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Viewing Angles, Uniformity, Response & Lag
Viewing Angles
We can see a little haziness in both the horizontal planes when the viewing angle exceeds 45°. Also visible is a slight red shift though light falloff is only around 30%. The AG352UCG’s AMVA panel shows typical performance in this area. IPS will offer better off-axis quality, but with lower contrast. Given the intended use of a curved ultra-wide screen, we’ll take dynamic range every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
Screen Uniformity
To learn how we measure screen uniformity, please click here.
Careful quality control is required to keep bleed and glow away from curved monitors, especially those with an 1800mm radius like this one. The black field test yields no problems whatsoever. Its 9.39% score puts it in a large group of quality, premium displays. We were a little surprised when it posted a higher number in the white field test, but 11.48% is not a concern. If one looks closely enough, a bright zone can be seen in our sample’s center from top to bottom. The issue is completely invisible in actual content. And the color uniformity test reveals no issues at all. 1.94dE means any errors can’t be seen by the naked eye.
Pixel Response & Input Lag
Please click here to read up on our pixel response and input lag testing procedures.
We’ve tested two monitors recently that redefined our perceptions of speed: the Asus PG258Q and Acer’s XB252Q. Both can sustain 240 FPS when driven by a suitably powerful video card and have virtually no input lag. After being spoiled by them, it’s easy to spot the difference a 100Hz monitor makes. Though we are not highly-skilled gamers by any means, we can see the difference in motion resolution between 7 and 11ms. It may be tiny but it’s there. G-Sync certainly helps in this situation, and makes a larger impact as framerates decrease. At 3440x1440 pixels, many games won’t play much above 100 FPS anyway. 38ms is a respectable lag score, but the higher refresh screens are a little better in this test. The AG352UCG is still a great gaming monitor for nearly any player as our hands-on experience is about to demonstrate.
Gaming With G-Sync
The quest for smooth gaming is always a balance between resolution and refresh rate. The 240Hz monitors we reviewed (XB252Q and PG258Q) both run at 1920x1080 pixels, which makes it far easier for them to achieve their full potential of 240 FPS. The AG352UCG maxes at 100Hz but its 3440x1440 dot-count will require a fair amount of processing power to hit 100 FPS in more demanding titles like Far Cry 4.
We started with that game, as it still represents one of the most difficult tests of any system. With detail levels maxed, we saw right around 100 FPS during the most intense battle sequences. Our G-Sync test system recently received a brand-new GTX 1080Ti FE, which has upped performance significantly. We can’t wait to test an Ultra HD screen with it.
Our first observation was excessive ghosting when using the overdrive’s Strong setting. Though motion blur was non-existent, there were obvious black trails in areas of fine detail. They only got worse as we moved the mouse more quickly. Dialing back to Medium cured the problem.
At 100 FPS, we certainly enjoyed a smooth experience in Far Cry 4, and clarity was top notch thanks to the high pixel density. It seems even with our new video board, this is about the highest framerate we can muster. Even our 240Hz screens didn’t offer much more speed. Control response was as good as we’ve seen from any previous monitor, so skilled players should be satisfied with the AG352UCG’s low input lag. While panels with higher refresh rates post lower latency numbers, the eye and hand will have a hard time discerning a difference.
Moving on to Tomb Raider, we easily pegged the FPS-meter at 100 regardless of gameplay intensity. And we observed the same behavior in the overdrive control. Medium is clearly the starting point. We never had a situation where turning it off was the right choice, but Strong simply causes too much black ghosting.
Lastly, we spent a few hours playing Bioshock Infinite, which represents a light load to the system while providing a satisfying level of detail and interest. Control response is clearly faster than either Far Cry 4 or Tomb Raider, which required an adjustment to the mouse sensitivity to keep things from becoming too jerky. None of this translated to tears or actual stutter, however. Even with complex water textures on the screen, we never saw anything less than perfection.
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