LG 27GP950 160Hz 4K HDMI 2.1

XoR_

XoR_

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jan 18, 2016
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So at the beginning of this year I found out review of LG 27GN950 and it seemed like almost perfect monitor minus no real HDR (well, it can be eye soaring bright but that looks like all it can do and even this not so much with HDR600 ;) ) and more importantly HDMI 2.1. So I waited for successor LG 27GP950 which due to availability issues I only managed to get it today.

First impressions:
- sRGB works as expected. Colors are pretty much the same as on HP DreamColor LP2480zx. Whitepoint is slightly different but it is probably due to my HP being calibrated 16.5K hours ago and I suspected it to be out of spec by this point.
- HDR works better than expected.
- fastest LCD panel I ever had pleasure experiencing with absolutely no visible RTC errors on "fast" response times at 160Hz.
- "fastest" response time is RTC error-fest
- at 100% brightness (should be 450cd/m2, at least that is what 27gn950 measured on tftcentral) it is surprisingly usable
- ambilight feature works as expected. It is not super bright by any means and LEDs do not switch very fast in actual ambi-light mode. I am not the fan of it and I almost always use ambient light so it is kinda pointless feature for me but if they had to put RGB-LEDs and didn't put them as backlight then I guess making ambient light out of it is the best they could do. I'll probably just use white light mode. Brightness can be changed with the wheel so it can easily be adjusted.
- the DCI-P3 gamut is not as wide as to make any issues with subpixel font rendering noticeable with sRGB emulation so that is good

Now the HDR with 16 zones is pretty much limited by its IPS-eque contrast ratio but surprisingly HDR videos I played do look very nice. The brighter scene the better overall result and outdoors scenes during the day showing sun do look awesome. Space shots like in this video show weakness of such implementation the most. Well, it is gray blacks fest most of the time but when star shows up it doesn't matter because it looks very bright 😎 Generally a lot of ambient light is needed to make blacks less jarring and forget about inky blacks and it should be fine.

What is nice is ability to reduce brightness in HDR mode. It might make HDR actually more usable alternative to using monitor at sRGB or DCI-P3 when game thinks it is running in sRGB (at least some games can be played in wide-gamut and extra color saturation does not look too much out of place) because game will use DCI-P3 but show all colors correctly and extended colors will be used only where colors are that saturated. Maybe not, maybe that is terrible idea... this I will definitely test more once I start doing game tests on PC and PS5.

My previous gaming monitor was Acer XB271HK which was 4K 60Hz but with G-Sync module and what I absolutely hated on this monitor (except it being only 60Hz and then 30Hz via HDMI, sic) was that I got eyestrain from it when turning brightness at anything more than about 100cd/m2. It was 250cd/m2 max monitor and at 100% I my eyes were burning. Here I can run desktop at 450cd/m2 just fine. What is interesting is that all other wide color gamut monitors I am able to run very bright also. RGB-LED HP LP2480zx which I use for years now I can easily run at its maximum brightness (250cd/m2) and the brightest monitor except this LG, the Dell U2410 was 400cd/m2 and it was surprisingly very usable. Yet some screens just have irritating light my eyes cannot stand and most of them have W-LEDs... of course :)

Maybe that is the solution for eyestrain - get monitors designed for very high brightness and then run them at reasonable brightness. Definitely light that monitor creates seems to be main factor.

Now the colors in sRGB mode are very nice and the only issue I see is that in sRGB mode gamma is too low to my liking and my liking is more Rec.709 gamma of 2.4 than sRGB gamma 2.2. For content consumption and especially in dark environment gamma 2.4 should be used. I guess if there was Rec.709 mode then gamma would be how I like. This can be however easily corrected with GPU control panel and this monitor as all good monitors should be able to do can be hardware calibrated including setting arbitrary gamut and gamma on top of white-point. I have not tested this hardware calibration feature but I am afraid my HP branded i1 Display probes will refuse to work. Hopefully not.

Now the last thing to mention is panel speed for gaming. Well, of course the panel is stupendously fast for a LCD. It does 160Hz and has very fast response times and no noticeable input lag. I do not see any RTC artifacts except "fastest" preset but this one is just a gimmick. Maybe it can be useful to make moving enemies more noticeable when camping? Edges of moving objects do become quite noticeable in this mode. It is not even available in sRGB mode so it mostly do not matter.

