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Happy New Year everyone!
For our first post of 2019, we’re reporting on an exciting new monitor announcement by LG, which has, to my mind, the ideal resolution for watching letterbox CinemaScope movies or playing PC games in Ultra-Wide 21:9 on it.
Expected to be demoed at CES 2019, the new LG 38GL950G-G is a 38-inch monstrosity that offers 3840×1600 at a whopping 175 Hz! The G represents the G-SYNC model, so we expect a FreeSync 2 version as well.
Now, for 4K resolution of 3840 x 2160 normally DisplayPort 1.4 bandwidth for HDR10 tops out at 98 Hz without chroma subsampling (so in 4:4:4). The good news about offering 3840 x 1600 instead of 3840 x 2160 in a traditional 16:9 monitor, is that the interface bandwidth saved from superfluous vertical real estate can then be used for full HDR10 support at 4:4:4 chroma up to 132 Hz, according to some back-of-the-envelope calculations.
Even with an RTX 2080 Ti, it’s difficult to sustain FPS higher than 120fps at 4K-ish resolution in modern games, even if that is letterbox (less vertical pixels to render = more performance).
Another new LG monitor in the same line to be shown at CES is a 27-inch 1440p named 27GL850G-B, again with G-Sync and this time with 160 Hz max refresh rate.
While we previously reported on similar 34-inch G-Sync and FreeSync LG monitors here, we wanted to give special thanks to forum poster Luckbad for making us aware of these newer ones. Keep up the good work!
I am personally really interested in this exact resolution for my next monitor purchase so I’ll be keeping a close eye on these developments. 2019 is going to be an exciting year for monitors, that’s for sure! The 1600 vertical resolution is a welcome development for those of us who want to move on from 1440 without dropping our pixels-per-inch (PPI) too much with a larger screen such as this one.
No mention of HDR peak nits is offered here yet, as details are sparse, but LG is surely pushing the limits of their IPS tech and we can only encourage them to continue doing so. We’ll surely have more to report on during or after CES.
As soon as these are available online, they will be added to List of Ultrawide Gaming Monitors.