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HiddenX

The Elder Spy
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I can recommend this gaming monitor:

BenQ MOBIUZ EX2510S Gaming Monitor | 24,5 Zoll IPS 165Hz 1ms HDR

The sRPG mode is really good and allows good editing of photos in Photoshop.
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
19,813
Location
Germany
I can recommend this gaming monitor:

BenQ MOBIUZ EX2510S Gaming Monitor | 24,5 Zoll IPS 165Hz 1ms HDR

The sRPG mode is really good and allows good editing of photos in Photoshop.

Is this the monitor you're using?
 
Joined
Nov 15, 2013
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I like big screens nowadays as I no longer play online games that require super-fast response times. Besides, a 4K resolution only makes sense on screens that are at least 32" in my opinion, though I'd personally still prefer 1440p on a 32" screen.
I'm generally not interested in ultrawide resolutions or curved screens.

I've waited a long time for the one screen to rule them all and after a long series of disappointing models and reviews, I have finally settled on the 43" ASUS ROG PG43UQ (the UQ is not to be confused with the inferior 8Q model) back in the first CoVid spring of 2020.

It had almost all of the items from my personal wishlist: 4K resolution, 144Hz refresh rate, certified G-Sync compatibility, 10-bit color and HDR 1000.

I'm very happy with this screen. Gaming feels very cinematic thanks to the sheer size of the thing. Like pretty much all huge displays, it isn't going to win any Speedy Gonzalez awards but it is plenty fast enough for offline games of all genres including fast-paced shooters.

The only disappointment, which probably is not directly related to the screen, is the HDR stuff. I have never been able to achieve good results with HDR. Quite a few games are even unstable (nVidia driver issues) with HDR enabled. The so called "Auto HDR" feature of Windows 11 is a huge disappointment as it does not work with this screen at all. The desktop image quality is still unacceptable with Auto HDR turned on.

I have stopped caring about HDR by now. It is too much hassle and too much fiddling required to get decent image quality and, quite frankly, the quality of the screen is excellent as is, so I'm not even sure why I would "need" HDR anyway. HDR is no longer a wishlist item for me. I won't pay any attention to it when purchasing future screens.

HDR aside, I'm a very happy camper. The image quality is great, 4K at 43" is perfect (no scaling past the default 125% in Windows required), 144Hz is great and G-Sync prevents tearing reliably.
I'm using nVidia's recommended control panel driver settings for G-Sync displays, i.e. V-Sync enabled in control panel (this prevents exceeding 144fps and thus leaving the G-Sync range) and V-Sync disabled in the game while Low Latency Mode = set to Ultra to minimize input lag.

The next big thing I'm looking forward to might be a 43" OLED (LG) or QD-OLED (Samsung) or micro LED screen whenever they become available and affordable (about €1500 max for me).
The only thing that I'd like to see improve over my current screen is response times. An even better image quality would be a nice bonus but I'm very happy as is because it's already awesome and much better than my previous LG 32" 1440p G-Sync display (32GK850G-B).
 
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Joined
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I like big screens nowadays as I no longer play online games that require super-fast response times. Besides, a 4K resolution only makes sense on screens that are at least 32" in my opinion, though I'd personally still prefer 1440p on a 32" screen.
No reason to only get 4K on bigger screens. I use 24" 1920x1080 monitors at work, and a 24" 4K at home on my dedicated gaming machine. The clarity (especially with fonts) on 4K is just so amazing due to the high DPI, that 1920x1080 just looks unbelievably ugly. No way I'd willingly go back. Unfortunately, at the superwide resolutions (see below) you don't have much choice and still have to deal with lower DPI resolutions.

I'm generally not interested in ultrawide resolutions or curved screens.
Have you actually tried the ultrawides? I'd say the ultrawides/superwides/etc are the best thing to happen to monitors recently. On my work machine at home I use a 43" superwide (3840x1200), but the big thing on the high-end right now is the 49" superwides that are 5120x1440. Both sizes are like having dual monitor, but with no gap between - which matters a lot more than you might think. It's really life-changing for productivity. Probably not that helpful for gaming, but for work/productivity purposes I could never go back on this upgrade either.

As far as curved screens, I didn't think I would like them either, but when you have a monitor that's 4-5 feet wide like the 43" and 49" superwides, a bit of curvature is a very good thing, I think it'd be problematic to not have it.
 
