ASUS and Acer UHD G-Sync HDR Monitors Forced to Use Color Compression at 120/144 Hz
We've mentioned the new Ultra HD G-Sync HDR ACER and ASUS monitors a couple of times already. Over the weekend some reported the ACER one got in the news due to a loud ventilator, today more news reaches the web, in high-refresh-rate modes, the displays fall back to color compression.
A few early adopters of these HDR, local dimming monster monitors noticed and reported on Reddit that when using a high refresh rate, the image quality dropped significantly. The story now is that the ASUS and Acer screens make use of color compression at 120 and 144 Hz, not because the panel couldn't handle it, but the main limitation is signal bandwidth over DisplayPort 1.4. This also means you pretty much need to run your Windows desktop at 60 Hz for a bit of a quality readable view.
DisplayPort 1.4 has too little bandwidth available to drive 4k, 144 Hz without compression. To bypass that, the screen monitor signal reverts to 4:2:2 chroma subsampling. basically your brightness information will remain intact, however, the color information will be based on half the resolution, 1920 x 2160 pixels. All is good up to 98 Hz, after that, it's 4:2:2 chroma subsampling ... on your 2500 Euro / 2000 USD Screen. Lovely. There's no real solution for this, other than new display connectors and graphics cards that do support such high bandwidth connections - HDMI 2.1.
chroma subsampling. (Picture: Wikimedia )
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Junior Member
Posts: 4862
Joined: 2009-08-29
I don't know how you would hit over 100fps @ 4k hdr enabled game anyway, kinda pointless for these monitors to even have that high of a refresh rate.
They could have left them at 60 and saved us all some $$
The vast majority of older games do that easily on a 1080Ti and even less.
Some newer games easily do 80FPS as well. Not every title worth playing is a AAA title with graphics rendering techniques that shatter the Earth in terms of performance required.
It's also a $2000 monitor that's supposed to last for a very long time. We need maybe 2 complete generations of GPUs to have GPUs that can do 4K 100FPS+ even on the latest AAA titles. 27" 4K 144Hz HDR IPS LCD is literally the monitor beyond which you encounter severe diminishing returns in terms of everything (resolution, refresh rate, color quality, contrast) and perhaps the only thing that could be improved upon sufficiently would be when OLED / microLED becomes mature enough to replace LCDs for desktop monitors, preventing the need for FALD and hitting even wider color gamuts at much lower response times / with strobing.
As it stands, $2000 for a monitor that will be fully fed, even with the latest games, at its 4:4:4 refresh rate of 98Hz in mostly a few year's time and essentially "bottleneck" your system from shooting for higher framerates even when that technology is available does not seem very well thought out.
Senior Member
Posts: 1636
Joined: 2009-01-21
I dont think so, as long as its real HDR. I play on a HDR10 tv and the games that support HDR look incredible. Its gimmicky in the way that there are not a huge amount of games that support it yet. Many more games on console support HDR compared to PC which is unfortunate. The brights are brighter, the darks are darker while keeping the detail, no color banding and overall just a more realistic picture. I personally feel that its still new so there are quite a few kinks as some games just do a much better job than others. Far Cry 5 and Destiny 2 are the two best looking HDR games I have seen so far. Assassins Creed Origins is not too far behind. The colors are improved for sure.
Having said that, a non HDR screen can still look really good if calibrated properly. I have also sacrificed high refresh rate and frame rate for 4k HDR 60 fps. At this point it is a trade off that you have to decide if its worth it. I really miss my 120hz gsync ultrawide in that regard, but considering most games I play are single player these days, the immersion is worth more than the latter.
Junior Member
Posts: 1
Joined: 2018-06-24
I dont understand what they done with the extra year wait ? When they should of been working on making this monitor perfect ,They should of been making it run on two Dports not one to booster the power ,Or maybe thats all ready done this, and this is phase one of the money making ,Then phase two will come later this year or early next with two Dports working as one to get true 4k hrd 144hz at 4:4:4 .They need to save something or what can they do next RIGHT !!! But for the money they want for this monitor its insane when its not really a true 4K HDR 144HZ monitor as showed on the TIN ...
But Ill be happy to play games at 4k SDR and 120hz at 4:4:4 ..HDR is over rated