> The Asus PG27AQDP Monitor Is Incredible But Nobody Should Buy It.

About a month ago I came home to what seemed like a monitor that was on its way to failing. I had the classics: horizontal banding, ghosting, and flickering that come with failing panels. In an attempt to verify it was indeed the panel and not something wrong with either my new Mac Studio or macOS in general, I booted into Windows. Alas, the flickering issue persisted. The monitor did indeed seem to be failing. Since the panel in question was my MSI 240Hz gaming panel I immediately began searching for a suitable replacement. Some things I needed to consider going forward was the increase in size. In 2020 I had decided that 27” was going to be too big for the space that I’m in but in 2025 I no longer had that option. So off to 27” it was. For the first time I was also considering OLED, even if it was with a healthy bit of caution. I landed on three monitors. All of them Asus since I had passed on their flagship in 2020 and somewhat regretted it. I hit the Asus web store to see what was available that met my requirements. I came away with:

  • The ROG Swift PG27AQDM: A 240Hz OLED
  • The ROG Swift PG27AQDP: A recently released 480Hz OLED
  • The ROG Swift PG27AQN: A 360Hz IPS LCD. My last potential bastion of IPS LCD as a backup.

I put the three of them to a comparison on Display Specifications.

I felt like I didn’t need to watch a review of the LCD as in this day and age you pretty much know what you’re getting with one. At best I would search around to make sure there aren’t any critical flaws. But I wanted to know more about the OLEDs. So off to the Internet I went.

Hardware Unboxed has a sister channel specifically for monitors. So I started there. I watched Tim’s review of the PG27AQDM. It’s an impressive screen and lots of features to love. OLED really can blow you away with color and inky blacks. While I’m not a photographer, I do expect my photos, and more importantly my games, to look as they should. So I was very disappointed to see that while sRGB colors were good, they weren’t great and would need tweaking. I really dislike the idea of calibrating the monitor as it seems like more work that I honestly shouldn’t have to do. ViewSonic ruined me back in the day by having great color out of the box.

Next up was the PG27AQDP. While it still had issues with sRGB, it was much improved and there were ways to bring it closer in line. 480Hz is nice but as long as it was a fast and variable refresh rate it was fine. COD hits anywhere from 120 to 300 and anything else, like Doom or most single player games, will at least look great in OLED. The only snag is the price: $1000 US.

I checked other reviews but most said the same things as Tim, just in a less technical way. So I checked Amazon and Micro Center for availability. This is a lot to pay for a monitor but there were only three in stock so I decided to reserve one and then stop in over the weekend before the reservation expired and see if I could check it out in store before walking out with one. Long story short: I walked out with one.

Colors, 27”, OLED, 480Hz

First things first, we need to talk about the colors. As expected, the colors are amazing. Inky blacks allow for colors to pop. Games and media look, I’m assuming, as the artist intended. To be fair, there will be detail missed as areas that were once gray on an LCD are now pitch black. The difference is that now it looks like it was always supposed to look: dark.

Take a look at Rogue One:

Rogue One 1

Rogue One 2

Rogue One 3

I was also very concerned about fitting the monitor on my desk. As I said earlier, my arrangement is for 25″ and while 27″ may not seem like that big of a jump, the physical size of the device takes up more room than the previous screen. Sadly I’ll need to adjust everything about an 8th of an inch right. But I also was afraid of 27″ simply being too big to keep track of things while playing games, especially games like COD. I’m constantly multitasking around the screen and felt like that would just be too far a distance for my eyes to travel to check the HUD elements in the corners. Turns out it’s fine but what I was not prepared to do was adjust my mouse movements to compensate for the larger screen.

We all know that 1ms response times on LCDs are the goal and as we go up in refresh rate that also helps input lag come down. OLED has a unique advantage in that all response times are sub 1ms, which feels incredible. Because OLED can redraw motion so fast the clarity of this monitor while playing something fast paced like Doom or COD is amazing.

