heywood on 13/4/2019 at 10:58
I haven't played a game with vertical sync off in over 20 years, so no tearing.
Thirith on 13/4/2019 at 16:29
Vsync has the problem of only working with set fractions of your overall refresh rate, which means that you might keep jumping between 30fps and 60fps, and that's quite a noticeable jump. That's where the advantage of adaptive sync comes in: you can have clean, tearfree frames whose framerate varies smoothly.
heywood on 15/4/2019 at 22:17
I can't stand tearing, so the drops in frame rate are the lesser of the two evils to me.
I did try using adaptive sync with the new NVidia driver. In older games that don't tax my graphics card, the effect is that I get a steady 75 fps rather than 60 fps, and I don't notice the difference. To benefit from FreeSync in newer games, I've got to dial down the display settings to stay above the 52 Hz minimum vertical refresh rate of my monitor, otherwise I get flickering. Without FreeSync, I usually try to pick settings that stay just above 60 fps most of the time, with occasional frame rate drops in certain scenes. There isn't much difference between 52 fps and 60 fps in terms of smoothness or what quality settings you can use. And due to the limited power of my GTX 1060, there are some games like Mankind Divided where I can't sustain those refresh rates even with low settings, so its better to just target a steady 30 fps on higher quality settings.
I think I would see much more benefit if my monitor supported a wider range of vertical refresh rates. Some gaming monitors claim 40-144 Hz. But once I saw a 38" ultra-wide screen, I had to have one, even if there are some sacrifices in gaming performance.
nam67190 on 24/4/2019 at 15:23
I own LG 29" Ultrawide monitor and its totally worth it imo. It is very useful while working but in gaming you'll have to check if that resolution is supported by that game or not
Pyrian on 24/4/2019 at 16:13
Any thoughts on corner-placed UI elements in ultrawide monitors? Still good? Bad because hard to see?
SubJeff on 24/4/2019 at 21:58
They're fine.
heywood on 24/4/2019 at 22:52
I think it depends on the screen size and how vital the information is. With my 38" screen, I have to move my head a little bit to check on the corners, which isn't something I want to be doing constantly. So I wouldn't want a light gem in a corner. Or if I'm playing a game where I have to constantly monitor health and energy/mana to keep from dying, I'd rather have the meters at the top or bottom of the screen so I don't have move my eyes from the screen center in the middle of a battle.
On the other hand, sometimes it's nice to have HUD elements that I don't use a lot moved to the periphery. In Human Revolution, I always wished for a way to turn off the radar because it was distracting. I was trying not to use it because it seemed like a cheat, but it kept drawing my attention. When I played the Director's Cut last year with the new monitor, the radar was far enough away from the center of the screen that I was able to ignore it.
On a large high resolution screen, HUD size & scaling is as important as placement. When playing older games designed for lower resolutions, I've had more trouble with scaling the HUD to an acceptable size than getting 21:9 to work. In games that have a clear, easy to ready HUD, I can scale up the size to the point where it becomes possible to keep track of vital information in my peripheral vision without taking focus away from the center of the screen.
Thirith on 26/8/2019 at 09:40
Quick update: I've now joined the ultrawide ranks. On Friday I got an LG 34GK950G-B... and it's nice. Very nice. I've not done much gaming on it so far, but Wolfenstein: The New Colossus is smooth as silk, and while Arma is never entirely smooth the performance is pretty good. The added width does a nice job of giving me something akin to peripheral vision. Finally, while I haven't yet worked much with it, the additional width definitely helped when I edited our current podcast episode.
Corsair on 12/9/2019 at 05:58
How's the back light bleed? I went from an AOC U3477PQU to an Alienware AW3418DW for the higher refresh and gsync, but am disappointed with the amount of black light bleed in comparison to the AOC model, which had virtually none. I did try an Acer Predator before getting the Alienware, but the back light bleed was so horrendous that I returned it after a couple of days. Apparently curved monitors are really hit and miss.
Thirith on 14/9/2019 at 18:24
It doesn't bother me in practice, but it's not like the lighting in our bedroom is great, so I may have a fairly high tolerance level for less than ideal setups. I've not yet played games where darkness is key.
