ASUS ELMB STROBING SUPPORT: A MIXED EXPERIENCE

ASUS's implementation of backlight strobing, also known as motion blur reduction, is a feature that differentiates it from other monitors. I was excited to check out this technology, which aims to reduce motion blur and improve overall visual fidelity. However, my experience with the XG27 was somewhat underwhelming. The response times on this display are already impressive, making the need for backlight strobing a moot point in most cases.

The result of enabling this feature is just okay, to be honest. While it may have some benefits in certain situations, I couldn't see myself using it frequently enough to make a noticeable difference. In fact, with the XG27's already excellent response times, I might not even bother enabling backlight strobing anymore.

On the other hand, the XG27 also features ELMB Sync, which combines backlight strobing with G-Sync technology. This mode adapts its behavior based on the frame rate of the content being displayed, offering a compromise between the two technologies. However, my experience with this feature was disappointing. On the XG27, it simply didn't look good, even at the same frame rate as standard ELMB without adaptive sync. In fact, it looked worse than expected.

Standard ELMB, on the other hand, performed reasonably well at 144Hz, and I can see its value in games that consistently achieve this high refresh rate. If you're confident in your ability to maintain a consistent 144Hz frame rate, ELMB Sync could be a useful feature. However, with the AESA Predator 270Hz also offering backlight strobing, I'm starting to question the need for it altogether. With the correct overdrive mode and G-Sync enabled, these monitors are already incredibly capable.

ANOTHER EXCLUSIVE FEATURE: NVIDIA REFLEX ANALYZER

One notable feature that sets the PG279QM apart from other monitors is NVIDIA's Reflex Analyzer, which measures the latency of your system and games. While this technology may not be directly relevant to most consumers and gamers, it could prove useful for developers and enthusiasts who want to fine-tune their setup.

The Reflex Analyzer can provide valuable insights into your system's performance, helping you identify areas where optimization is needed. However, I'm not sure how often a consumer would use this feature in practice. For most people, the idea of latency and frame rate optimization might seem like a complex topic that requires expert knowledge. Nonetheless, it's an interesting addition to the PG279QM's feature set.

1440P ENTHUSIAST OPTIONS: A COMPARISON

The market for enthusiast 1440p monitors is highly competitive, with several excellent options available. The XG27 EQM, PG279QM, and XB273UGX from Acer are all top contenders in this space. While each monitor has its strengths and weaknesses, I believe the XG27 EQM offers a compelling combination of features and price.

The slightly higher refresh rate on the XG27 EQM (270Hz vs 240Hz) might seem like a minor difference, but it could prove useful for those who want to future-proof their setup. Additionally, the overdrive modes on this monitor seemed better tuned than what I experienced on the Acer Predator XB273UGX.

1080P: THE MOST COMPETITIVE AND LOWEST LATENCY EXPERIENCE

Despite the impressive capabilities of 1440p monitors, I still believe that 1080p offers a more competitive and lower latency experience. Refresh rates are higher, frame rates are typically higher, and smaller displays can feel larger when viewed from arm's length.

While it may seem counterintuitive to prefer a smaller display, there's something to be said for gaming on a screen that's closer to your viewing position. However, achieving the necessary 1080p performance requires more powerful hardware, such as a high-end GPU with a strong cooling system. If you're planning to game at lower refresh rates or don't want to invest in top-of-the-line hardware, there are better options available.

FUTURE-PROOFING YOUR SETUP

For those who want to future-proof their setup and take advantage of the latest advancements in gaming technology, investing in a high-refresh-rate 1440p monitor might be wise. As new GPUs become available, these monitors will be able to take full advantage of their capabilities, providing a smoother and more responsive gaming experience.