Now, 480Hz is something I will probably never need or use for quite some time. Unless I start playing games like CS2 or Quake I’d argue I’m never going to use it. Most games I play hit 300 FPS at best. To be fair, while we’ve realistically hit the point of diminishing returns at 240Hz. I wasn’t looking for anything higher than that. There are some e-sports titles like CS2 that will be able to take advantage of this. Nut that’s very few games. I can notice a bit of a difference but it’s nowhere near as stark as going from 60hz to 240Hz. Its nice but I absolutely could live without it. Maybe time will change my mind on that.

OLED Problems

You would think that with all these good things to say this monitor would be a keeper. Generally, you’d be right. The thing about it is there’s some issues with OLED in general that I was not prepared for, even if I was prepared for some of the bigger ones.

  • Burn in is an issue with OLED. Period. It’s not if, it’s when. For the prices that Asus is asking for this panel, I feel like a 3 year burn in warranty is enough. Unless you use this only for content consumption and gaming you’ll have burn in sooner rather than later. This concerns me as I use the panel for personal work on my Mac and in Windows. I also use of for remote work for my day job. That’s a lot of hours with static content. Following Tim’s abuse of an OLED over on Monitors Unboxed gives hope since that’s all he’s using an OLED for and is a disaster scenario and his seems to be holding up ok considering. Still, the burn in is an issue in general, even with TVs. I think this was about the only issue I was prepared for going in.

  • Variable Refresh Rates are useless since they can’t be used. This is something I was unprepared for. Yes the hardware is capable of doing it and it does indeed do it but using it creates a flicker that almost no reviews talk about. The only review that mentions it was the one over at rtings.com. It’s very distracting even if it doesn’t seem to happen during game play. The only real solution is to turn it off. So then why bother including it? Yes, the monitor has an anti flicker setting but it’s still there. there is no good solution to this other than to turn it off.

The Last Of Us Part 2 Remastered menu screen The Last Of Us Part 2 Remastered Menu Screen

Doom The Dark Ages Chapter End screen Doom The Dark Ages Chapter End Screen

Call of Duty Loading Screen Call of Duty Loading Screen

  • On the Mac, waking the Mac from sleep and letting the panel come up produces issues so I turned off VRR on the Mac as well. It’s not needed there so it’s no real loss.

  • The 480Hz refresh rate also seems to be a problem for the Mac display driver. I have random crashes of macOS that, as best I can tell from the crash report, are due to the display driver crashing/panicking while trying to put the monitor to sleep.

Will I keep it?

For weeks I was torn between keeping it and returning it. Yes, the colors and everything are amazing. The response times when gaming are perfect. Even when there is natural motion blur during fast games, like COD, the screen as clear as it can be. I ended up watching Rogue One and some other TV shows over the weekend just to try it out fully. It’s a gorgeous panel and the 480Hz refresh rate is nice even if it is barely noticeable above 240Hz and a little overkill. The 27″ size doesn’t bother me as much as I was afraid of while gaming, and 1440p is a vast improvement over my previous MSI 1080p panel. It makes me want to update my Dell UltraSharps that are sitting here to 27″ now too. I’m just not sure I can get past the combination of burn in, VRR issues, and that $1000 price tag.

I went back and watched Monitor Unboxed’s review of the PG27AQN. At time of release, it also carried a $1000 price tag, which would be about $1100 with inflation. As I watched Tim’s review I was reminded of all the things we go through for finding that perfect LCD. The overshoot. The inverse ghosting. The overdrive. All the things we have to turn on and tweak to make sure we have a clear, clean picture. Even then, it still might not be quite right. There’s always some backlight bleed or uniformity issue. The only upside is that the sRGB color space is perfect on LCDs at this point.

So even in a perfect scenario, I’d be trading uniformity and backlight bleed for burn in and VRR flicker (which can be corrected, even if it sucks to disable it). It really just comes down to which set of problems do I want to have.

