This isn't the first time that I've checked out a monitor with AMD Freync,
and you can watch my video about the LG 34UM67
up in the little eye thing, but it might
be the first Freync monitor to impress me with its variable refresh rate
technology since it mostly avoids a significant pitfall that the other one
didn't. This is the BenQ XL 2730Z,
the AMD gamer's answer to the critically acclaimed ASUS ROG Swift PG278Q that I
declared to be the best gaming monitor yet in August of last year.
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Let's start the video with something Ben Q hasn't done as well as ASUS. The ID or
industrial design of the XL2730Z.
Instead of glowing red rings on the base and a stunningly slim bezel, BenQ has
taken the yo, my eyes are up here approach with a plain, completely
uninteresting look. But hey, maybe that
works for them since you won't be giving up anything as far as actual features
are concerned. Front and center is the
144 hertz 2560x440 16x9 8bit TN panel boasting 1
millisecond gray to gray response times basically no input lag and what's this
72% NTSC color gamut support so about
equal to sRGB not too shabby yes it
turns out that much like the ROG Swift which likely uses the same or a very
similar panel this is not your
granddaddy's TN with rubbish color accuracy, nauseainducing color and
contrast shift, and a washed out low contrast overall appearance. And while I
wouldn't recommend it for any professional photo editing, anyone
coming from an older or less expensive commodity grade monitor is going to be
plenty impressed. More impressive stuff. Even though you don't have to use it
thanks to the Vasa compliant holes at the back, the stand features all the
usual adjustments, tilt, swivel, height, and even pivot, and has some unusual
stuff like a spot to put the puck controller that you can use to navigate
the onscreen menu, a handle for carrying it to and from LAN events, both
headphone and microphone audio jacks, and even look at that, a little
headphone holder. Right under that bad boy are two of the USB 3.0 ports that
run off the built-in powered hub. Then around the bottom, we find the other two
of those along with a metric whack ton of other I/O. We've got the uplink for
the USB hub, VGA, I seriously VGA.
Anyway, DisplayPort, dual HDMI inputs,
one of which is HDMI 2.0, dual link DVI,
the connector for the little controller puck, and the microphone pass through.
You won't actually need a pass through for your headphones since your audio will actually come over HDMI or display
port from your video card. And that DisplayPort port, that's the one you're
going to want to use primarily if you're a PC gamer because if you want to take
advantage of the big feature of the XL 2730Z, AMD's Freync variable refresh
rate technology, that is the input that
supports it for now. So, let's talk about Freync. Just like NVIDIA's G-Sync,
it allows the graphics card to work in tandem with the monitor to only update
the image on the display once a new frame has been rendered by the GPU. This
is to eliminate stuttering and tearing in the onscreen animations as frame
rates swing all over the place during a typical gaming session. But, and this
was the issue I had with the 34UM67, while AMD in theory supports anywhere
from 9 to 240 Hz refresh rates to match
the frames that the video card is outputting per second, modern LCD panels
need to be refreshed more often than nine times per second or the image will
actually start to fade in between frames being drawn, causing an unpleasant
flickering. NVIDIA handles this with a strategic frame doubling or even
tripling strategy that they've implemented consistently on their
certified displays. But on the Freync side, it's been left up to monitor
makers to determine how low they can go.
So with my last monitor, it actually had an effective variable refresh rate
window with butter smooth animations of only 48 to 75 hertz. A window that one
could easily exceed on both sides in a
single gaming session. But what about exceeding the range of
the window then? Well, AMD handles this by allowing you to either enable
traditional VSSync and choose to deal with some lag when frame rates are high,
although it's fairly minor on a high refresh rate display like this one
outside of the window or deal with some tearing by disabling VSYNC altogether.
Something NVIDIA does not give their users the option to choose. But enough
of this theory stuff. What's it like to game on the thing? Well, I started by
fine-tuning the image quality settings cuz as much as BenQ's black equalizer
feature allows you to see bad guys hidden in shadows, it really does look
like butt. And I wish they wouldn't enable it by default since it's only
really relevant for competitive play and not the kind of sightseeing gaming that
I typically do. And then when I was done with that, I fired up some games.
Overall impressions, not too shabby. Freync works as expected. noticeably
smoothing animations regardless of frame rate. So, check out the ugly mini tears
in this uh street lamp post in Grand Theft Auto 5 without Freync. And then
check it out again with Freeync. And the best thing about it is that it doesn't
disappoint the way that it did with the LG ultra wide thanks to the much wider
variable refresh rate window. So, the 2730Z actually handles everything from
40 to 144 hertz, which if you tweak your
graphical settings correctly, should be plenty of room to stay inside. But what
if you do dip below that 40fps? What I
tried to do was create a scenario with the R9290X
as well as the GeForce GTX 970 where I'd
be floating in that 30ish FPS range just
to see how they both felt in Grand Theft Auto 5. And while I don't necessarily
agree with Scott at Tech Report's assessment that the shift isn't that
noticeable or that there isn't much of a difference, what I do think is that any
PC gamer who is gaming on a 144 hertz
display at that kind of a frame rate
should be changing the settings in the game in order to get the best out of
their equipment anyway because neither G-Sync nor Freync are able to maintain
their wow the animation is still smooth
even though I dipped below 60 FPS effect
below around 45 FPS anyway. So, it's
basically a moot point, but NVIDIA does seem to handle it a little bit better.
So, with that said, even though I could create situations where the gaming
experience wasn't as ideal or quite as good as G-Sync, thanks to the large
window and the configurability of PC games, the XL 2730Z looked great to me
as a PC gamer using variable refresh on an AMD graphics card. But there are some
users who might not be as thrilled with the monitor. It does have a touch more
motion blur compared to the RG Swift. Again, not a closed ecosystem, therefore
harder to control, things like pixel timing, blippity bloop. And user
Falconine from overclock.net points out that because BenQ didn't correctly
implement single strobe backlight modulation at some refresh rates, very
notably 60 Hz, motion blur reduction, which is the strobing backlight, which
doesn't work alongside Freync and therefore I would typically leave off on a PC anyway, won't work correctly on a
game console. a bit of a bummer if you wanted this as a multi-purpose display
thanks to its plethora of inputs. Which
leaves just the bottom line. Is it worth it? Wow. If it was the same price as my
new favorite gaming monitor, the XB270HU,
an IPS 144Hz G-Sync monitor, I would say
no. But at $200 cheaper,
it's really darn competitive. So, that's pretty much it. Thanks for watching,
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