While we don't have an official release date for the ASUS ROG Swift PG279QM (yet), I'm hopeful that it will arrive soon. With the latest advancements in G-Sync technology and backlight strobing, this monitor is shaping up to be one of the most exciting options in the market.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enall right so 1440p monitors are getting quick like really really quick the one behind me is the xg27 aqm from asus and it's 270 hertz which i mean let's be real that's faster than most people's 1080p displays today i want to discuss whether it is the best 1440p option that you can buy in terms of response times and motion clarity and stuff like that and also how it stacks up to a lot of the fastest 1080p options that i've reviewed because i mean you know we're at the point now where a mid-range gpu like a ti or a 37 it can pretty much outpace a lot of games at 1080p and of course the gpus of tomorrow are going to be even faster realistically if you're looking for a single monitor for your setup that can kind of offer the least amount of compromise for the most amount of things like competitive gaming single-player gaming normal day-to-day work and stuff like that then i don't know if you can get better than kind of what's sitting behind me or at least the specs and kind of the few monsters that we're going to look at today 1440p 270hz really does feel like the least amount of compromise in a single panel and that's coming from someone who has used pretty much the best of either end of the spectrum right i've used 1080p 390hz i also use 4k 160hz but this could replace probably both of them without being too much compromise on either end could definitely use this for competitive gaming and i probably could use this for you know editing at 1440p as well that would be totally doable now talking about the specs you know it's exciting but it doesn't really tell you how fast this monitor actually is compared to a lot of the other competing options out there what i really want to discuss today are the response times and you know how this compares on a response time level to even some of the fastest 1080p options that you can buy so the definition of pixel response time here is the amount of time that it takes a single pixel to transition from one color to the next faster response times therefore result in clearer motion and slower response times result in what's called ghosting or motion blur and that ghosting is really bad for competitive style gaming especially if you're on a high refresh rate monitor so we want the fastest and lowest response times possible now up until now i've solely used the ufo ghosting test from blowbusters.com to evaluate the response times of each gaming monitor and it does the job pretty well you can visualize how much ghosting or overshoot each response time mode or monitor has and it's great for testing modes like dayak or ulmb moving forward though i mean we definitely have to step things up a notch there's a 500hz monitor on the horizon there's 1440p 360hz monitors coming out soon clearly the monitor industry is just getting so so quick and we need an objective measurement so what i have behind me is nvidia's new ldap revision which basically allows you to measure the proper greater gray millisecond response time values which means finally we have an objective response time value to compare with now don't worry i will still be doing the ufo motion tests for each monitor review out there i think that's what most of you are probably interested in seeing aside from like this really nerdy response time stuff that i'm about to show you but i mean from a testing perspective and in terms of objectively comparing monitors to monitor this is a lot more useful so what we're seeing here is a little sneak peek of what's happening when we're talking about response times in this case we have a monitor that is switching between the color black represented as 0 and the color middle gray represented as 128 and in a perfect world it would switch to this color instantly giving us a perfectly clear image but as we can see it takes a little bit of time for those pixels to switch to that target color in this case we have a response time of 7.4 milliseconds now as you probably know most gaming monitors have a few different response time overdrive settings and when we do switch to one of those faster settings the transition completes now five milliseconds faster which gives us clearer motion but also at the same time what's called overshoot this is when the response time overdrive is so aggressive that the pixels momentarily go beyond the target color and this is exactly what's happening when you see a monster that has inverse ghosting in this case however it's only about seven percent overshoot and that's actually ideal not something that you're really going to notice in terms of inverse ghosting and we do benefit from those faster response times this is mostly a problem once we start exceeding about 20 overshoot from what i've seen so far in fact in terms of what this looks like using the ufo ghosting test here are the two modes that we just saw so level 4 is undoubtedly the mode to use here even with 14 average overshoot across all transitions it still looks great and pretty much ideal you can actually bump things up a little more though level 5 gets us down to a response time average of just 1.8 milliseconds but at this point a 45 overshoot average does mean that the inverse ghosting is really noticeable and something that you'll want to avoid now the response time curve that we looked at previously that was only for a single greater grade transition from black to gray otherwise known as 0 to 128 but to properly test response times we should test a lot more so 0 to 128 as we saw took 2.4 milliseconds then we also test 0 to 160 which takes 2.6 0 to 192 takes 2.8 milliseconds eventually with enough greater great transitions tested we can get a bigger picture of what's happening and get the monitor's average response time in this case it's 2.5 milliseconds which for a 1440p 270hz monitor is really damn fast we can also see then what the overshoot or inverse ghosting is for each of those transitions and in some cases there is quite evident overshoot above say 50 or so but most of them barely have any overshoot at all so finally proper response time testing as you can see i'm really excited about it but in isolation it doesn't really tell you much right like if i tell you a monitor has a 2.5 millisecond average