One thing I tried to immediately test was integer scaling... well with RTX 2070 it might be useful feature, especially for RTX games if I want to keep in monitor VRR range. At 1080p integer scaled to 4K games look very good even if slightly pixelated though nice square pixels themselves look good and they never bothered me. I was forced to use 1080p like that on my previous 4K monitor when playing Cyberpunk with RTX because my GPU didn't quite cut it for DLSS Ultra performance and 1080p just worked better. There is an issue with this idea on this new LG but easily resolvable. Integer scaling option in Nvidia control panel is not available in monitor overclock (160Hz) mode. When switching down to normal 144Hz option is there and monitor can be ran at 1080p with perfectly square pixels. Not such a big issue especially since 1080p would be used when game runs like crap on 2160p so it won't probably hit anywhere close to 144fps on 1080p.

From ergonomic point of view stand of this monitor could be better. For one it doesn't look all that nice and veritcal height regulation is very limited. Stand itself is very plasticky and there is piece of plastic which is supposed to be used for cable management but I would rather not use it because it looks like even looking at it will cause it to break. Otherwise monitor is quite stable so it does its main function. Monitor itself looks good.

Generally not the cheapest monitor ever but for quality that I got I can't complain. Compared to HP LP2480zx it has worse viewing angles but that is no surprise because it is one of rare A-TW monitors. IPS glow is however smaller than my previous Acer monitor. Just enough smaller that I do not see bright patches in the corners from normal viewing distances. And definitely this monitor like I mentioned can be viewed with very high brightness setting which this monitor can also happily do which is one of the things I was most afraid won't be the case when buying it because those kind of issues are not something reviews cover and which was one of the biggest issues of monitor it replaced. With hardware calibration it should be on par with my second monitor (HP LP2480zx) when it comes to ability to have really correct colors while being gaming monitor with 160Hz and no input lag vs 60Hz and 24ms inherent input lag. Even without doing such calibration I am very happy with the image quality.

Main reason why I did not get 27GN950 and waited for GP950 was HDMI 2.1. I did not test it yet with my PS5 but I suppose it should work well. It is not like I can test all HDMI 2.1 features on PS5 just yet. Imho it was worth waiting few months and get more future proofed display. It looks good enough to be usable for next ten to twenty years at least. Not that I will use it for that long but actually it it won't break and I won't sell it there is no reason not to put it to use. That was the main reason for going with HDMI 2.1 display.

Perhaps only complaint is the price... but it was at least not completely ridiculous. I am really happy with the monitor otherwise. It is this rare event in life when you get new display and there is nothing really to complain about. Usually consumer monitors look like made by people who quickly assemble and push product from random parts without even checking how the picture looks on the damn thing... or they do look and make sure there is some breaking flaw ;)
Here quality and features are at level I expect from professional color grading monitor without any FW quirks so far. At least none which I can notice at first glance. BTW. Apparently this monitor has a fan but I do not hear any fan so maybe it goes live at hot summer days when blasting at full HDR for a while. Should not be an issue.

tl;dr
Great colors, eyes not tired from watching it, support next gen consoles, pixels are fast fast!
Do recommend, great display 🤩
 
I bought the 27GN950 earlier this year. Unfortunately my office is very quiet and I could hear the fan running all the time. I exchanged it for another one because so many reviews / user comments said they couldn't hear the fan in theirs at all. The fan on the second unit was the same so I ended up just getting a refund.

I did read they may have reduced the fan speed on the 27GP950 though so maybe it's not quite as bad.

Other than that I agree - good, responsive display. The two units I had were great in terms of white uniformity, backlight bleed, dead pixels.
 
After about two hours of playing with brightness at 50% when I put my ear to the back of the monitor I can barely hear it and I doubt anyone would complain. Maybe they did reduce fan duty cycle in newer model.
I do not have dead pixels.
Uniformity looks good on white screen and less so on black screen. There is spot on bottom left corner with slightly raised black level. I had this issue in previous monitors (somehow always in the same place...) and it did go away (mostly) eventually, also with small massaging so I am not panicking. It isn't at all noticeable in normal use though.

Additional observations:
In sRGB mode I cannot change pixel response speed and with the help of nvidia pendulum demo (in test pattern mode) and setting fps to about 65fps (normally at 144/160fps there are no visible overdrive artifacts) I was able to notice difference between normal and faster and then checked sRGB and it uses "fast" setting. Which is I guess fine because that is setting I would use anyway but this seems like an arbitrary nonsensical limitation to not allow user to set overdrive in this mode. At least they didn't set it "fastest" as this would be an issue because this mode is ridiculous.