Ultimately I’ve decided to keep it. And there’s a few reasons why:

First, we moved from CRTs to LCDs about twenty years ago and back then you could make the same arguments about LCDs and burn in but also that, at the time, LCD was the inferior screen if we’re talking about refresh rates and ghosting. An 8ms response time was considered good in 2005. In some ways it felt like a step back even if the overall picture was better. Same case here. I don’t mind being a bit on the cutting edge here.

Second, there is a three year warranty on burn in. So I look at it this way: at worst I RMA the monitor within three years. At best I get the supposed 5 years out of it before any burn becomes noticeable and unbearable. It’s more than what I would’ve gotten back in the day on my first LCD as there were no burn in warranties that I remember on LCDs back then.

Lastly, and this could just be a placebo effect, but it feels a little easier on my eyes. Because the black is pure black and LEDs aren’t lighting up it feels like it isn’t straining my eyes like a regular LCD monitor does. Black is black because the pixels are off. There is no back light blasting me even when trying to produce dark colors of black. As someone who sits in front of a computer for living that makes all the difference in how I feel at the end of the day.

That said, the only people that should buy this monitor are people who play games that can hit 480 FPS. I’m sure there are better OLED monitors at 1440p and 27” out there for colors but not for gaming. Even then, who’s really hitting these frame rates consistently?

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The Best Of The Modern Doom Games You Say? ▉

This video by John Linneman at Digital Foundry is an interesting watch and I’ll be curious to see if I agree with his criticisms once the game releases and I can get my grubby paws on it.

Considering how close we are to release I would consider most of this done and arguably not changing for launch at least. That’s fine because if something truly is an issue id usually will make adjustments accordingly. I like that the combat seems fast and furious and very much like the original 1995 Doom games. Doom Eternal was fast but this seems faster. It’s also crazy to think that all these years later we’re back at the crazy amounts of enemies on screen as we re back in the 90’s too. I agree with John’s take on the Glory Kill system and how it seemed to get abused in Eternal and I’m glad to see it dialed back in The Dark Ages. He makes it sound like they practically killed the system though and I’m not quite sure that was the right move either. I won’t know until I play it for myself.

I would be remiss if we didn’t talk at least a little bit about the engine. The game looks amazing as expected from id and it justifies the 7900 XTX in the gaming rig. I was right to suspect that India Jones and The Great Circle would share an engine to some extent with this game. Now, as noted in the video, the Ray Tracing here is done well and from what I can tell seems mandatory, just like Indy. Which means a 16GB graphics card is an absolute necessity to play this game in all its bloody and violent glory even at 1080p max settings. Recommended specs on Steam state a 10GB card seemingly for 1440p/60FPS/ High Quality but thats about as low as I’d be wiling to go and feel comfortable that I’d have a good experience even at 1080p.

Some ancient wisdom learned long ago: recommended requirements are often the real minimum requirements.

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Yes It’s a Coup. Again. ▉

Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, writing on his substack about the current coup in progress here in the United States:

Imagine if it had gone like this.

Ten Tesla cybertrucks, painted in camouflage colors with a giant X on each roof, drive noisily through Washington DC. Tires screech. Out jump a couple of dozen young men, dressed in red and black Devil’s Champion armored costumes. After giving Nazi salutes, they grab guns and run to one government departmental after another, calling out slogans like “all power to Supreme Leader Skibidi Hitler.”

Historically, that is what coups looked like. The center of power was a physical place. Occupying it, and driving out the people who held office, was to claim control. So if a cohort of armed men with odd symbols had stormed government buildings, Americans would have recognized that as a coup attempt.

And that sort of coup attempt would have failed.

Now imagine that, instead, the scene goes like this.

A couple dozen young men go from government office to government office, dressed in civilian clothes and armed only with zip drives. Using technical jargon and vague references to orders from on high, they gain access to the basic computer systems of the federal government. Having done so, they proceed to grant their Supreme Leader access to information and the power to start and stop all government payments.

That coup is, in fact, happening. And if we do not recognize it for what it is, it could succeed.