response time it's not really useful so what we want to do now is compare to a lot of different other gaming monitors i've tested a handful of the important ones for this review for example the acer nitro 390 hertz how fast are the response times on this compared to that well in terms of response times it's actually faster again what we're looking at here is effectively how much ghosting each monitor has all of the results are pretty damn quick but i guess the point here is that yeah there are current 1440p monitors out there that are as quick as some of the highest refresh rate 1080p options on the market now a closer look at those three 1440p high refresh rate options the asus pg279 qm has the best response time performance out of the three but the other two aren't that far off at all in fact when we compare the ufo tests we can see just how similar all three look i mean you have to keep the perspective of what this is actually going to look like when you're playing and focusing on your gameplay and with that considered they're all virtually the same i will give points to the pg279qm though for being the clearest and the best tuned one reason for that is probably due to the physical g-sync module that the other two 1440p options do not have the other two are g-sync compatible but don't have that module installed now something that that g-sync processor does provide is what's called a variable overdrive which means that the overdrive amount is always adapting to the refresh rate that's compared to how overdrive normally works on most monitors without this which is basically just a static overdrive amount that means that you get different amounts of overshoot at different refresh rate values usually what happens is that the overshoot increases as the refresh rate decreases the pg-27 on the other hand you can kind of think of as having like optimized overdrive if you're sticking within that g-sync range with overshoot not becoming a problem if you're lowering refresh rates like the other two in practice it's not a huge difference the pg does look a little bit clearer here when they're both set to 144 hertz but it is one of the benefits of that g-sync module worth noting now on the flip side of this something that the xg27 has that the pg-27 doesn't is support for elmb this is asus's implementation of backlight strobing also known as motion blur reduction and since this is one of the main distinctions between these two monitors i was really excited to check it out the result though is just okay to be honest the response times are already so good on this display that i probably wouldn't even bother enabling this now in addition to this the xg27 also has elmb sync which i was even more excited for this is basically elmb plus g-sync mashed together the backlight strobing essentially adapts on the fly depending on what your frame rate is which is kind of the best of both worlds this mode has a lot of potential but on the xg27 aqm i don't know what's happening here but it just plainly doesn't look good even at the same frame rate as standard elmb without adaptive sync it just looks worse especially at 144hz which is the whole point of el mb sync to actually be better at those lower refresh rates standard elnb at 144hz looks a lot clearer in fact elmb at this refresh rate is pretty good like if you have games that you want to run at 144hz and you're confident that you can consistently get that frame rate this would actually be a decent mode to use now the aesa predator 270hz also has a backlight strobing mode slightly better than the asus but kind of falls in the same basket right these monsters are already so good without it that i think just enabling the correct overdrive mode and g-sync is pretty much just the way to go now something that's kind of interesting and exclusive on the pg279qm is nvidia's reflex analyzer which can measure the latency of your system and your games i've used this personally for a few projects here and there but it's a feature that most consumers and gamers probably won't find that useful it's kind of something that you'll switch on and check after a hardware upgrade or something like that make sure everything's running good but that's probably it unfortunately this is one of the main reasons that the pg279qm is so much more expensive currently than the xg27 aqm so just keep that in mind so in terms of these enthusiast 1440p options the xg27 eqm the pg279qm and the xb273ugx from acer i mean they're all really really good options if you bought either one don't feel like you kind of bought the wrong one because they're all really really good personally if you're kind of you know starting from scratch and you're looking at getting one i would pick the xg27 i think it's a lot cheaper than the pg27 at the moment the slightly higher refresh rate is also nice 270hz versus 240 hertz and also the overdrive modes just seem a little bit better tuned than what i saw on the acer predator now as fast as these 1440p options are i mean they are incredibly quick 1080p is still something that you might want to look at i mean 1080p still feels like to me the most competitive and lowest latency experience that you can currently get refresh rates are higher frame rates are typically higher as well and you know there is something to be said about gaming on a smaller display which most people are kind of more comfortable with 24 inch and 25 inch versus 27 inch might only be like a couple of inches but you know when it's at arm's length that bigger panel does feel a lot bigger than those numbers suggest and the other side of this is that you do need a pretty hefty gpu to make use of these 1440p high refresh rate options i mean don't plan on getting this if you have like a 30 60 or a 30 50 or something like that you want to be having like a 30 80 or higher or at least be looking forward to the next generation of gpus as an upgrade to support those kind of pixels at that refresh rate by all means you can also kind of consider it as a bit of a future proofing option for your setup as well maybe you're currently gaming in the kind of 165 hertz range but maybe you want that extra refresh rate headroom available to you in the future that's something i can totally respect and in terms of the 1440p 360hz options which were announced a couple of months ago i think i did ask asus for a bit of an eta but they're not comfortable giving me a release date or anything just yet so i guess we'll see maybe in time for the new gpus or towards the end of the year