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
100hz ultrawide monitor to a 200hz 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 38gl 950g it's
g-sync it's up to 175 hertz it's ultra
wide and it's not only bigger at 38
versus 35 inches it's even cheaper
so let's find out which one ends up on my desk
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so even though this is not my first encounter with this monitor i actually
saw lg show it off back at it's 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 thousand knit 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 going to 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 going to be getting the most out of it um
and 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
uh 38 versus 35 inches but turns out
that is a lot of panel
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 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 hey there it is all right we're running
at 60 hertz right now though so let's get that fixed too so that's 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 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
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
175 hertz
theoretically it's fine but you never know sometimes when manufacturers advertise
an overclocking setting they're saying yeah it 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 175 hertz full native resolution you're going to go and you're
going to apply that and you're going to 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 going to 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 have 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
a lot of these reflections off the rocks
kind of are unrealistic it makes everything look kind of
shiny like an 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 minute 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 um
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
backlight but it specifically says sdr variable
backlight and it's grayed out it appears
as though in order to increase the um 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 gotta say i was sort of expecting the outcome to be
lg clear winner plop that goes on the desk but up until 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 pg35
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 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 aha take that terrace
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 offers 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
three 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 going to 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 versus 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 if i knows the game that you're playing
the most i feel like i'd go with the lg go with the lg frano yeah but like
i would feel like i want to bring this one home to play tomb raider or
battlefield v 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 going to 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 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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