In the third decade of the twenty first century, power is more digital than physical. The buildings and the human beings are there to protect the workings of the computers, and thus the workings of the government as a whole, in our case an (in principle) democratic government which is organized and bounded by a notion of individual rights.

The ongoing actions by Musk and his followers are a coup because the individuals seizing power have no right to it. Elon Musk was elected to no office and there is no office that would give him the authority to do what he is doing. It is all illegal. It is also a coup in its intended effects: to undo democratic practice and violate human rights.

This is exactly the sort of thing I had been saying privately during the election cycle and essentially this was the sort of unsaid pushback that I, and anyone like me who studied political science and history, got when we said we would lose the country if Trump won. It’s also the same reason Americans don’t seem to take January 6th seriously. They say it can’t happen here or that those things just don’t happen anymore in modern, at least western, society. It’s because they don’t look like the coups that we grew up learning about in grade or high school. To Snyder’s example above, those governments were either taken by some kind of group quickly or violently through some type of force. But coups have many forms and not all of them are obvious.

We as Americans tend to think of coups as things closer to revolutions. Messy and violent. People in the streets with guns. Americans in particular also have a tendency to think that these are things things that only happen in poor or faraway places like Africa or Eastern Europe. But they can happen here too. We all learn about Shay’s Rebellion in school. What we aren’t taught is that was a failed coup against the then Federal Government under the Articles of Confederation, before the Constitution. Like it or not, January 6th, 2021 was also a failed coup. Donald Trump lost the 2020 election was attempting to maintain power even though he no longer had any right to it.

I feel like when people discuss the fall of a democratic system, they expect things to change overnight. As I said, we expect these things to be messy and violent. That’s just not how it works with the new authoritarians. It took Hitler roughly six months to change Weimar Germany to Nazi Germany.

At this pace we’ll be full on authoritarian in about six weeks.

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Half Life 3… Confirmed? Maybe? Probably? ▉

Kyle Orland writing for Ars Technica:

The more than two decades since Half-Life 2’s release have been filled with plenty of rumors and hints about Half-Life 3, ranging from the official–ish to the thin to the downright misleading. As we head into 2025, though, we’re approaching something close to a critical mass of rumors and leaks suggesting that Half-Life 3 is really in the works this time, and could be officially announced in the coming months.

The latest tease came just before the end of 2024 via a New Year’s Eve social media video from G-Man voice actor Mike Shapiro. In the voice of the mysterious in-game bureaucrat, Shapiro expresses hopes that “the next quarter century [will] deliver as many unexpected surprises as did the

[…]

On its own, a single in-character post from a voice actor would probably be a bit too cryptic to excite Half-Life fans who have seen their sequel hopes dashed so often over the last two decades. But the unexpected tease comes amid a wave of leaks and rumors surrounding “HLX,” an internal Valve project that has been referenced in a number of other Source 2 engine game files recently.

Kyle’s right in that any other voice actor dropping an in character social media post is really not a big deal. Even if one suddenly showed up from, say, Joe DiMaggio, the voice of Marcus Fenix from the Gears Of War series, it would be notable but not “what the actual fuck” notable.

It’s very rare that we get any Half Life news, and Valve is a famously secretive company. They also famously tend to move at their own pace and I had heard that while Half Life 3 was not in development for quite some time, it was more that they were waiting for the time, but more likely the technology, to be right.

Those HLX references got a lot more attention about five months ago when noted Valve watcher Tyler McVicker posted a video analyzing the Valve code and concluding that the HLX project is “a fully-fledged non-VR Half-Life game.” In subsequent videos, McVicker has gone into more detail on datamined code for everything from voxel-based deformation systems to zero-g and underwater navigation systems to “so much flammability stuff,” all seemingly in service of “HLX.”

“It’s obvious that Valve wants to be able to push the envelope in the same way that Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2 did in their day,” McVicker said in November in a video bluntly entitled “Valve Isn’t Trying to Hide HL3 Anymore.” McVicker now believes that “instead of pushing graphical fidelity like everybody else, it seems like Valve is pushing for physical fidelity” with its in-game systems and objects.