but uh yeah we'll just have to wait and see otherwise i hope you found this video helpful as always a huge thanks for watching and i'll see you all in the next oneall right so 1440p monitors are getting quick like really really quick the one behind me is the xg27 aqm from asus and it's 270 hertz which i mean let's be real that's faster than most people's 1080p displays today i want to discuss whether it is the best 1440p option that you can buy in terms of response times and motion clarity and stuff like that and also how it stacks up to a lot of the fastest 1080p options that i've reviewed because i mean you know we're at the point now where a mid-range gpu like a ti or a 37 it can pretty much outpace a lot of games at 1080p and of course the gpus of tomorrow are going to be even faster realistically if you're looking for a single monitor for your setup that can kind of offer the least amount of compromise for the most amount of things like competitive gaming single-player gaming normal day-to-day work and stuff like that then i don't know if you can get better than kind of what's sitting behind me or at least the specs and kind of the few monsters that we're going to look at today 1440p 270hz really does feel like the least amount of compromise in a single panel and that's coming from someone who has used pretty much the best of either end of the spectrum right i've used 1080p 390hz i also use 4k 160hz but this could replace probably both of them without being too much compromise on either end could definitely use this for competitive gaming and i probably could use this for you know editing at 1440p as well that would be totally doable now talking about the specs you know it's exciting but it doesn't really tell you how fast this monitor actually is compared to a lot of the other competing options out there what i really want to discuss today are the response times and you know how this compares on a response time level to even some of the fastest 1080p options that you can buy so the definition of pixel response time here is the amount of time that it takes a single pixel to transition from one color to the next faster response times therefore result in clearer motion and slower response times result in what's called ghosting or motion blur and that ghosting is really bad for competitive style gaming especially if you're on a high refresh rate monitor so we want the fastest and lowest response times possible now up until now i've solely used the ufo ghosting test from blowbusters.com to evaluate the response times of each gaming monitor and it does the job pretty well you can visualize how much ghosting or overshoot each response time mode or monitor has and it's great for testing modes like dayak or ulmb moving forward though i mean we definitely have to step things up a notch there's a 500hz monitor on the horizon there's 1440p 360hz monitors coming out soon clearly the monitor industry is just getting so so quick and we need an objective measurement so what i have behind me is nvidia's new ldap revision which basically allows you to measure the proper greater gray millisecond response time values which means finally we have an objective response time value to compare with now don't worry i will still be doing the ufo motion tests for each monitor review out there i think that's what most of you are probably interested in seeing aside from like this really nerdy response time stuff that i'm about to show you but i mean from a testing perspective and in terms of objectively comparing monitors to monitor this is a lot more useful so what we're seeing here is a little sneak peek of what's happening when we're talking about response times in this case we have a monitor that is switching between the color black represented as 0 and the color middle gray represented as 128 and in a perfect world it would switch to this color instantly giving us a perfectly clear image but as we can see it takes a little bit of time for those pixels to switch to that target color in this case we have a response time of 7.4 milliseconds now as you probably know most gaming monitors have a few different response time overdrive settings and when we do switch to one of those faster settings the transition completes now five milliseconds faster which gives us clearer motion but also at the same time what's called overshoot this is when the response time overdrive is so aggressive that the pixels momentarily go beyond the target color and this is exactly what's happening when you see a monster that has inverse ghosting in this case however it's only about seven percent overshoot and that's actually ideal not something that you're really going to notice in terms of inverse ghosting and we do benefit from those faster response times this is mostly a problem once we start exceeding about 20 overshoot from what i've seen so far in fact in terms of what this looks like using the ufo ghosting test here are the two modes that we just saw so level 4 is undoubtedly the mode to use here even with 14 average overshoot across all transitions it still looks great and pretty much ideal you can actually bump things up a little more though level 5 gets us down to a response time average of just 1.8 milliseconds but at this point a 45 overshoot average does mean that the inverse ghosting is really noticeable and something that you'll want to avoid now the response time curve that we looked at previously that was only for a single greater grade transition from black to gray otherwise known as 0 to 128 but to properly test response times we should test a lot more so 0 to 128 as we saw took 2.4 milliseconds then we also test 0 to 160 which takes 2.6 0 to 192 takes 2.8 milliseconds eventually with enough greater great transitions tested we can get a bigger picture of what's happening and get the monitor's average response time in this case it's 2.5 milliseconds which for a 1440p 270hz monitor is really damn fast we can also see then what the overshoot or inverse ghosting is for each of those transitions and in some cases there is quite evident overshoot above say 50 or so but most of them barely have any overshoot at all so finally proper response time testing as you can see i'm really excited about it but in isolation it doesn't really tell you much right like if i tell you a monitor has a 2.5 millisecond average response time it's not really useful so what we want to do now is compare to a lot of different other gaming monitors i've tested a handful of the important ones for this