Joined
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My monitor and my wife's are both BenQ. I'm very happy with both of them. Mine is a refurbished XL2420Z I got over 6 years ago and I've never had any issues. Her monitor is the "StarCraft II/ RTS Gaming Monitor" I bought over 9 years ago.

They're not a very well known brand in the States but if you live here you can order direct from their US site.
 
Joined
Apr 9, 2013
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PA
Which panel type is generally considered the best for gaming noways? I've been using the same monitor for almost a decade, so I'm a little out of touch when it comes to the the new monitors.

No reason to only get 4K on bigger screens. I use 24" 1920x1080 monitors at work, and a 24" 4K at home on my dedicated gaming machine. The clarity (especially with fonts) on 4K is just so amazing due to the high DPI, that 1920x1080 just looks unbelievably ugly. No way I'd willingly go back. Unfortunately, at the superwide resolutions (see below) you don't have much choice and still have to deal with lower DPI resolutions.
Are you switching to a lower resolution when not in a game? Otherwise, how can you read anything at that res on a 24" screen?

My current monitor is 24" (1920x1200), and I sometimes boost my res to 4K using Nvidia DSR. It looks great in-game, but I have to use my native res for my desktop and web browsing or fonts are impossible to make out.
 
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Joined
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The OS can scale the size of fonts and screen elements so they are the size you're used to, but much more sharply defined. You get a percentage slider. I'd imagine doing DSR downsampling to 4K your desktop will look horrible on a 1920x1200 monitor, because the pixels aren't really there. And then if you used rescaling to get them to the right size, it wouldn't give great result.
 
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Which panel type is generally considered the best for gaming noways? I've been using the same monitor for almost a decade, so I'm a little out of touch when it comes to the the new monitors.
Depends on what you're looking for. TN panels often offer lower latency and higher refresh rates, but everything else on them is bad: color accuracy, contrast, viewing angles etc. I'd avoid TN, and get an IPS or VA for gaming personally.

Are you switching to a lower resolution when not in a game? Otherwise, how can you read anything at that res on a 24" screen?
No, I never switch desktop resolutions, running monitors at non-native resolutions normally makes things look pretty trashy. I've upgraded to a Dell G3223Q (32" 4K 144Hz) since I posted what you replied to, but back when I was using the 24" 4K, I had the Windows scaling setting set to 200%. So, everything ended up being about the same physical size that it would be on a 24" 1080p monitor, yet obviously you still get the benefits of 4K, like fonts that look ridiculously good, potentially better looking images, etc. Modern games always looked perfectly fine on the 24" 4K, nothing was ever insanely tiny etc. Could be that the games pay attention to the Windows scaling setting when deciding how to size their UI. Not entirely sure. Some games have settings to let you manually scale the UI or font size, and and I do tweak that sometimes, but usually not even necessary.

Really old games can be screwy on a high DPI monitor though, for example I believe I had to change my desktop resolution when playing KOTC1 recently. NVIDIA and AMD both offer GPU-based "integer scaling" in their drivers nowadays, which I use for these purposes. What that means is that if you set a 4K monitor to 1920x1080 in Windows, instead of using normal upscaling logic (which will soften/blur things), it just quadruples every pixel. Keeps old pixely games looking nice and sharp like they should.

On the new 32" 4K, I'm only using 150% scaling instead of 200%, and things are still about the same physical size, so moving from the 24" to 32" allowed me to fit a whole lot more stuff on-screen, even though the resolution hasn't changed, which is nice. The key is really the scaling factor, which if you're still using 1080p, is something you probably never had to think about before...
 
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Depends on what you're looking for. TN panels often offer lower latency and higher refresh rates, but everything else on them is bad: color accuracy, contrast, viewing angles etc. I'd avoid TN, and get an IPS or VA for gaming personally.
I found this basic comparison of panel types that says pretty much that. An IPS panel sounds like the right combination for me.

No, I never switch desktop resolutions, running monitors at non-native resolutions normally makes things look pretty trashy. I've upgraded to a Dell G3223Q (32" 4K 144Hz) since I posted what you replied to, but back when I was using the 24" 4K, I had the Windows scaling setting set to 200%. So, everything ended up being about the same physical size that it would be on a 24" 1080p monitor, yet obviously you still get the benefits of 4K, like fonts that look ridiculously good, potentially better looking images, etc. Modern games always looked perfectly fine on the 24" 4K, nothing was ever insanely tiny etc. Could be that the games pay attention to the Windows scaling setting when deciding how to size their UI. Not entirely sure. Some games have settings to let you manually scale the UI or font size, and and I do tweak that sometimes, but usually not even necessary.

