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Asus ROG Swift OLED PG27AQDP Review – IGN

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2 months ago

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Asus ROG Swift OLED PG27AQDP Review – IGN

The OLED gaming monitor market has exploded this year with multiple releases seeming to take the flagship throne before quickly being replaced to repeat the cycle again. If you have deep pockets, it’s a tremendous time to be in the market for one of the best gaming monitors. The Asus ROG Swift PG27AQDP is the latest to hit the PC gaming scene and it’s a stunner. With a 1440p resolution, cutting-edge WOLED panel, 480Hz refresh rate, and a suite of features that can actually improve your gameplay, it’s an outstanding choice for any gamer but strikes a special chord for competitive players and esports aspirants.

Asus ROG Swift PG27AQDP – Design and Features

The Asus ROG Swift PG27AQDP is a premium gaming monitor that comes with a design and feature set to match its $999 price tag. Its 26.5-inch WOLED screen is big and bright and features a crisp 1440p (2560 x 1440) resolution. Its crowning achievement, something that Asus claims is a world first, is that it runs at a native 480Hz, all while delivering 10-bit color and impactful HDR.

This has caused quite a stir among the competitive gaming community, and rightfully so. OLED is already extremely fast, virtually eradicating motion blur. Dialing up the refresh rate decreases input latency, the time between clicking your mouse and seeing your weapon fire on screen. For competitive esports, like Valorant and Counter Strike 2, it offers an improvement you can actually feel.

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Simply put, more clarity and faster response means that you have a better chance of landing an accurate shot and beating out the enemy player. And no matter what you’re playing, everything looks incredibly smooth.

We’ve seen gaming monitors this fast in the past, even from Asus. The fastest gaming monitors can reach up to 500Hz. There’s even another Asus monitor, the ROG Swift PG32UCDP, that can reach 480Hz though in a special mode. But until now, such a quick refresh rate hasn’t been possible with an OLED monitor without major trade-offs. The Alienware AW2524H is small and 1080p, while the PG32UCDP runs at 4K, but if you turn on 480Hz, it drops to 1080p, which kills image quality.

By contrast, the PG27AQDP lands perfectly in the middle. It can run at 480Hz natively, without sacrificing features or using any special mode. It’s not 4K – 1440p is easier to run and is a better fit for mid-range graphics cards. Its 27-inch size is pitch perfect for this resolution, providing ample screen real estable and exceptional crispness. Add its screen to the mix, which is rated for up to 1,300 nits of brightness, 99% of the DCI-P3 color space, and accuracy at Delta

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The build quality is top-notch, which is par for the course with Asus’s OLED releases this year. It comes with a heavy three-legged stand with lots of adjustability. It offers 4.3 inches of height adjustment, +20° to -5° of tilt, 30° of angle adjustment on its base, and can be rotated into portrait orientation for use as a secondary monitor or various forms of creative and professional work. There’s the usual red light that projects the ROG logo down onto your desk (you can create your own using a blank disc) and the illuminated “Swift” logo on the back. If you’re a content creator, you’ll also appreciate the standard camera thread on the top that allows you to easily mount a camera, light, or microphone without extra hardware. It also has a cable management channel to keep your desk looking tidy.

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The display uses a very thin frame, with a sizable box in the center of its back that houses its motherboard and assorted circuitry. Given that thinness, you’ll need to take care if you need to adjust it and always pick it up by its base to avoid damaging its sensitive panel. To the side of the circuitry housing, a bright ROG logo illuminates with cycling RGB. At first, I thought it was the same as most of the other Swifts I’ve tested, but the rear frame is actually made of semi-translucent frosted plastic that’s at once nostalgic and futuristic. It’s not something I’ve seen on a monitor since the iMac in the late 90s and its uniqueness makes it all the more appealing.