FPS counter in the monitor isn't very useful for checking framerates as it was on G-Sync monitor because at lower FPS values GPU sends two or even three frames so something like 50fps will be 100fps on monitor (which is strange because it should cover this framerate in its freesync range but it seems nvidia is doing that because I saw it doubling 60fps to 120fps at seemingly random...). I guess as far as game experience goes this should not be an issue and driving monitor two frames visibly improves overdrive while doesn't seem to affect how well VRR works. I mean looking at test pattern there is slightly visible overdrive artifact at 60fps and at "50fps" (100 on monitor) it is not visible at all. Overall as a diagnostic tool to see if VRR is active this indicator is useful, just not so useful as a replacement for in-game FPS counter as it was on G-Sync monitor because numbers jumping >100 do not mean game runs at >100fps ;)

Lastly since my indicator showed >100 but tricked me that my GPU is powerful enough for 4K I did test how integer scaled 1080p looks on this monitor and I am very happy with result. Sure it is not 2160p but at least proper 1080p and there are no issues with G-Sync. The only limitation seems to be being limited to 144Hz instead overclocked 160Hz which is fine for me. Wide gamut mode looks at first slightly ridiculous but after a while as my expectations for the colors changed having ability to play colorful games with even more vibrant colors is a plus imho :)
 
XoR_ said:
So at the beginning of this year I found out review of LG 27GN950 and it seemed like almost perfect monitor minus no real HDR (well, it can be eye soaring bright but that looks like all it can do and even this not so much with HDR600 ;) ) and more importantly HDMI 2.1. So I waited for successor LG 27GP950 which due to availability issues I only managed to get it today.

First impressions:
- sRGB works as expected. Colors are pretty much the same as on HP DreamColor LP2480zx. Whitepoint is slightly different but it is probably due to my HP being calibrated 16.5K hours ago and I suspected it to be out of spec by this point.
- HDR works better than expected.
- fastest LCD panel I ever had pleasure experiencing with absolutely no visible RTC errors on "fast" response times at 160Hz.
- "fastest" response time is RTC error-fest
- at 100% brightness (should be 450cd/m2, at least that is what 27gn950 measured on tftcentral) it is surprisingly usable
- ambilight feature works as expected. It is not super bright by any means and LEDs do not switch very fast in actual ambi-light mode. I am not the fan of it and I almost always use ambient light so it is kinda pointless feature for me but if they had to put RGB-LEDs and didn't put them as backlight then I guess making ambient light out of it is the best they could do. I'll probably just use white light mode. Brightness can be changed with the wheel so it can easily be adjusted.
- the DCI-P3 gamut is not as wide as to make any issues with subpixel font rendering noticeable with sRGB emulation so that is good

Now the HDR with 16 zones is pretty much limited by its IPS-eque contrast ratio but surprisingly HDR videos I played do look very nice. The brighter scene the better overall result and outdoors scenes during the day showing sun do look awesome. Space shots like in this video show weakness of such implementation the most. Well, it is gray blacks fest most of the time but when star shows up it doesn't matter because it looks very bright 😎 Generally a lot of ambient light is needed to make blacks less jarring and forget about inky blacks and it should be fine.

What is nice is ability to reduce brightness in HDR mode. It might make HDR actually more usable alternative to using monitor at sRGB or DCI-P3 when game thinks it is running in sRGB (at least some games can be played in wide-gamut and extra color saturation does not look too much out of place) because game will use DCI-P3 but show all colors correctly and extended colors will be used only where colors are that saturated. Maybe not, maybe that is terrible idea... this I will definitely test more once I start doing game tests on PC and PS5.

My previous gaming monitor was Acer XB271HK which was 4K 60Hz but with G-Sync module and what I absolutely hated on this monitor (except it being only 60Hz and then 30Hz via HDMI, sic) was that I got eyestrain from it when turning brightness at anything more than about 100cd/m2. It was 250cd/m2 max monitor and at 100% I my eyes were burning. Here I can run desktop at 450cd/m2 just fine. What is interesting is that all other wide color gamut monitors I am able to run very bright also. RGB-LED HP LP2480zx which I use for years now I can easily run at its maximum brightness (250cd/m2) and the brightest monitor except this LG, the Dell U2410 was 400cd/m2 and it was surprisingly very usable. Yet some screens just have irritating light my eyes cannot stand and most of them have W-LEDs... of course :)

Maybe that is the solution for eyestrain - get monitors designed for very high brightness and then run them at reasonable brightness. Definitely light that monitor creates seems to be main factor.

