NDUS wrote: ↑14 Apr 2026, 18:42
For the past ten years or more, I've been saying to myself: I can't wait for the next year or two, when OLEDs finally become superior to all the other options. But it hasn't materialized and it seems like it never will.
But they already are superior to all other options?
Even more so with the arrival of the
ASUS PG27UCWM, which will finally solve the biggest issue we've had the past 4 years of OLED monitors, the subpixel layout.
The issue is that most people forget that, in principle, S&H simply requires FPS>Hz, which falls apart in the vast majority of games and/or workloads that people do every day.
In fact, only ~390 / +10k games I went through by hand are playable at +500FPS natively...
NDUS wrote: ↑14 Apr 2026, 18:42
In terms of their biggest deficiencies (burn-in, color drift) they are a little better than they used to be, but it's still a big factor for anyone using an OLED as a daily main monitor.
Burn-in is a over-exaggerated complaint.
NDUS wrote: ↑14 Apr 2026, 18:42
But in terms of what used to be marketed as their biggest upside (refresh rate, motion clarity)
they are still inferior to strobed TN panels.
As anyone who's seem both side-by-side, or looked at motiontracked comparisons online can tell you, strobed TN still beats OLED badly.
See, this is the 'problem' with the thread.
You've cherrypicked a single characteristic of
dynamic image quality, which is
eye-tracked motion performance and come to the conclusion that OLED is disappointing.
See:
S&H was never meant to compete with impulsed displays at these, relatively speaking, low refresh rates.
With "low refresh rates", I mean anything 4000 FPS @ <4000 Hz.
Another thing which isn't mentioned in your write-up is the eye-strain concern of strobed solutions, which isn't a miniscule thing in the slightest.
NDUS wrote: ↑14 Apr 2026, 18:42
And OLEDs cannot strobe at refresh rates remotely close to what TN is capable of.
OLEDs don't strobe. They don't have a backlight, they insert a black frame.
Brightness is the limitation at hand here. Which means pushing voltage through the OLED driving and/or switching circuitry is going to introduce some form of issues.
I do think it's a artificial limitation though, as seen with the LG C1 & a few other OLED displays, which were able to use achieve a effective refresh rate which is noticably above their actual refresh rate (aka ~2,7778ms 'on' period @ 120Hz)
NDUS wrote: ↑14 Apr 2026, 18:42
How can this be? Nothing prevents OLED panels from running at arbitrarily high refresh rates except the manufacturer's willingness to write faster / more optimized firmware and implement it on sufficiently strong controller chips.
In terms of the physical hardware, OLED
should be able to do any refresh rate (just like how LEDs can effortlessly run at a duty cycle of 40,000hz.)
OLEDs will have the same visual artifact (ghosting) as LCDs have right now once we go past 2000 Hz.
The biggest limitation is the workloads (games) which can fully take advantage of such (relatively large) refresh rate numbers.
It's why I understand why people complain of not having good BFI on OLED, which would make it the "king of display solutions" due to not having the G2G RT limitation of LCD, having proper contrast ratio.
It would render any other strobed/impulsed solution on the market irrelevant.
A reminder that CRTs can get 0,1 ms – 0,5ms strobe 'on' period, which means that its clear on the TestUFO ghosting test above 3840 px/s
Current OLEDs are far below that.
NDUS wrote: ↑14 Apr 2026, 18:42
So why don't we
at least have OLEDs which have strobe + refresh at frequency parity with TNs?
Are OLED manufacturers fundamentally incompetent or lazy in some way that TN manufacturers are not, and so they are unable or unwilling to produce high-refresh-rate display controllers?
Is this because OLED has historically been a luxury home theater product, where product engineering quality is not emphasized as much as marketing? I'd be interested to hear anyone's thoughts.
Cost-cutting is likely one of the biggest factors, a actual good product would likely cost much more and thus not generate a large enough revenue to make it profitable for manifacturers.
Gaming monitors are already a niche thing, with <50k sales AFAIK.
Chief Blur Buster wrote: ↑15 Apr 2026, 02:41
720Hz OLED strobed at 1 visible frame vs many black frames = 1/720sec MPRT = 1.4ms = fairly competitive to most strobe backlights, albiet very dark. While a lot of strobe backlights can go briefer than that, a lot are roughly in that territory, so we're already getting there.
...except that the 27" HD@720Hz mode on the model you're referring to (PG27AQWP) has bilinear scaling applied, completely rendering it useless from a static image quality perspective.
The best MPRT / 'on' period we have is QHD@500–540 Hz, which is around 2ms – ~1,852 ms
The "CRT beam simulator" also isn't a viable solution due to it being software based (computational overhead) & being finnicky with other parts of the Windows stack (MPOs, DSC, erratic frametimes of games introducing worse flicker etc.)
LCD is sadly the sole leader in terms of pushing the impulsed display market... and only select implementations (<10) are close to CRTs.
NDUS wrote: ↑14 Apr 2026, 18:42
But that's only true at lower refresh rates like 60hz, which is cool for retro gaming I guess, but
1) probably still inferior to CRTs for that, and
Yep, grossly inferior, especially since most digital objects move at speeds much faster than 480px/s
NDUS wrote: ↑14 Apr 2026, 18:42
2) hugely inferior to strobed 540hz TNs for high framerate games.
When comparing 540Hz TN w/ strobing & 540Hz WOLED in purely a eye-tracked motion performance perspective, yes.
The TN's usually reach "effective +2000Hz refresh rate", which would require 2K FPS @ 2KHz for OLED to match (and beat easily due to great G2G RT and no artifacts such as crosstalk and/or overshoot)
NDUS wrote: ↑14 Apr 2026, 18:42
This should be embarrassing to OLED companies when a huge chunk of performance is basically being left on the table, only gated behind firmware / controller design effort.
It's also a sort of performance which would be immutable: OLEDs inevitably lose their color accuracy, but they never lose their refresh rate.
I'm very certain that it isn't solely a firmware / controller design effort limitation.
There's also a material science / engineering design limitation at play here, but I cannot claim any absolutes.
NDUS wrote: ↑14 Apr 2026, 18:42
I just find it insanely disappointing that OLED manufacturers have been fiddling with their thumbs for ten years when, if they put in effort, and didn't want to sell incremental upgrades, we could've had a 1000hz strobing OLED ten years ago, let alone today. It's not like it's so inconceivable to make a 2000hz display controller, the energy dissipation permitted in a monitor allows a lot of computation. Nvidia has been selling monitors with a coprocessor that drinks an extra 20 watts of energy for a long time and it works fine.
+500FPS gaming and strobing are niches within a niche (gaming monitors).
+240Hz OLED monitors are only 4 years old now.
What you're actually searching for is a BFI implementation which exceeds the native refresh rate by large enough margin (which Nvidia calls "effective refresh rate") to encapsulate your specific use-case (fast-paced games of X max speed)
I doubt we'll ever get that with OLED or MicroLED.
