We've probably all done this at some point or another whether it's with a gaming computer or with a car or
camera setup or whatever the case may be you make a big
major upgrade in this case I went from a 100 Hertz ultrawide monitor to a 200 Hertz one and the results are fantastic,
but there's like a couple of things that are still noticeably
imperfect. In this case when I have the full array local dimming on playing my
recent game of choice
which is Anno 1800 I get halos that follow around the cursor and there's no real way to avoid that
until they can make monitors with so many local dimming zones that they're the size of a cursor.
The other major one here is that the motion blur on it is frankly not that amazing,
there is a fair bit of ghosting on this display in spite of all the tech that ASUS and Nvidia have packed into it.
So,
back to the thing that's probably happened to all of us I
was both frustrated and also excited
when I found out that just a few weeks after I made this upgrade
LG came out with something that could solve all of my complaints while also being cheaper.
This is the ultra wide 38GL950G.
It's g-sync, It's up to 175 Hertz, it's ultra wide and
it’s not only bigger at 38 vs. 35 inches, it’s even cheaper.
So let's find out which one ends up on my desk at the end of this video.
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*Intro*
So even though this is not my first encounter with this monitor
I actually saw LG show it off back at it was either CES or Computex this year
I actually can't remember, but the thing is their main claim to fame with it the one
millisecond response times with an IPS panel was something that at the time I was taking with a huge
mountain of salt like this much salt because we've heard those kinds of claims from manufacturers before. The thing is
LG has since elaborated on the technology that they're using in this display saying that their new way of
creating an IPS display
can achieve response times that are comparable to TN panels and
the little brother of this monitor the 27-inch version has already made its way through our lab
And here's the crazy thing the claims
actually hold up.
So what that means is that out of the two problems that I have with the PG 35 one of which being the
halos that I can actually solve just by turning off the full array local dimming and
the smearing when objects are moving around
this one solves the only one that I cannot fix just by changing settings on the other monitor.
This is shadow, by the way, this is our new rotten cat.
Now before we go any further
I felt like it was important to fire up so that it's fresh in my mind
a game that supports HDR like shadow of the Tomb Raider
to properly appreciate what the PG 35 brings to the table that
LG's competitor simply doesn't and that is that full
1,000 nits peak brightness
HDR experience, that was such a
wow factor for me when I first saw it on this monitor back when we shot the original video. It really does look spectacular.
It makes lighting look more realistic.
Yeah, it's kind of awesome. So that's gonna be hard to give up but the extra size not to mention the extra resolution
and of course the
quoted one millisecond response times
may be enough to make up for it. Oh boy, I'm using it as a USB hub.
Hopefully the LG has that feature otherwise I may actually not have enough USB ports.
So we do have a two port USB hub DisplayPort and HDMI in I wouldn't recommend using HDMI in on this thing
you're not gonna be getting the most out of it.
That's pretty much it so actually pretty similar to the other one.
Man, this thing is big. You know, it's only three inches bigger
38 vs. 35 inches, but turns out that is a lot of panel
Whoo
Well, it's got RGB lighting that's for sure!
Okay, so I think we're gonna have to make some adjustments to our resolution here, huh.
G-sync display connected though that worked properly right out of the box.
Let's see if we can fix what's going on here.
‘Ey, there, it is. All right, we're running at 60 Hertz right now though. So let's get that fixed too.
So thats it 3840 by 1600
144 Hertz that appears to be working perfectly and
we can already get some initial impressions for our pixel response times here just by having a look
at what just dragging a window around looks like.
Now you can see there's still a hint of yellow on the trailing edge as I drag this window to the right, but that is
noticeably better than the other panel. Also, I haven't even had a look at the settings yet.
So the response time is on fast, that's actually exactly where we want it
faster is how you get to that one millisecond rating
but what it also does is it introduces a bunch of visual artifacts that I personally find very
obnoxious it kind of makes your games look like they're over sharpened
and it's gross.
Mmm, yeah this I think I've got a defective nipple here.
Words you never thought you'd say!
So thanks to the miracle of DisplayPort 1.4
this guy can actually be overclocked to a 175 Hertz
Theoretically it's fine, but you never know
sometimes when manufacturers advertise an overclocking setting they're saying yeah
tt should work
but it might not. So interestingly just like on the ASUS if you crank
everything so you want 10-bit color, you want a 175 Hertz, full native resolution,
you're gonna go and you're gonna apply that and
you're gonna discover that you've got these these pink
fringing artifacts that are called chromatic aberration and it's caused by the lower
chroma, subsampling here
so you can see we're at YCBCR422.
What we have to do if we want to get the best possible color performance, especially
for things like text is
lower our refresh rate to something more reasonable.
Looks like we have to go all the way down to 120 Hertz in order to apply both 10-bit color and
444.
So my middle ground here is probably going to end up being
144 Hertz
8-bit color RGB and
full dynamic range which should still allow us to turn on HDR.