Now the colors in sRGB mode are very nice and the only issue I see is that in sRGB mode gamma is too low to my liking and my liking is more Rec.709 gamma of 2.4 than sRGB gamma 2.2. For content consumption and especially in dark environment gamma 2.4 should be used. I guess if there was Rec.709 mode then gamma would be how I like. This can be however easily corrected with GPU control panel and this monitor as all good monitors should be able to do can be hardware calibrated including setting arbitrary gamut and gamma on top of white-point. I have not tested this hardware calibration feature but I am afraid my HP branded i1 Display probes will refuse to work. Hopefully not.

Now the last thing to mention is panel speed for gaming. Well, of course the panel is stupendously fast for a LCD. It does 160Hz and has very fast response times and no noticeable input lag. I do not see any RTC artifacts except "fastest" preset but this one is just a gimmick. Maybe it can be useful to make moving enemies more noticeable when camping? Edges of moving objects do become quite noticeable in this mode. It is not even available in sRGB mode so it mostly do not matter.

One thing I tried to immediately test was integer scaling... well with RTX 2070 it might be useful feature, especially for RTX games if I want to keep in monitor VRR range. At 1080p integer scaled to 4K games look very good even if slightly pixelated though nice square pixels themselves look good and they never bothered me. I was forced to use 1080p like that on my previous 4K monitor when playing Cyberpunk with RTX because my GPU didn't quite cut it for DLSS Ultra performance and 1080p just worked better. There is an issue with this idea on this new LG but easily resolvable. Integer scaling option in Nvidia control panel is not available in monitor overclock (160Hz) mode. When switching down to normal 144Hz option is there and monitor can be ran at 1080p with perfectly square pixels. Not such a big issue especially since 1080p would be used when game runs like crap on 2160p so it won't probably hit anywhere close to 144fps on 1080p.

From ergonomic point of view stand of this monitor could be better. For one it doesn't look all that nice and veritcal height regulation is very limited. Stand itself is very plasticky and there is piece of plastic which is supposed to be used for cable management but I would rather not use it because it looks like even looking at it will cause it to break. Otherwise monitor is quite stable so it does its main function. Monitor itself looks good.

Generally not the cheapest monitor ever but for quality that I got I can't complain. Compared to HP LP2480zx it has worse viewing angles but that is no surprise because it is one of rare A-TW monitors. IPS glow is however smaller than my previous Acer monitor. Just enough smaller that I do not see bright patches in the corners from normal viewing distances. And definitely this monitor like I mentioned can be viewed with very high brightness setting which this monitor can also happily do which is one of the things I was most afraid won't be the case when buying it because those kind of issues are not something reviews cover and which was one of the biggest issues of monitor it replaced. With hardware calibration it should be on par with my second monitor (HP LP2480zx) when it comes to ability to have really correct colors while being gaming monitor with 160Hz and no input lag vs 60Hz and 24ms inherent input lag. Even without doing such calibration I am very happy with the image quality.

Main reason why I did not get 27GN950 and waited for GP950 was HDMI 2.1. I did not test it yet with my PS5 but I suppose it should work well. It is not like I can test all HDMI 2.1 features on PS5 just yet. Imho it was worth waiting few months and get more future proofed display. It looks good enough to be usable for next ten to twenty years at least. Not that I will use it for that long but actually it it won't break and I won't sell it there is no reason not to put it to use. That was the main reason for going with HDMI 2.1 display.

Perhaps only complaint is the price... but it was at least not completely ridiculous. I am really happy with the monitor otherwise. It is this rare event in life when you get new display and there is nothing really to complain about. Usually consumer monitors look like made by people who quickly assemble and push product from random parts without even checking how the picture looks on the damn thing... or they do look and make sure there is some breaking flaw ;)
Here quality and features are at level I expect from professional color grading monitor without any FW quirks so far. At least none which I can notice at first glance. BTW. Apparently this monitor has a fan but I do not hear any fan so maybe it goes live at hot summer days when blasting at full HDR for a while. Should not be an issue.

tl;dr
Great colors, eyes not tired from watching it, support next gen consoles, pixels are fast fast!
Do recommend, great display 🤩
Click to expand...

