Here I am with Philips’ lovely, curvy 40-inch 4K monitor sat in front of me, thinking I was the proverbial shiz because I’ve got the most banging screen in the office, and here come Samsung with a 49-inch mega-wide panel and Asus with a retina-searing 1,000cd/m2 screen. Way to make me feel inadequate, guys…
These new screens are a little way off, so check out our pick of the best gaming monitors around right now.
Yeah, you read that right. 49-inches. TFTCentral claim to have gotten hold of a Samsung monitor roadmap showing three new PC screens to release later this year. That mega-wide panel offers a frankly ridiculous 32:9 aspect ratio with a native resolution of 3840 x 1080.
It’s going to be based on VA panel technology – so good black levels, response times and viewing angles – with a 1800R curvature to it. That’s a relatively tight curve (the Philips I’m using at the moment is a flatter 3000R) which would make sense given the width of the damn thing. It’s also offering an impressive 5000:1 contrast ratio and a 144Hz refresh rate.
I’m sold on pretty much every aspect of this screen except that horrifically crushed vertical resolution. For such a large panel to only have a 1,080 pixel high resolution seems utterly bizarre to me. It may look stunning in-game, but on the desktop it’ll be like using Windows through the letterbox on your front door.
Samsung are though also set to offer a 44-inch panel (apparently designed to replace a twin 24-inch monitor setup) which, though smaller in diagonal scale, delivers a taller native resolution of 3840 x 1200. Like the 49-incher it will be a VA panel with the same 1800R curve but could come in both 144Hz and 60Hz trim.
Both of these mega-wide panels are due to go into mass production in September this year so there are likely to be some rather extreme monitors on sale at Christmas.
Not to be outdone (outshone?) by Samsung Asus have been showing off some sexy new screens at the overly verbose Join the Republic: Outshine the Competition event they held recently in Berlin. Using the quantum dot panel tech we’ve only seen in Samsung monitors so far the curved G-Sync ROG Swift PG27VQ promises a 165Hz refresh rate in a 27-inch 1440p form.
Alongside that will be the ROG Strix XG27VQ. It’s a similarly curved 27-inch screen sporting a 144Hz refresh rate, the same G-Sync tech and a 1080p native resolution. That’s not going to be a quantum dot panel but hopefully should be a more affordable ROG screen.
What won’t be affordable though is the 27-inch ROG Swift PG27UQ which debuted at CES in January. That’s a flat, 4K, 144Hz quantum dot panel which will also support high dynamic range (HDR) gaming through its use of a full-array backlighting setup. By utilising 384 discrete backlighting zones behind the screen the PG27UQ ought to deliver contrast levels you won’t have experienced in a PC monitor before.
The IPS-like AHVA panel is being manufactured by AU Optronics and features a luminance range of 600 to 1000cd/m2. Considering most gaming monitors are between 300 and 400cd/m2 for their peak luminance ratings that’s going to be rather retina searing. You might even get a tan…
AUO are set to begin mass production of the panel in June, so expect to see the Asus ROG PG27UQ sometime in Q3 this year. So, around September time, I reckon. They also say AUO are prepping a 32-inch version of the panel to follow it, but that’s not going to go into production until the end of the year.