Really old games can be screwy on a high DPI monitor though, for example I believe I had to change my desktop resolution when playing KOTC1 recently. NVIDIA and AMD both offer GPU-based "integer scaling" in their drivers nowadays, which I use for these purposes. What that means is that if you set a 4K monitor to 1920x1080 in Windows, instead of using normal upscaling logic (which will soften/blur things), it just quadruples every pixel. Keeps old pixely games looking nice and sharp like they should.
Yeah, any modern game will automatically scale everything. I only tried 4K with my desktop as an experiment because I was curious what it would look like on this monitor. That's why I like Nvidia's DSR feature so much. I can instantly swap to a higher res than what my screen natively supports in-game without changing anything outside of the game.

That integer scaling sounds pretty great. I'll keep that in mind the next time I do any classic gaming.

On the new 32" 4K, I'm only using 150% scaling instead of 200%, and things are still about the same physical size, so moving from the 24" to 32" allowed me to fit a whole lot more stuff on-screen, even though the resolution hasn't changed, which is nice. The key is really the scaling factor, which if you're still using 1080p, is something you probably never had to think about before...
I'd prefer not to use scaling if I don't have to which is why I'm leaning towards going with a 1440P monitor. My desk isn't very large, so I'm sitting kind of close to my screen. A 32" or similar size would be enormous at this range. I'm thinking 1440p at 27" might be a sweet spot, and I'll use DLDSR to boost the res while gaming.
 
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Any thoughts about this?


It's cheap over here at the moment...
As long as you don't mind that it's only 60Hz, it seems like an excellent screen at that price.

Also, it's Freesync compatible but not G-Sync compatible, so I assume you have an AMD GPU?
 
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That integer scaling sounds pretty great. I'll keep that in mind the next time I do any classic gaming.
It's a massive step forward for anyone who's trying to play old games on a high-DPI monitor. People were begging for it for years, NVIDIA finally implemented it like 3 years ago and AMD/Intel quickly followed suit. You don't need a 4K monitor to take advantage of it either, for example if you're on a 1440p, then you could set a fullscreen resolution of 1280x720 and have the integer quadrupling turned on to keep everything nice and sharp.

I'd prefer not to use scaling if I don't have to which is why I'm leaning towards going with a 1440P monitor. My desk isn't very large, so I'm sitting kind of close to my screen. A 32" or similar size would be enormous at this range. I'm thinking 1440p at 27" might be a sweet spot, and I'll use DLDSR to boost the res while gaming.
Out of curiosity, why would you want to avoid scaling? It's nothing like upscaling or downscaling, if that's what you're thinking. It's just a number to let the OS and applications know what physical size they should be targeting for text and other elements. For example, a font rendered on 4K at 200% scaling will look godly compared to a font rendered at 1080 at 100% scaling.

With a 27" 1440p, I think you'd want a bit of scaling too. I'd probably use something like 125% there. With a 32" 1440p, maybe I'd run with no scaling set.

About the sizing... I use a 32" at a desk, I sit around 20-24" away. Once upon a time I thought it would be a problem, which is why I stuck with a 24" for so long, but it's actually fine, it's an upgrade I should have done a long time ago. But I can tell that any larger, on the vertical dimension at least, would be a problem.
 
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IMHO gamers who don't need more than 100 / 120 Hz and have enough space to create distance to the screen should seriously consider buying a good TV instead of a monitor. You can get 55" OLEDs from LG or Panasonic for under 1000€ incl. taxes, if you keep your eyes open.
 
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Out of curiosity, why would you want to avoid scaling? It's nothing like upscaling or downscaling, if that's what you're thinking. It's just a number to let the OS and applications know what physical size they should be targeting for text and other elements. For example, a font rendered on 4K at 200% scaling will look godly compared to a font rendered at 1080 at 100% scaling.
Scaling it up means less room on your desktop though doesn't it? I tend to have a LOT of icons on my desktop, and I like to be able to see them all at once. It's not a dealbreaker though.
 
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