I bought the 27gp850b which is a different model than yours, but in the same family.

I am having the hardest time getting the color set right. It just looks, off. Especially annoying is some games that I play, certain reflective surfaces are just plain disgusting, and I just can't get a good baseline for it. To make matters worse, I can't seem to use the same method for calibrating the monitor that I'm used to, because it has a wide color gamut and the windows color management tool (I forget the name) gives a warning about it not being correct for monitors with wide color gamuts.

Can you tell me what settings you use? I did install the LG drivers, so in windows display settings the color profile is selected as LG Ultragear. Any help here would be appreciated.

PS: I'm using an nvidia graphics card. Any color settings in windows, on the monitor, and in nvidia that you can recommend would be greatly appreciated.
 
As far as I am concerned and you should be also: this is sRGB monitor when you are in sRGB mode.
Colors in Windows desktop will look correct only in this mode or in HDR though here you would need to increase SDR/HDR balance to 100% and reduce brightness in monitor OSD if it allows you do so like mine does. It is almost the same as SDR sRGB mode but not quite. I'd say passable not to have to disable HDR in the break from game and watch everything over-saturated but best to disable HDR for SDR stuff.

Because you installed drivers please also make sure you have no profile loaded. When installing drivers it might happen that profile gets installed and set for your display as well and you do not want to CMS (Color Management System) aware programs to correct from ~DCI-P3 to sRGB when you are using sRGB mode. You can use sRGB profile for sRGB mode or better yet remove all profiles for this display and I always make sure to remove any profiles (not necessary since I do not load drivers though) because all my wide-gamut monitors are in sRGB/Rec.709 and I do not want any color correction and I treat them as sRGB/Rec.709 displays and never had any issues with that approach. There is no wide-gamut until you enable mode that has wider gamut.

Other differences might be due to gamma being too low or too high. RTINGS review show measured gamma of 2.09 which is definitely too low. Gamma can be changed in Nvidia control panel. To get gamma 2.4 set gamma slider to 0.87 or 0.9 for 2.3. I would not recommend using gamma 2.2 (slider at 0.95) because 2.2 is not recommended for actual content consumption. This 2.2 myth is caused by misunderstanding of standards. Consumers, especially in dark room should use gamma 2.4 as specified in Rec.709 standard which is intended for content consumption. Meaning all videos should be mastered for this standard... using sRGB gamma which is really intended for content creation and takes in to account that people almost always over-correct images on production stage. So for anyone eg. creating YT video I would recommend 2.2 but for anyone viewing it I would recommend gamma 2.4. It is strange I know but world is weird when you take human perception in to account :p

Of course gamma is not only simple value but whole shape. To get best result one would really need calibration probe (eg. i1 Display Pro) and do proper calibration. For that however to get most of the calibration in games and to avoid Windows CMS headaches (which are severe :p) it is best to get monitor with hardware calibration in the first place, like the LG model I got. Frankly this thing having hardware calibration was the only reason I spent so much money on it as it my eyes this elevated this product to "pro" category.

-------------------------------
BTW. Further observations
I noticed, especially on some content, like my mainbox for some reason, that image brightness shifts in small but noticeable steps, at times in larger steps. For a while I was sad and angry because I used newest FW and found out people had similar issue on 27GN950 without resolution. I even started writing to LG support and started thinking about hassles in returning the monitor. It was however fortunately just a matter of disabling "SMART ENERGY SAVING" option in OSD. I do not know what is smart in irritating user by changing brightness for no reason. I would understand if brightness was dependent on ambient light in the room or something... anyway, just a thing to check and away disable because it is irritating as hell once it is noticed.

Another thing I checked was how well HDR works on this monitor at low brightness levels.
So the monitor having no FALD backlight makes true HDR a pipe dream but since I can reduce brightness in HDR mode I checked what is the difference between SDR and HDR in two games: Cyberpunk 2077 and Doom Ethernal at the same brightness level. Surprisingly results are very good. Cybepunk shows the same colors for everything except vibrant stuff and this vibrant stuff is more vibrant. There is slightly more toned down bloom from bright objects like sun (which was way too bloomy imho anyways) and no automatic exposure correction (coming from bright place to dark corner doesn't make it look brighter making it slightly darker in HDR than in sRGB) but overall both bright places and dark places looked very good, even nicer than in SDR mode. Doom saw even less differences and mostly blood was more red 🤩

I will of course test more games but so far it seems it is actually what I wanted to achieve: have color managed DCI-P3 gamut in games and otherwise do not require to blast my eyes off. It would probably be cool to be able to have sun so bright to make me go blind if I did sun gazing in game but super high brightness was never my goal and just having games take advantage of wide color gamut was. In this sense HDR is usable on such monitors just fine even if at least mostly advertised feature of HDR is really not.