Now I did say that this wasn't gonna have the same kind of HDR capabilities as the ASUS monitor,
but that doesn't mean that it isn't capable of HDR at all. So let's go ahead and fire up our game and
see how it compares.
Now the argument that ASUS made and actually Acer along with them for the previous
144 Hertz 4k monitor that had that same issue when you took it beyond
120 Hertz all the way to 144 with the chromatic aberration is that in games it's not that noticeable
it's something that's more noticeable on the desktop, especially if you're looking at text so we'll give that a shot here
but for my part I had found that I would rather
not encounter it because a lot of games actually do have text in them.
So HDR is working in the game, but it is immediately noticeable to me that it is
not as good as the other display like you can see Lara's flashlight here and
that's exactly what I mean. You can see the lens of Lara's flashlight
on the PG 35 you can see a bright flare in your eyes as if you were looking directly into a flashlight.
It really does make for a different experience. Now in some cases
I do find that HDR can be kind of overdone in games like on the PG 35 a lot of these reflections off the rocks
kind of are unrealistic it makes everything look kind of shiny like it's got an early 2000s vibe to me a little bit
but while this looks all right
I've definitely seen a couple things already where the HDR does not
hold up to the PG 35 at less than half of the peak brightness
I guess that kind of makes sense.
And once again here we're definitely getting the benefit of the HDR mastered version of the game like it does
look
more dynamic, but there's less detail preserved up here where the light sources are really bright and
it just looks
more lifeless and in the case of something like foliage
that matters that makes a difference to the immersion level of the game.
Another interesting observation
is that with no obvious way of turning it off so you can see I'm running in HDR and there is a setting in here
for variable back light but it specifically says SDR variable back light and it's grayed out
it appears as though in order to increase the
the advertised contrast ratio of the display, they're actually dimming the entire
backlight or brightening it depending on the kind of scene you're looking at. Now when you want good HDR you want high
contrast, but an advertised
contrast ratio that relies on
dimming or brightening the entire backlight of the panel is not going to give you that high contrast within one scene,
it's going to rely on actually brightening the display
when moving from one place to another I don't know if you guys can see it that well on camera
but it is very noticeable to the eye as I transition from looking into the cave here to looking at the waterfall.
So I got to say I was sort of expecting
the outcome to be
LG clear winner plop it goes on the desk but up till this point in the video
I am kind of leaning towards putting the ASUS
back on here. With that said what we've looked at so far an HDR game is
obviously an advantage for the PG 35
now that I'm playing something that's a little bit more down to
perfect image quality as I'm whipping around on the screen the LG comes into its own a little bit, like you can really notice it
in the readability of this text as I'm panning around.
See that everything is really crisp and really clean just like we observed on the 27-inch version of this monitor
really impressive for an IPS display!
All right, now we're up to a 175 Hertz. Oh boy, there's a lot of.. Okay I'm bailing.
I gotta say I love the size of this thing
Like there's not many monitors that just take up your entire field of view
like I can only see a sliver this big a
Little bit like that and like maybe this much on either side of it at a comfortable distance here.
Oops!
Yeah, I won, haha take that terrorists!
Now, of course, I don't spend the majority of my gaming time playing Shadow the Tomb Raider or CS:GO at this point
so unless this one offer is a tangibly better Anno
1800 experience it probably doesn't make a ton of sense to change out to it.
So as a game with no support for HDR
It doesn't take advantage of the most advanced capabilities of either of these displays,
but one thing that it has over the ASUS is its larger size
like I said before 3 inches doesn't sound like much but you can see
It's actually an enormous
amount of display once it's in front of you and you've got a city that you're managing with it.
So it's time to make a decision and the only honest conclusion
is that whether it's at the low end or the high end there's always
going to be trade-offs
nothing can be the best of all worlds. This one right here has up to
240 hertz refresh rate if you're willing to put up with some fringing, it's got g-sync ultimate for a
noticeably like markedly better
HDR experience, but it's gonna cost an extra
$500 compared to this one, which is already pricey at about 2,000 US dollars
and it gives up some other things. So the pixel response time is clearly, obviously,
noticeably not as good and if you do things other than gaming like if you want to get some
you know work done on the side, for example
the extra screen real estate of a 38-inch vs. a 35 inch display can be a big difference maker.
So,
I have to make a decision now, one of these has to go back to the office.
I can't be hoarding all the amazing monitors and
that is it's a really tough call.
Brandon what would you do?
(Brandon) If Anno is the game you're playing the most...
(Brandon) ...I feel like I'd go with the LG
Go with the LG for Anno. But like (Brandon) Yeah.
I would feel like I want to bring this one home to play Tomb Raider or Battlefield 5 anything with HDR support.
You know what?
Because they both cost the same to me...
... I think I'm gonna keep the ROG swift on the desk, but at a $500 delta
especially depending on what I was gonna do with it LG has made an absolutely incredible
contender for top gaming monitor on the market. I mean either of these two if you were to buy them
you'd be crazy not to be completely stoked on them.
That's a such a cop-out conclusion, but I'm sorry guys they really are
very
evenly matched even though they're not equal.
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