As McVicker states in the second linked video from the article, Valve is a bit notorious for pushing technical boundaries. While the original game mostly pushed boundaries in terms of level design and storytelling, the second blew our fragile minds with physics. Between the Gravity Gun and the ability to wreck a level according to the actual laws of physics, Half Life 2 was something we had never seen before and I would argue really haven’t seen since. But Valve is also really big on things like AI. Remember Left 4 Dead? Remember what made that game special? The AI “Director”. The “Director” would dynamically spawn enemies and items based on each player’s stauts, situation, and skill. This would make each play through dynamic. The version in Left 4 Dead 2 can also affect the levels.

Let’s also not forget something that was small, but very impressive when Valve revealed Counter Strike 2: the volumetric smoke effect.

Valve isn’t just looking to make a game that looks and plays good. They’re looking to give us a game that plays as if we’re in it. They initially made their mark with the immersion of the original Half Life, upped the anti with the physics of Half Life 2, and now they’re looking to take everything up a notch and do it all again with Half Life 3.

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Get Your COD Skill Ranking ▉

XclusiveAce once again doing the lord’s work in sharing how to get your skill ranking in Call of Duty. As noted in the video, this is all matches played since Vanguard though when I requested my data I had everything in the list from Modern Warfare forward. That could just be for Warzone though they were listed separately.

So what’s the over/under on how long this is available before Activision decides this is something we aren’t supposed to see? I say less than a week.

Grab it here

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From The #Finally Department: XclusiveAce Makes a “COD Is In Trouble” Video ▉

Let me preface this by saying I absolutely appreciate what Ace does not just for the community but that he generally takes the scientific approach to either figureing out how something works or just generally, as he even mentions in this video, proving or disproving a conspiracy theory. His “Gun Guide” weapon stat videos and his videos on perks and other things are quite literally the lord’s work. I know I wouldn’t have the patience to sit and do what he does to help make the community better players. It’s just that most of the time lately he comes across more like an shill apologist evangalist for COD rather than a player. I honestly don’t mean to pick on Ace but that’s how his videos on just about any contraversial topic regadring Call of Duty have felt like these last few years. The most recent video that comes to mind was the first Double XP event in Black Ops 6 where he basically admits the way it works is misleading but is still fine with the idea so that people don’t crash Nuketown 24/7. Double XP should always just be as simple as XP for a given thing… doubled. It shouldn’t even be a discussion let alone Ace having to figure out why people are complaining.

All this to say that you know its bad if Ace is willng to talk about it. It’s really bad if Ace thinks there’s a problem.

He mentions a few things in the video that I really want to touch on as well. The first one being the whitepapers and blog posts.

One of the whitepapers they published was on matchmaking and how it’s done. In that whitepaper they proclaim that “ping is king”. But eveyone knows this ins’t true. Anyone with any experieince playing COD sees their ping fluctuate from game to game. I live in New York City on the east coast of the United States. It’s fine for me to be put in matches in Atlanta or Chicago, or anywhere near those areas. My ping will generally be anywhere from 7ms if I get something local (and I own a Netduma R3 so I always get something local) to ~30ms if I’m put in one of those cities. Whithout the Netduma router I can be placed in games in Dallas or even Los Angeles. I mean shit, I’ve been placed in games in Sao Paulo, Brazil even with the R3. I have a symetrical gigabit fiber connection to my home and live in one of, if not the most, populated areas of the world and you can’t find me a match locally during peak hours? Bullshit.

The second thing, and argueably the more important thing, is the conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories live in the abscence of information. Much like how power abhores a vaccum, information does too. Last year’s conspiracy was boits in the multiplayer. That was mostly debunked. This year’s conspiracy is “skill based damage”. Here’s the problem that I have: Somewhere, I’m sure, Activision has a patent that does adjust damage basked on your skill vs your oppoenent’s and vice versa. Do I think it’s in the game? No. Would I belive that Activision would do something scummy like this to make them more money? Absolutely. The problem here? We don’t know because Activision won’t talk about it. Ace even says he’s tried to test and if he can’t find it, and I believe him. I mean it was a joint venture between him and Drift0r that proved the existance of skill based matachmaking. This is a problem that’s only going to get worse the longer it’s ignored.