I played some games, mostly at 1080p integer scaled because I cannot afford RTX 3090 and so far I am very happy from gaming performance.
Next to test is Playstation 5 and HDR there.
 
Additional findings, this time with help of forbidden monitor magic:
- it is actually possible to change whitepoint in sRGB mode
- no luck changing overdrive/gamma setting in sRGB

I made sRGB mode whitepoint to look be pretty much like I had it calibrated on HP LP2480zx and did so by making it a tiny bit colder looking.Very small difference but still jarring when having two displays next to each-other. I could just calibrate HP to the same whitepoint as LG but going it the other way works for me even better.

Using the same trickery I tried to control overdrive and gamma in sRGB but it did not work.
 
This monitor looks really good and unique in this shitty monitor market. I'm trying to buy this since the beginning of july. Amazon shows it's in stock but doesn't ship it if i buy it and goes out of stock. It's 27GN950 btw, i don't need hdmi 2.1. Hardware calibration feature is so cool. I bet my colormunki display doesn't gonna work though. Wish it was 32 inch, that's the only downside of this monitor imo. HDR looks actually good with very good gamut and around 750 nit brightness. 16 dimming zones should help in most situations. I'm still waiting for the stock.



AW2721D became available yesterday. I started to think about that one. These two monitors are almost identical but 27GN950 have 4k and hardware calibration, AW2721D have 240hz and gsync ultimate chip with 32 dimming zones(really good build too). At 27 inch size 1440p is actually enough. 240hz is a good plus. Gsync ultimate chip should improve the monitor a lot. So far my experience is that every native gsync monitor are properly calibrated and carefully designed, thought out premium products. Accurate and well behaved HDR and gsync sounds good.

Don't know what to do. 4k 144hz 32 inch monitors are coming but veeeery slow and they are overpriced as hell.
 
I spotted tftcentral review of 27gn950 at the beginning of the year and I immediately knew I need to get one.
LG makes good panels, they know their way around colors and I mean it in the quantum sense ;)
Just not without HDMI 2.1 for full price so I waited for GP model to come out or get very good bargain for GN950.

Alienware also has LG panel with similar specs.
For gaming it should be better. If you intend to stick with Nvidia that is ;)

My reasoning for getting 4K screen is that FullHD integer scaled on such screen will look good enough. Like the Overload game I play now runs 50fps at 4K on RTX 2070, would run fine on 1440p but at 1080p it literally flies :)
It is "just" 144Hz at that mode, not even 160Hz. Not that at some point these things matter anyway.
 
XoR_ said:
My reasoning for getting 4K screen is that FullHD integer scaled on such screen will look good enough. Like the Overload game I play now runs 50fps at 4K on RTX 2070, would run fine on 1440p but at 1080p it literally flies :)
It is "just" 144Hz at that mode, not even 160Hz. Not that at some point these things matter anyway.
Click to expand...
XoR_ said:
I played some games, mostly at 1080p integer scaled because I cannot afford RTX 3090 and so far I am very happy from gaming performance.
Click to expand...

Happy from gaming performance but what about image quality ? This is something i have been thinking about. I currently integer scale some games on my old hardware and it gives decent results (although my CPU is weak and so the lower res puts more strain on it). Im running 1440p on a 31.5" screen so the PPI isn't exactly great to begin with ( it's fairly 'soft' and needs sharpness turned up a decent % ) running this at 720p-integer gives a very pixelated look, but even so at such a low res and running on such a low PPI screen it's 'passable' on certain games simpler looking 3D games.

The decision to move to 4k 31.5 and not down to 27" 1440p really hinges on it's ability to run 1440p/1080p non natively and not look like smeared ass. I have tried to find some pictures online and even videos comparing the perceived look of 4k down to 1080p on a 4k display, but i have not found any. Would it be possible for you to take some shots at about 40 - 70cm of your screen running 1080p integer scaling on your 4k monitor just so i can get a feel of how it looks. I have a suspicion that it will do me fine, but id like to make sure.

