just being G-sync native only below that threshold, the sample & hold behavior is acceptable for me personally there for lower fps motion as I had no issues playing in the 40-70s with G-sync on the PG279Q which then still felt acceptably smooth due to the 'blur' introduced, that was back on a 1080Ti with Ultra settings.
I currently have it setup with some cheap 3 meter passive DP 1.4 cables from amazon with HBR3 specification, HBR3 seems to be a must-have as I tried a 8K 60Hz "DP 1.4a" cable of 3 meters that didn't have HBR3 and it couldn't even drive my PG279Q DP 1.2 monitor beyond 85Hz, the Pulsar monitor is also working perfectly fine with it at 360Hz 10-bits with and without HDR.
The monitor always wakes up in 360Hz with Pulsar enabled for me in 10-bits mode, but I think that is due to the fact I'm running a RTX 5090 with the newer displayheads which should only use a single display pipeline to drive this with DSC enabled, it seems a little unfortunate that the older GPUs struggle a bit more with this negotiation, part of the reason I held of buying a new videocard since the 1080Ti as that was already DP 1.4 equipped.
This also allows me to use DSR/DLDSR on the monitor, even at 8K using a DSR Hex Calculator 'trick' to enforce higher resolutions on my monitor through registry edits the monitor sticks to 360Hz mode with Pulsar enabled and everything. Unfortunately probably out of luck on doing this with RTX-40 or older GPUs. This is just something I sometimes use on older games that lack things like DLSS/DLAA or any other proper form of anti-aliasing and just in general making the picture a bit crisper for distant content as well minimizing the shimmering of 3D models in the far distance in motion.
That being said I am absolutely loving how sharp the image stays during 200-300+ FPS situations, even with 6x MFG in games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Avatar Frontiers of Pandora going beyond 300 FPS it works incredibly well even for that, and hopefully soon with the new firmware 1.1.6 version on lower ranges too, this kind of image motion smoothness is something I hold dearer to me than something like HDR or higher contrasts. Maybe in the future we can see MiniLED displays with Pulsar combining the best of both worlds together as MicroLED/OLED can't support Pulsar due to the self-emitting nature.
HDR also works fine though, while not as spectacular as OLED could provide I am finding myself using it in the games where it is supported, it gives a bit more life-like feel to it in games that are using it properly.
My brightness of Pulsar is set to 350 as I found 500 too bright for general use also due to its whitier whites than the broken white the PG279Q provides, which is set to 75% brightness, while contrast and RGB is all set to 100 on the Pulsar, for G-sync only mode it is configured at 400 as I found that the switch between Pulsar on/off seemed pretty seemless in brightness like that as Pulsar gets brighter than regular G-sync mode. Out of the box it was far too dim on regular mode for my taste, somewhere in the low 200s.
With HDR enabled the display does get a bit hotter, likely due to it pushing more brightness than what I've set normally, but fortunately it has been working very well without any shutdown notices I've seen some users report. I only have to deal with 1 pixel that is stuck on deep-red but otherwise the monitor is mint.
There are however some things I like less about the panel, partially it could be a Mediatek limitation, otherwise it's mostly just general build quality things I like lesser versus the PG279Q
- 1. Can't disable DP/HDMI deep sleep like PG279Q
This means that the display will entirely disconnect from the system and move the open windows to another monitor, that is kind of annoying as when you turn it back on it reconnects it does change the primary monitor but the windows stay on the other monitor. So I had to make window profiles in DisplayFusion so I can just 1-button click everything I have open back into the positions I like.
Another caveat for this could be connecting remotely to the system, as the monitor is not detected it can't be used as a remote display, e.g. for software like Parsec or Steam Remote game streaming over the internet, as my PG279Q and BenQ BL2411PT both have the option to disable Deep Sleep these remain active, it does mean the games I run remotely over steam will be adhering the V-sync limits of that PG279Q.
It will sometimes also confuse games, because some of them will remember the secondary monitor as the primary monitor after being used remotely, so the next boot up the game ends up booting on the wrong monitor. Something I did notice with DOOM The Dark Ages for one, sometimes even with WoW though I don't play that remotely so the Primary monitor number must be shifting around due to this.
- 2. The monitor is not instant-on like the PG279Q, this is probably due to the fact the PG279Q is always 'connected' with the aforementioned, it has a boot up time of atleast 8 seconds or so before display is resumed.
