this is part of a new generation of OLED displays that LG is calling dual mode it
allows you to switch between the native 4K resolution and 1080p resolution wait
you must be thinking I can do that on my monitor right now is my monitor dual
mode or no DEA mode yes but also no if
you have a Modern Display it may be capable of interpreting a signal in all
of those different modes but only one of them is native that is able to be
displayed cleanly without any scaling
that is the trick here or at least it
would be if it worked as well as this segue to our sponsor ug green their
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before we get into the details let's just try the two different modes because
there is more to this than just setting it to the ideal mode and then forgetting
about it forever in theory a display like this can offer The Best of Both
Worlds right now what we're looking at is 4K 240 HZ obviously there's
outstanding picture Clarity amazing motion Clarity but because of how human
Vision Works OLED is is still going to have some drawbacks compared to a
classic CRT monitor that is unless you use black frame insertion to
artificially strobe the image so to my eyes this is this is pretty darn clear
even with fast onscreen movements but it
can be better we experimented with this before we started and it turns out mid
game at least in this game I can just
press the mode toggle button and now we're looking at 1080p 4 180 HZ
we still get the same outstanding HDR and color performance but at this size I
would say the image Clarity is a bit of a drag the upside is that by running at
a lower resolution we overcome the limitations of our DisplayPort link and
we can run it a whopping 480 Refreshers
per second now I already spoke about this in detail when I took my first look
at alienware's new 500 HZ display but in a nutshell it makes more of a difference
than you would probably imagine for reasons that we'll get into later in
terms of the subjective experience it's
great like I just can't miss heads with
this thing you know got him which is really cool but why can't I just go into
the advanced Windows menu and change my refresh rate here there dual mode right
well no since the days of this connector
monitors have included a bit of metadata called called an edid the ID's purpose
is to report the display's capabilities to any connected device be it a computer
game console or what have you this monitor has two eids which can be
toggled through the OSD or this little
button right here we extracted them we
ran them through an interpreter and we had a look at the output end surprisingly the only major difference
is that the 4K mode will not allow the display to be driven past 240 HZ
regardless of the configured resolution in the window settings and the 1080p
edid doesn't list as many resolutions and maxes out at 1080p 480 HZ if you try
to force feed it 4K resolution in 1080P
mode it will actually scale that input down to 1080P and then back up again to
the native 4K of the panel why did they feel the need to do this well we have
some theories but let's come back to them after we've talked about the
performance of the display and determined whether this thing is even worth jumping through all these hoops
for starting with color accuracy srgb mode is solidly okay the color
temperature is a little cool but if you don't know what that means you're unlikely to notice it and if you do you
can simply calibrate your troubles away at least unless you want to use gamer
mode unfortunately it is tuned for
colors that are pretty but not accurate
no problem just ignore it then right I guess but unless you're using one of the
first four listed display modes an extra frame of processing latency gets added
at 480 HZ or 240 HZ for that matter it's
not such a big deal but if you use adaptive sync for smoother animations
and your GPU doesn't happen to be god tier it could be a problem for you in
HDR we measured both low Peak brightness mode and high peak brightness mode low
is best viewed in a dim room while high managed to over 1,00 nits in a 1% window
for dazzling highlights now let's talk about responsiveness this is a gaming
monitor first and foremost and both of the modes are great but they have some
small differences because it refreshes at half the rate the 4K mode has
inherently worse input latency of course we're talking about a difference of
about 1 millisecond so who cares right
well hold on we've said for years that there's a point of diminishing returns
past about 240 HZ but the reason that
faster matters for OLED displays is because of how our eyes perceive motion
by switching more frequently we will see fast moving objects with better Clarity
the 1080p mode has a curious trait of its own though if you run it at a lower
refresh rate the latency goes up more
faster than you would expect perhaps it has something to do with scaling those
inputs it is a 4K native panel regardless of whether it's running in a
1080p mode and scaling is impossible to
avoid on a Modern Display because these panels are made up of a fixed array of
pixels that can't change in size or shape by contrast classic CRTs had no
concept of physical pixels they could adjust the beams to draw tighter lines
for higher resolution even if it came at the cost of brightness or refresh rate
now sometimes scaling can be simple 4K
happens to be exactly four times the number of pixels as 1080p so that's fine
you just double in each mention a voila
perfect clarity just with bigger blocks
this is called integer scaling because the higher resolution can cleanly be
divided by the lower one 4K also happens to be divisible by 720p and for you
retro Gamers 240p as well so you would
think that we would use that kind of scaling as often as possible but as it
turns out most displays just throw a
blurry ambing filter on it and call it a
day of course this isn't most displays is it if LG
expects you to use 1080p mode it had better be clean so how does it hold up
as it turns out pretty okay even in 4k
mode it seems like it's trying to do integer scaling it's sharper than you'd
expect but if you look closely each
1080p pixel is offset down to the right
by half of a 4K pixel okay hold on a second L is half a
pixel you just told me they couldn't change size and shape okay yes but check
this out we've established that integer scaling converts four physical pixels
into a single virtual 1080p pixel if you
offset that by half a pixel in each Dimension now that one pixel takes up
nine at 4K one in the middle and 8 half
pixels on each side at first we thought this must be some kind of intentional
scaling thing but after looking at how it affects the corner pixels we think it's actually
just an off by one error somewhere in the display logic that Maps the scaled
image to the panel we get to see how well it actually scales if we try any
other resolution including 720p and it gets blurred this is unfortunate
because they could have integer scaled 720p as well that would mean that the
Lion's Share of common resolutions over the past two decades would look perfect
on this display at 480 HZ that would be
awesome if LG could rectify it in the future but if not it's a pitfall that
hopefully at least other manufacturers who use a similar technology can avoid
in the future and in LG's defense it's
not really a deal breaker in 4k mode you
can still use integer scaling on your GPU driver or you can use upscaling
methods like dlss and FSR to render your
games at a lower resolution for better performance and then output 4K native
from your GPU which is obviously going to look perfect the question then
becomes why does the 1080p mode exist
and should you bother to use it well our
best educated guess for why the mode switch even has to happen is that the
timing controller or the tcon needs to be reset to change its Behavior even
though 1080p at 480 HZ requires half of the bandwidth of 4K at 240 HZ 480 HZ is
fast in terms of time so the timing controller probably can't directly
address the full 4K pixel Grid at that
crazy speed so instead it appears to use a technique called line doubling
scanning out each line of the image twice to reduce the processing load we
can verify that this is happening by looking at the pixels rather than being
offset in both directions as 1080p looked in the 4K mode now the image is
only offset to the right in summary then intriguing product hopefully it's a
solution that we just won't need a few years from now but if you want
tomorrow's Tech technology today and you don't mind pressing this switch
depending on what mode you want to run in and what game you're running and also
if you don't mind spending $1,400 you're getting a genuinely
impressive piece of technology even if there are a few limitations it also
makes me even more excited for the day after tomorrow no not that one uh when
we see updated tcons that can push even greater than 480 HZ because with pixel
response times that are in the .3 millisecond range OLED has a lot more
headro to be pushed and while 600 HZ or
heck even this 480 HZ display is going to be endgame territory for most people
perfect to the ey motion Clarity could require closer to 1,000 HZ or even more
which is so fast that if you blink you'll miss it like the segue to our
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off thanks for watching guys go check out that time we pitted an OLED against
an HD crrt for a little bit more on the importance of motion Clarity let's go
finish the match