( complex 3D games running of course not 2D games, maybe some text )
 
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Cirkustanz said:
I am sorry if this comes across as being a jerk, but I'm not sure why comments about the N series monitors are being placed on this thread which is a P series. N = 2020 models, P = 2021.
Click to expand...
I do not think that matters because 2020 model should be roughly the same, just without HDMI 2.1
At least that is my understanding. Maybe there are some differences but I would suspect they are at most limited to firmware quirks.

@GNUse_the_force
24" 1080p is 81.59 PPI whareas 1440p on 31.5" is 93.24" so I have slightly larger pixels. They are quite visible but if that is an issue depends on game. For example Doom Eternal blurs image with RT and with DLLS it looks even more blurry in motion. Otherwise game look ok at 1080p. I do not need however to use 1080p in this game, fortunately. Game I did play in 1080p on 4K was Cyberpunk, and this was with DLSS Performance and it looks ok. The same pretty much as on CRT at 1080p, just certain details of DLSS and pixels in general are more visible. I'd rather use 4K with Ultra Performance DLSS but it is slower enough to make game less playable. On the new monitor I play Overload (Descent clone) in 1080p because at 4K game runs at 50fps and at 1080p it runs at as much as I would want it to run and slightly less sharp presentation is actually an advantage ;)

1080p on 31.5" would be 69.93" so much larger. I do not think that if you want sharp image that would fly.

As you can notice, or not, the integer scaling looks more like MS-DOS era gaming than having native display of given resolution so it is its own unique non-unique look. I personally like it. It is good last ditch solution to get performance up to speed or when game refuses to work at 4K. More useful for 2160p screens than 1440p however because I would not want to drop down to 720p necessarily. Integer scaling would be even better on 8K screen because you could play at 4K, 1440p, 1080p, 720p... maybe some day ;)

One solution I like to use to get higher performance (or in cases where 4K just refuses to start due to memory amount limitations) is creating custom wider resolution that have less pixels vertically so for 4K something like 3840x1800 which would be much wider. It should work even better on larger screen so you can try eg. 2560x1080 and see how that looks. Some people do not like black bars so it might not be good for you but I was never bothered by them personally. Heck, back when I used 980Ti I had to run all newer games like that to get to playable framerates (45-55s :p) and it wasn't bad at all.

----------------------------
BTW. I tested PS5, so far only 60fps stuff, HDR on and off. VRR is currently not supported, besides I didn't see any frame drops in games I tested.
  • Given I do not have speakers here I used this opportunity to test headphone output and very surprisingly the output is pretty good. Much better than PS5 gamepad. I didn't really expect much from some audio output from monitor. There are few options for this output, default setting is pretty bassy but perhaps in usable way. I will later do RMAA of this output as I intend to connect it to amplifier.
  • The same settings are carried for different modes as on DP including slight whitepoint correction I made for sRGB mode.
  • 60Hz mode works better in overdrive 'normal' than 'fast' because of slight overdrive artifacting. Nothing deal breaking though..
  • 120Hz mode with 60fps in game works and here there is no overdrive artifacting at 'fast' overdrive. Motion clarity is better overall but not massively and mostly because pixel response times are better on scanning image twice and frame drops would be less noticeable (though I didn't see any and this should be taken care of by VRR anyways)
  • HDR after calibration in new Ratchet&Clank and Astro Playroom looks really good. Obviously black levels (I tested it with brightness at 100%) could be better but on this panel black level doesn't disturb be at all so overall I find very usable. Those were bright games/scenes and maybe darker games will look better in SDR. More testing is definitely needed.
  • In HDR mode there is overdrive setting so it can be set to 'normal' in 60Hz games
  • I did not test playing non-HDR games in HDR yet or 1080p games (from what I know 1080p games output 1080p to TV so monitor scaler is used)
Unfortunately I could not test VRR because SONY is not very fast to implement such radical features. Also games need to specifically support 120Hz otherwise they run at 60Hz. 'Fast' overdrive setting locked for sRGB is less than optimal for 60Hz imho but that would be my only complaint really and it is not even something which is immediately noticeable and I can see how many people would prefer it anyway because it makes motions slightly sharper.

Overall general experience is very good. I will still use plasma for PS5 because it is also great display and most of all much bigger. More demanding games do rather obvious upscaling so the super crisp effect that 4K resolution enables is not really there while on 1080p plasma it all looks always perfect. One game, Immortals Fenyx Rising have even this nasty sharpening mask at 4K so playing game at 1080p is an advantage imho ;)
 
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