review for example the acer nitro 390 hertz how fast are the response times on this compared to that well in terms of response times it's actually faster again what we're looking at here is effectively how much ghosting each monitor has all of the results are pretty damn quick but i guess the point here is that yeah there are current 1440p monitors out there that are as quick as some of the highest refresh rate 1080p options on the market now a closer look at those three 1440p high refresh rate options the asus pg279 qm has the best response time performance out of the three but the other two aren't that far off at all in fact when we compare the ufo tests we can see just how similar all three look i mean you have to keep the perspective of what this is actually going to look like when you're playing and focusing on your gameplay and with that considered they're all virtually the same i will give points to the pg279qm though for being the clearest and the best tuned one reason for that is probably due to the physical g-sync module that the other two 1440p options do not have the other two are g-sync compatible but don't have that module installed now something that that g-sync processor does provide is what's called a variable overdrive which means that the overdrive amount is always adapting to the refresh rate that's compared to how overdrive normally works on most monitors without this which is basically just a static overdrive amount that means that you get different amounts of overshoot at different refresh rate values usually what happens is that the overshoot increases as the refresh rate decreases the pg-27 on the other hand you can kind of think of as having like optimized overdrive if you're sticking within that g-sync range with overshoot not becoming a problem if you're lowering refresh rates like the other two in practice it's not a huge difference the pg does look a little bit clearer here when they're both set to 144 hertz but it is one of the benefits of that g-sync module worth noting now on the flip side of this something that the xg27 has that the pg-27 doesn't is support for elmb this is asus's implementation of backlight strobing also known as motion blur reduction and since this is one of the main distinctions between these two monitors i was really excited to check it out the result though is just okay to be honest the response times are already so good on this display that i probably wouldn't even bother enabling this now in addition to this the xg27 also has elmb sync which i was even more excited for this is basically elmb plus g-sync mashed together the backlight strobing essentially adapts on the fly depending on what your frame rate is which is kind of the best of both worlds this mode has a lot of potential but on the xg27 aqm i don't know what's happening here but it just plainly doesn't look good even at the same frame rate as standard elmb without adaptive sync it just looks worse especially at 144hz which is the whole point of el mb sync to actually be better at those lower refresh rates standard elnb at 144hz looks a lot clearer in fact elmb at this refresh rate is pretty good like if you have games that you want to run at 144hz and you're confident that you can consistently get that frame rate this would actually be a decent mode to use now the aesa predator 270hz also has a backlight strobing mode slightly better than the asus but kind of falls in the same basket right these monsters are already so good without it that i think just enabling the correct overdrive mode and g-sync is pretty much just the way to go now something that's kind of interesting and exclusive on the pg279qm is nvidia's reflex analyzer which can measure the latency of your system and your games i've used this personally for a few projects here and there but it's a feature that most consumers and gamers probably won't find that useful it's kind of something that you'll switch on and check after a hardware upgrade or something like that make sure everything's running good but that's probably it unfortunately this is one of the main reasons that the pg279qm is so much more expensive currently than the xg27 aqm so just keep that in mind so in terms of these enthusiast 1440p options the xg27 eqm the pg279qm and the xb273ugx from acer i mean they're all really really good options if you bought either one don't feel like you kind of bought the wrong one because they're all really really good personally if you're kind of you know starting from scratch and you're looking at getting one i would pick the xg27 i think it's a lot cheaper than the pg27 at the moment the slightly higher refresh rate is also nice 270hz versus 240 hertz and also the overdrive modes just seem a little bit better tuned than what i saw on the acer predator now as fast as these 1440p options are i mean they are incredibly quick 1080p is still something that you might want to look at i mean 1080p still feels like to me the most competitive and lowest latency experience that you can currently get refresh rates are higher frame rates are typically higher as well and you know there is something to be said about gaming on a smaller display which most people are kind of more comfortable with 24 inch and 25 inch versus 27 inch might only be like a couple of inches but you know when it's at arm's length that bigger panel does feel a lot bigger than those numbers suggest and the other side of this is that you do need a pretty hefty gpu to make use of these 1440p high refresh rate options i mean don't plan on getting this if you have like a 30 60 or a 30 50 or something like that you want to be having like a 30 80 or higher or at least be looking forward to the next generation of gpus as an upgrade to support those kind of pixels at that refresh rate by all means you can also kind of consider it as a bit of a future proofing option for your setup as well maybe you're currently gaming in the kind of 165 hertz range but maybe you want that extra refresh rate headroom available to you in the future that's something i can totally respect and in terms of the 1440p 360hz options which were announced a couple of months ago i think i did ask asus for a bit of an eta but they're not comfortable giving me a release date or anything just yet so i guess we'll see maybe in time for the new gpus or towards the end of the year but uh yeah we'll just have to wait and see otherwise i hope you found this video helpful as always a huge thanks for watching and i'll see you all in the next one\n"