- 3. The build quality overall just seems on a less high level than the PG279Q once was but this is not related to Pulsar itself in any way, just Asus dropping the ball in my opinion and is likely found back on similar Strix models as well.
* The joystick is loose and rattles when touching it with your finger, PG279Q didn't do this, same for the buttons.
* Buttons and joystick are harder to press
* FPS-overlay is permanent black-background, PG279Q had yellow letters without a background, so it blocks more of the view.
* FPS-overlay interferes with OSD-control, it is basically always listening to joystick input to move it around but you can't open the OSD without clicking the Joystick then until you turn the overlay off.
* FPS-overlay position is constantly reset every time the monitor is turned off and back on
* The backside where the cables has an upstanding edge at the bottom, larger cables interfere with this edge leading to bending
* The Power-LED light can be seen from looking from above vertically down the bottom bezel, not possible on the PG279Q
* Access to the VESA mount was more cumbersome and the looks of it after the mount look less clean than the square hole the PG279Q had.
Now I have two G-sync Displays I also noticed that the G-sync toggle counts for both displays at once and not individually, I am not sure about the reasoning behind this but it is generally not an issue.
ManuelG, if you are reading this;
It seems like recent driver versions have broken something for the older PG279Q G-sync panels, because whenever the monitor goes to stand-by mode and wakes up later, it won't resume with G-sync enabled (the indicator turns white) even though the Pulsar monitor remains nicely in G-sync/Pulsar activated mode.
The Nvidia Control Panel will tell you G-sync is active, while one monitor lost access, and it did this also prior the installation of the Pulsar monitor, it is interesting the Pulsar is not showing this behavior. So you need to turn off and back on G-sync to restore G-sync access on the PG279Q.
In certain games G-sync with MFG is not working correctly either, taking DOOM TDA as an example, whenever 2x mode is changed to 3x or 4x mode, the game becomes jittery in motion, especially noticeable when sprinting around the 'Ripatorium' I use for testing. That is with 1440P Path Tracing & DLAA enabled with everything maxed with high framerates. I don't believe that is a hardware capacity problem for the RTX 5090 as Cyberpunk 2077 or Avatar Frontiers of Pandora with similar GPU-load, DLAA and PT do not show this behavior, not even at 6x MFG in fixed mode with Preset B and Preset E.
Once G-sync is completely disabled, that issue disappears, and it does not occur with MFG for every type of game.
With the PG279Q 165Hz monitor I even noticed erratic GPU-utilization issues (it drops randomly) when G-sync was enabled with MFG because it would get stuck around ~327-333 ish FPS instead of pushing for 500 FPS in GTA V Enhanced which also led to visual issues with MFG, usually triggered by alt-tabbing but it does it at random ingame too, but it would not get this issue when G-sync was completely turned off. The game settings did not make any difference nor forcing off V-sync through the drivers.
I have seen someone report a similar issue with Black Ops 7 on the Nvidia Driver Feedback topic before and it appears to happen when MFG was pushing beyond 250+ FPS for these games while the Hz cap of the monitor is lower. It is almost like it is miscalculating something. When I set the monitor to 100Hz mode the ingame FPS would drop to ~228 instead of ~333 which seemed really odd to me meaning something is going wrong with how MFG is functioning at high framerates.
For the Pulsar using RTX Remix games like Portal RTX or Half-Life 2 RTX with 3x MFG and DLAA at 1440P they work completely fine and smooth, but once you turn on 4x MFG the microstuttering starts. I am a bit at a loss to understand why it is doing this but I can only report this and hope the best for it.
Note that my experiences are based on Windows 10 22H2 x64 Pro with ESU.
In any case, thanks for all the updates and information everyone has shared thus far, and thanks to brownvim getting in touch with Nvidia over that ghosting issue (I did as well but by other means) and thanks ManuelG for giving us a heads-up!
This monitor technology has a lot of potential, I know it is not perfect yet and we're still in the early stages despite a long time of R&D due to its complexity, but once perfected I would love to stick to this technology as much as I've wanted to stick to Native G-sync with the extra's Native G-sync provides all this time. I am just happy we're getting closer to eliminating that sample & hold blur as much as possible because it is a joy panning around the camera and things being actually trackable and readable in many games.
And while I thought the PG279Q already had decent smoothness and I did believe that higher Hz had more potential, this 360Hz monitor just blew me away with how much more difference it still gives, even just the input for moving the cursor on the desktop is incredible.
