- Before we begin, this Unboxing & First Impressions
is sponsored by Samsung.
This is the Samsung Odyssey G9 monitor,
and I get to open it up.
Oh yes.
Did I say Odyssey G9?
Apparently there's two monitors in here.
Samsung's getting real serious about gaming monitors now.
Am I even gonna be able to get this out of here by myself?
(slams)
I know, I know, the G9's the one you guys all wanna see,
but this one's really cool too.
It's G-Sync compatible,
which means it also has support for FreeSync.
It's got a 1000R curvature, so that's designed
to match the curvature of the human eye, apparently,
which is interesting.
It is 32 inches, it runs at 240 hertz
with a rated one-millisecond response time, and...
all of that stuff we've seen before.
No, the big deal here is the resolution.
So 240 hertz, yeah, we've seen it before,
at 1920 by 1080.
But this manages it at 2560 by 1440.
So at this kind of screen size,
and it's available in 27 or 32 inches,
and this is the 32-inch one,
it would not be pretty to be sitting monitor distance
from a 1080p display.
1440p, well that's a different story.
Wow, that is really curved.
I'm surprised at that.
Oh, this is nice,
screws are just pre-installed in there for you.
Is it obvious to you where this goes?
(clattering)
(snaps)
And here's how it goes on.
Oh yeah.
And I'm a little surprised to see
an external power supply for such a large monitor.
But the thing is, this is a VESA DisplayHDR 600 monitor,
which means that it is probably using
some form of full array local dimming,
which means that the backlight for the display
is much bulkier than what you would find
in just a typical edge-lit display.
That is a hefty power supply too, wow, look at this thing.
Aw, check this out.
That's a cool cable management doodad.
It's got a built-in headphone stand.
The secret sauce here is the DisplayPort 1.4 connection.
So, while it does have an HDMI input right about there,
if you want that full 240 hertz refresh rate at 1440p,
oh yeah, it also has a built-in USB hub and an audio jack,
you need to use DisplayPort,
because that is a lot of bandwidth.
That's basically like running four times that resolution,
so that would be 5k, at 60 hertz.
Of course, in order to drive that kind of resolution
at that kind of frame rate,
we need a lot of power.
So we've equipped our machine with an RTX 2080 Ti,
to see just how far we get.
Sorry, I was mistaken, it's a Titan RTX.
Either way, hopefully we're gonna have
enough horses for that butter smoothness.
Of course, the refresh rate is only part of the story
for a gaming display.
The other part is the pixel response times,
and one quick and dirty way to see how good those are
is just dragging a window with text across the screen.
You can see here, I'm getting very little
in terms of discoloration at the edge of my window,
and text remains readable
until I'm moving it quite quickly across the screen.
So you can see, it's actually curved
a little bit more sharply in the middle,
and it's a little bit gentler towards the edges.
Okay, G-Sync compatible, enable G-Sync,
enabled for windowed and full-screen, love it.
Just even Windows animations are so smooth.
- [Crew Member] Oh, cool.
- [Linus] Oh yeah.
As I expected, this display does have local dimming.
High brightness, fps...
Whoa, wow, that high brightness is pretty bright.
You can have a cheater crosshair.
Wow, that is buttery smooth,
running at a locked 240 frames per second.
So there will be no excuses for losing.
Man, that's sharp.
Now, to be clear, at 32 inches,
1440p is not super high pixel density,
but it's so much better than 1080.
Oh, no no no no no!
Oh no, run away!
This is a really nice pre-calibrated sRGB profile.
I'm actually really happy with that.
A lot of the time on these gaming monitors,
you just try to get rid of any vivid color boost,
or black equalizer, whatever nonsense,
you just wanna see the sRGB values
as they were intended by the game developer,
and it goes and vomits a bunch of bright colors
in your face or whatever.
But this is great.
You know, it's a funny thing,
I marveled at this for so many years,
how Samsung, leading global technology company,
based in South Korea of all places,
took so long to take gaming monitors seriously.
But yet, here we are, and I'm like,
this is why I wanted you guys to do this stuff
so many years ago, because this is great!
The curve is gonna be polarizing for some people,
but when it comes to the performance of the panel,
I don't think we're gonna see a lot of complaints
from owners of this puppy.
Now let's get real interesting, I have just fired up HDR,
and we're going to open up "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" here.
That's curious, my HDR profile was set to
30% or something like that out of the box,
and because HDR assigns illuminance value per pixel,
you definitely want that set to 100% on your display.
That looks a lot better, don't it?
Now, you're not gonna get those dazzling highlights
with direct sunlight reflecting off of things
on a VESA HDR 600 display
like you would on a 1000 display,
but it still does look notably better
than a VESA display HDR 400 display.
As you can see,
even with the most powerful graphics card on the market,
we are struggling to break 150 fps on this puppy,
so you're definitely buying into the future-proofness
when it comes to sightseeing
eye-candy single player games like this one.
But eSports titles with a powerful enough rig,
as we've shown, can hit that 240 fps consistently.
Honestly, for this kind of game,
this is plenty of fps, that is so smooth.
The only thing disturbing the smoothness
is the kind of jarring camera distance shifts, that's it.
Obviously we'd need to grab the pursuit camera setup
in order to objectively evaluate this,
but having seen the UFO test on a lot of monitors...
(laughs)
I am real impressed by this.
Don't look at the 60 fps or 120 fps lines,
the one we're after is 240 fps, and that alien looks crisp.
You can't quite make out his pupils or anything like that,
but his control stick is very well-defined.
Almost no discoloration on the leading or trailing edges,
little bit of blue on the leading,
little bit of orange on the trailing.
Overall, really good.
Expect to see a full followup over on the LTT channel
once James is back from vacation,
he's kind of our monitor guru these days.
But initial impressions of this thing
are really, really impressive.
Now, I know I promised you guys
that I was gonna do the G9 in this video,
but I realize that A, it's time to go home,
and B, this is already an eight-minute video,
so I'm gonna make you guys subscribe
and follow up probably the next day, or maybe two days,
we're gonna follow up with the G9.
But we're off to a real good start here.