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On the bottom of its electronics section is the connectivity panel. There are two HDMI 2.1 jacks, one DisplayPort 1.4 with Display Stream Compression, a headphone jack (there are no built-in speakers), and a USB hub with two USB 3.2 Type-A ports and a Type-B which connects to your computer. There is no Type-C input, which is surprising for a monitor at this price, and the USB ports don’t feature the SmartKVM technology found on the PG32UCDP. Since this display is more affordable, I don’t really mind, but it would have been nice to see USB-C connectivity.

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If you’re concerned about the longevity of its panel (i.e. burn-in), you’ll be pleased to know that the PG27AQDP features more protective features and design elements than any monitor I’ve tested thus far. Within its electronics panel, it uses a custom heatsink to efficiently draw heat away from the panel to extend its life and reduce the chance of burn-in. The monitor also uses a dedicated white LED within its pixel structure, so the red, green, and blue LEDs don’t need to shine at once to create whites, reducing power draw and burn-in.

Within the OSD, you’ll find a wide range of OLED Care+ protective features. Staple features like pixel shifting and pixel cleaning cycles are present, but Asus has stepped it up further than any of its releases so far this generation. You’ll now find Taskbar Detection, which dims the part of the screen where your taskbar is positioned. Logo detection and dimming is also an option if you’re playing a game with a static element, like a character frame. Outer dimming drops the brightness around the edges of the screen, while global dimming seems to analyze what’s on the screen and adjust the brightness of the whole display.

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You can also enable Target Mode, which is familiar from Asus’s recent Zenbook S 16. This feature darkens everything but the window you’re currently looking at. It works most of the time but, like the Zenbook, I found that it had a tendency to become confused when Alt+Tabbing between windows, so I wound up turning this off.

None of this eliminates the wisdom of basic OLED caretaking. You should still avoid leaving static elements on the screen for extended periods of time. The taskbar should be set to auto-hide and view desktop icons should also be disabled. Likewise, running an animated wallpaper can also help ensure that pixels burn at a balanced rate. If all else fails, Asus provides a 3-year warranty that covers image retention.

Asus ROG Swift PG27AQDP – Software and OSD

The PG27AQDP features a very similar OSD and feature set to other Asus monitors released this year. It provides you with deep control over the picture, including multiple modes for different game genres and tasks, as well as the expected brightness, contrast, sharpness, and gamma options. If you don’t have a colorimeter, it even allows you to adjust a six-axis color mixer to fine-tune the image.

The OSD is also where you’ll choose from its different performance modes in SDR and HDR, as well as engage with OLED-specific features like OLED Anti-Flicker. Like with past models of this generation, the brightest mode is still Console HDR, but True Black 400 mode is the most accurate across its significantly more limited brightness range.

Within the OSD, you’ll also find gaming features like Sniper Mode and Shadow Boost, which provide a zoomed-in area in the center of your screen and raise the shadows for better accuracy in dark areas respectively. Both of these are familiar, and the former could even be considered cheating as it artificially enlarges the size of targets.

Asus’s Windows OSD, DisplayWidgetCenter also makes its return and allows you to customize all of these settings without needing to navigate with the more cumbersome built-in menu. It has nearly every feature as the actual OSD but is easier to use. It also allows you to tie certain visual presets to apps. For example, you may want to put the monitor in sRGB mode whenever you launch Photoshop. So long as DisplayWidget Center is running, the change happens automatically.

Asus ROG Swift PG27AQDP – Performance

I won’t beat around the bush: the PG27AQDP is a seriously fantastic gaming monitor. It’s close to being the ideal 1440p monitor, and the fact that it manages to cost $999 when many of its competitors are hundreds of dollars more is impressive. $999 is still exorbitant for a gaming monitor, but what you get for that investment is impressive.

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To begin, I tested Asus’s claims on brightness and color accuracy. In SDR, it’s able to reach a peak brightness of 427 nits in a 10% full-white window. Dimming began to occur once I hit 25% it began to descend but bottomed out at 259 nits on a full white screen. Contrast, as with all OLED monitors, is infinite. Because the panel can turn its pixels off individually, it’s able to deliver perfect blacks across every mode.

