Ultrawide monitors. This is not the first one I've seen, but it is the first
I've seen that targets gamers so directly. Welcome to my video of the LG
34UM67. Fractal Design listens and the Define R5 case was made with feedback
from you, the community. So, click my face to learn more about that and give
your feedback. So, let's start by having a look at her physically. H if you
watched my video on the 34UM95 just under a year ago, you
already know pretty much how this story goes. The stand is see-through, which is
neat, but it's otherwise subpar since only its tilt and angle can be adjusted
without removing and replacing the two screws that let you change the height a
grand total of like an inch. And there's some unfortunate stuff at the back as
well. That glossy plastic is going to do what glossy plastic does best. Although
we might have an idea for a solution, so make sure that you're subscribed for
that video. And while the standard vasa mount and included sticker to protect
the back of your monitor are welcome sites, folks who want to wall mount this
puppy will need to buy lowprofile angled connectors for anything but the second
HDMI input. So, the audio pass through HDMI 1, DVI or DisplayPort ports. No
USB hub back here. Something I would have liked to see on such an expensive
display as well. Moving around to the front, things get quite a bit better in
a hurry. The bezel around the matte anti-glare coated 2560x 1080 75 Hz IPS
panel is super slim, and LG's joystick for navigating the onscreen menu is
present. And what an onscreen menu it
is. It lacks an sRGB color profile, even
though 99% sRGB coverage is a selling point on the monitor's web page for some
reason. But if you've got a calibration tool, the six-axis color adjustments
will let you take care of that easily. And just about anything else, you can
set it to six bit or 8 bit color, adjust pixel response times, although as usual,
I found medium was the best compromise and much better than older IPS panels.
By the way, you can tinker with their black stabilizer feature, which is
similar to Ben Q's black equalizer, a contrast reducing effect that makes it
easier to see objects in shadows in games without washing out all of the
colors on screen. You can use any of the preconfigured gaming modes that monkey
around with color, gamma, and sharpness, or you can make your own that you can
switch to by pressing up on the joystick twice. And then you can enable and
disable a couple of LG's other killer features for the 34UMM67 as well. The
first is DAZ or dynamic action sync.
This one is pretty simple. It's designed to reduce display lag or the time
between the monitor receiving a frame and displaying it on the screen.
Usually, this feature is labeled on TVs as a game mode or similar and results in
dramatically worse image quality thanks to less pixel processing. But in the
case of the 34UMM67, I can't find any reason with my
bare eyes to turn it off. It looked exactly the same to me. And the second
killer app, compliance with the optional adaptive sync portion of the Display
Port 1.2A standard and AMD free sync
certification. This monitor supports dynamic refresh rate gaming where your
supported system can effectively tell the monitor when to refresh the image
eliminating the issues associated with VSYNC on. So that is stuttering and lag
and VSYNC off that tearing effect where
there seems to be a horizontal line through the image where there's half of
one frame and half of the next one on the screen at the same time. There are
some caveats here though. In addition to a compliant display, you'll need a
supported AMD dedicated or onboard graphics solution. You'll need a display
port cable, curiously not included in the box. And you'll need a Freync
compatible driver. So, I used a beta 1 provided by AMD for my evaluation of
this monitor. Yes, friends, NVIDIA graphics card owners will not be able to
take advantage of the dynamic refresh rate of this monitor unless NVIDIA
decides to go down the DP1.2A open standard route sometime in the future.
instead of asking monitor vendors to buy their own G-Sync scaler chip, something
that at this time is quite expensive and only supports DisplayPort input, but
NVIDIA claims will have other advantages down the line. We can talk about that
when that comes, but first, let's talk about the usage experience of this
monitor. I still love ultrawide for productivity, but I'm also still not
super stoked on 2560x 1080 for that
particular use case. I found myself frustrated with the number of vertical
pixels, scrolling a lot, the same way that I always was way back in the day of
the dinosaurs when 16x10 monitors went out of fashion to be replaced by 16x9
1080p monitors. And this issue if for me
is made worse by the size of this display thanks to its IPS panel.
Contrast, color vibrancy, and viewing angles are non-issues. But with pixel
density this low, even with no scaling,
text looks abominable and no amount of
low blue light reading modes made it feel comfortable for me to use compared
to its 3440x440 brethren, also from LG. But I
understand why LG did it this way. They didn't really have a choice. From the
marketing, this is a gaming monitor first and productivity monitor second.
And 3440x440 is just about 80% more pixels
than 2560x 1080, which might make graphics card companies happy with all
the video cards they'll be selling just so folks can play games at native res,
but might not thrill gamers too much. And in games, the pixel density bothers
me a lot less. I don't find anti-aliasing unnecessary like I did
with Dell's 5K monitor, but four times
AA was a good balance between playability of very demanding games like
Crisis 3 at very high settings on an R9 290X and image quality. Gaming on this
screen this size is going to be immersive pretty much no matter how you slice it. And thanks to its very low
lag, solid motion blur performance, and
75 Hz panel that really does make a big
difference over 60. By the way, the 34UMM67 is a pleasure to game on. But
hold on a second, Lionus. You didn't even mention Freync yet. You're right. I
didn't. But I will now hear in the conclusion. In spite of this monitor's
presence in AMD's Freync media materials and the prominent logo on the box, I
didn't find the implementation of Freync to be as useful as it can be in this
case. But it took me a few hours and a lifeline call to my buddy Ryan Shrout
from PC Perspective to figure out why I
was encountering stuttering and tearing with Freync enabled when it was clearly
working in AMD's windmill demo. It's because this monitor's adaptive refresh
rate window is from 48 hertz to 75
hertz, only 27 hertz. That means even if
you enable freync with VSSync also on
the experience is pretty good as long as your frame rates remain pretty high
other than the very slight input lag penalty similar to VSync that is caused
by capping your frame rate like that. And with it off, so with VSync off,
you'll actually still get tearing anytime your game runs above 75 FPS. And
there's more bad news, too. You'll get lag under 48 FPS thanks to LG's
selection of 48 hertz as the low-end cut off of the adaptive refresh rate window
on this monitor. But to be clear, this
is not a knock-on freeync. There are monitors with much wider like 100 Hz
plus Windows that go down to 40 Hz. And the spec actually allows for Windows as
low as 9 hertz once panel technology improves. And it's actually not a
condemnation of the 34UM67 as a gaming monitor either. Its size, IPS panel, and
ultrawide aspect ratio along with its incredible responsiveness for
considering all of those things still make it a totally unique gaming
experience. It just means that those two technologies didn't complement each
other as well as I was really hoping for in this case. So, this is cool. Well,
we're giving away 30 one month XSplit professional codes. All you got to do is
enter in the form thread in the video description and winners will be selected
one week from today, April the 2nd.
Pretty cool stuff. Not today, April the 2nd. On April the 2nd. Yay. Anyway, if
you don't know what XSplit is, it's basically a broadcasting software that
personally I absolutely love. We use it every Friday for our live show. It
allows us to change scenes. It allows us to take a wide variety of different
inputs and basically switch them around, move people around. We can import Skype
callers so that we can have people, you know, joining us for our podcast or
video podcast as it were. And it's awesome for game streamers, especially
when it's paired with XSplit Game. So, there's broadcaster and game cer. So,
Gamecaster is great for gamers because it allows you to bring up a little overlay so you can easily stop and start
your stream and all that kind of good stuff. And one of the coolest things about XSplit is that it is absolutely
free for the basic version. So all you got to do is head over to
xplit.com/minus to start streaming and recording in HD today. So guys, thanks
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