But to answer his question at the end of his video, am I happy with the current state of Call Of Duty? Fuck no.

Jim Kjellin and Andreas Larsson from Machine Games discuss Indiana Jones’s Hardware Ray Tracing with Digital Foundry’s Alex Battalglia ▉

Alex Battalglia from Digital Foundry does a fantastic sit down with Jim Kjellin and Andreas Larsson from Machine Games as well as Jacob Freeman from Nvidia. Alex does all the PC technical videos on the channel and is very good at explaining things so that everyone can understand what’s going on and why it matters.

This interview is no exception. Its technical but I don’t think it’s difficult to follow. It’s also a great example of why this is going to matter to single player, story driven games going forward.

It also goes to show that even in 2024, developers are still squeezing every ounce they can out of the hardware. I know that’s an unpopular take but anyone saying developers are lazy and intentionally not optimizing things doesn’t understand software development at all.

I love that when asked about being one of the first games to require 12GB of VRAM as well as bing the first major title shipping requiring hardware Ray Tracing, they took me down memory lane with Quake 3 Arena breaking new ground by requiring hardware Raster. As you can see in the video when it comes up, it looks crude but that was also 1999.

I keep saying it but only because I’m firmly of the belief that 2024 has been a year of a sort of line of demarcation in technology if you will. There are firm breaks happening and Indiana Jones is one example in that 8GB graphics cards are no longer in spec for modern games. I would push that to include 10GB cards as well and Nvidia’s silicon chops are only going to carry it so far. You can’t make up a lack of physical RAM in silicon. While for a completely different reason, Apple now requiring 8GB of RAM on all iPhones going forward and 16GB on all Macs underscores this. Microsoft doesn’t even offer a Surface with less than 16GB of RAM either, most likely for the same reason Apple bumped their specs (AI).

What’s fun is that it feels like the late 90’s all over again where game developers are putting their foot down and pushing new technologies forward, available hardware be damned. The even more impressive thing is that it’s still coming from the same place: idTech and id Software. Indiana Jones may not be an id Software title but it’s using idTech underneath.

I really truly cannot wait to see what’s in store for Doom: The Dark Ages.

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XDefiant Season 3 Is The Last And Best Update ▉

This update is incredibly bittersweet. The Season 3 update bringing in the Assassins faction is amazing and looks like it wil be really fun to play. New modes and a classic COD style prestige mode.

But alas, this is also the last update as the game shuts down in June. It’s crazy to see where this game was headed as we also got all the upcoming content from seasons 4 through 8 both finished and unfinished.

With Black Ops 6, and arguably Call Of Duty as a whole, in a downward spiral, it’s a shame this game is shutting down.

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Digital Foundry’s PC Tech Review For Indiana Jones Shows Exactly Why 8GB Cards Are Done ▉

Alex for Digital Foundry getting into the VRAM issue I wrote about yesterday. But also you should check out Digital Foundry’s Tech Review for Xbox Series Consoles. It can be hard to understand why this isn’t an optimization problem and is indeed a VRAM issue and I think Alex describes the problem well. It really comes down to not just pure frames per second and frame times as the game and id Tech in general has always done that really well. It really is a texture loading issue and frankly the size of the textures in the game and in December of 2024 going into 2025 is just simply too big to achieve the visual detail the team wanted with such a small memory pool. As Alex points out, you can work around it but it’s still a problem in some places and as textures load in.

The original teams that made the engines any not be there anymore but if it is one thing id Tech engines are known for its raw performance.

The era of 8 GB cards is over. I would even warn against a 10 or 12 GB card. Going forward 16 GB should be the minimum anyone should be buying whether they’re using frame generation technologies like FSR or DLSS or not. There really is no excuse anymore.

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