The PG27AQDP is a seriously fantastic gaming monitor.

In HDR, Asus’s claims prove to be a little overblown. In a 2% white window, I was only able to get the monitor to reach 1,136 nits. That’s still impressive, even if it’s not exactly to Asus’s 1,300-nit rating. In a 10% window, I measured 782 nits. At full white, that drops to only 257 nits.

In practice, it still delivers a stellar HDR gaming experience. A 10% window is closer to an object in a game, like a torch, and its peak brightness feels very luminous and engaging within a scene at that size. A 2% window is closer to glints on water or reflections on glass. With its deep-reaching blacks, the PG27AQDP provides great detail in both shadows and highlights.

Color coverage and accuracy are very good. My colorimeter actually measured 99% of the DCI-P3 color space, matching Asus’s claims, and 100% of the sRGB color space. Accuracy in wide gamut mode was slightly off, with an average Delta E of 3.4. Perfect accuracy is less important in gaming where you would be more likely to use this mode and it’s unlikely you would be able to notice any discrepancies with the naked eye. In DCI-P3 mode, which is what creative professionals would surely opt for, accuracy was actually better than claimed with a Delta E average of only 1.7.

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And, as expected, motion blur is a complete and total non-issue. The above photo is from the Blur Busters UFO Ghosting Test, and the PG27AQDP delivers one of the best results we’ve ever recorded. In-game, there’s no ghosting at all.

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Caption: Bokeh seen here is a visual effect in-engine and not motion blur

Gaming at 480Hz is interesting. A couple of things need to be understood going in. The first is that hitting this frame rate is really only going to be possible in lightweight esports games that are optimized for high framerates and don’t ask much of your graphics card. Even with an Nvidia RTX 4090, getting new blockbuster games to hit 240Hz is next to impossible without dropping graphics settings off a cliff, and that defeats the purpose of gaming on an OLED display. Second, 480Hz isn’t the kind of upgrade that is suddenly going to make you a better player. If you’re not already playing at an above average level, you’ll probably be fine with 240Hz or even 144Hz.

But, just because you don’t need it doesn’t mean you can’t want it. Look, I’ll level with you. I’m closer to 40 than I am to 30 and my days of dominating teenagers are probably behind me. If I were an esports athlete, they would have retired me a decade ago. But even I can feel a difference in responsiveness. The PG27AQDP just feels tight. Which is interesting, because I’ve spent a lot of time playing at 240Hz, and always felt diminishing returns set in hard at that point. But here we are: 480Hz isn’t the same kind of jump as going from 60Hz to 144Hz, but the separation between action and response has never been slimmer.

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Even if you remove that as a factor, the monitor remains excellent and one I would recommend at half the refresh rate. The colors, contrast, and brightness can be downright gorgeous. Text clarity isn’t an issue at all from a normal viewing distance. And though the monitor has a Uniform Brightness setting to prevent dimming between different windows, the dimming that takes place is so slight and so smoothly done that I didn’t find it to be very noticeable in day to day use.

Gaming is smooth and tear-free. Nvidia G-Sync worked without a hitch on my system. Motion blur isn’t an issue at all. Going from 144Hz to 240Hz, the improvements to motion blur are less noticeable than making the jump from 240Hz to 480Hz. Both refresh rates are good, but 480Hz makes it easier for even average pixel peepers to see the upgrade.

I would stop short of calling all of this game changing. It’s not. But it is game enhancing. Its improvements are not just on paper. And when considered with its extended range of OLED protections and competitive price in its category, the ROG Swift PG27ADQP becomes one of the most compelling OLED monitors on the market today. Even if you don’t need 480Hz, why not get it when every other part of the monitor is so good and the price is right?

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