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Let’s take a moment to celebrate a humble, hardworking element of every desktop PC and many laptop gaming setups: the port and cable that connect to the display. For years, these underappreciated pieces of hardware have had to make do with limited bandwidth. DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI ports do just fine when sending a 1080p signal, but when gamers crank up the resolution to 4K and add on immersive extras like HDR and 10-bit color, there’s just not enough bandwidth left over to enable a high refresh rate, too — at least, not without some form of compression. Now, that’s all changing. ROG’s first DisplayPort 2.1 gaming monitor, the ROG Swift PG32UQXR, takes advantage of the latest DisplayPort standard so that you can have it all. Gobs of bandwidth for your 4K gaming rig The bottom strip is 21mm wide and features a tiny OLED screen called LiveDash. LiveDash displays many different things, like refresh rate, picture mode and CPU and GPU temperatures. It’s super cool to have that information always visible and not overlayed on the picture. Below that is a dial with a button in its center and two more keys flanking. This is Asus' new take on OSD navigation, and it's also very cool. The dial feels like the volume knob on a high-end audio component and makes changing settings a snap.
Confirming the other specs of the screen, the PG32UQXR is 32″ in size and uses a ‘Fast IPS’ panel from AU Optronics. It has a 3840 x 2160 “4K” resolution, quoted 1ms G2G response time (as usual), 1000:1 static contrast ratio, 400 cd/m 2 brightness (SDR), 178/178 viewing angles, 10-bit colour depth and a wide colour gamut covering 96% DCI-P3 and ~160% relative sRGB coverage. Prior to DisplayPort 2.1, you could only achieve this combination of resolution and refresh rate with Display Stream Compression (DSC) tech. Many gamers find DSC to be perceptually lossless, but if you’d rather just keep compression out of the equation, then a DisplayPort 2.1 monitor is just what you need. Fantastic contrast and vivid colorIn the System Setup menu, it a toggle for the Asus ROG Swift PG32UQX’s room light sensor. It can vary screen brightness in SDR mode according to your environment. On the second screen is the control for the LiveDash at the bottom of the bezel. The OLED screen has three brightness settings too. While MSI has a similar monitor planned, the MEG381CQR, Asus' alternative is actually on the market and might be one of the coolest things we’ve ever seen on a computer monitor. Asus ROG Swift PG32UQX Calibration Settings Gaming is at the top of the list with four main sections. OD (overdrive) has three levels of which number two is the best at reducing blur while avoiding ghosting artifacts. GamePlus brings an array of crosshairs, timers, a stopwatch, frame counter and display alignment marks. You can display the stopwatch, frame counter and timer on the LiveDash OLED screen as well. Though the PG32UQX is factory-calibrated, it doesn’t ship in its most accurate picture mode. Scenery is the default and has a cool grayscale, skewed gamma and oversaturated color. The best choice whether you calibrate or not is Racing. Switching to that mode nets a visible and measurable improvement. To take it to the professional level, a few tweaks of the RGB sliders are required. GamePlus brings aids like aiming points, timers, frame counter, sniper mode and multi-display alignment marks to the table. Sniper mode magnifies the center of the screen, making long-distance targets easier to spot. The crosshairs come in three designs, appearing in red or green. The frame counter displays the current refresh rate in real-time so you can monitor system performance. We spent a lot of time working with and playing on the PG32UQX and found no flaws in its image quality. With 138 pixels per inch (ppi) of pixel density, you can sit as close as you want without seeing any dot structure. And since the monitor has such a large field of view, you don’t have to sit super close to fill your peripheral vision with the image. Though not quite as immersive as an ultrawide monitor, a 32-inch monitor with a 16:9 aspect ratio has a distinct height advantage, making it better suited for documents, photos and watching movies.
Working in Photoshop is easy, with plenty of room for toolbars on the sides and top and the image occupying about 75% of the screen. If you need color management, profiles are the best way to go. The PG32UQ’s sRGB mode is reasonably accurate but cannot calibrate to a higher standard. And the monitor’s native gamut is larger than both DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB. Calibration controls include six gamma presets and seven color temps, plus a User mode with RGB sliders. Setting 6500K in the Racing mode will get you most of the way there. We’ll detail our full calibration settings below. The answer could very much be a resounding ‘YES!’, but it depends. ASUS ROG Swift PG32UQXR is made specifically for the most advanced gaming, so for gamers with serious ambitions, this is the thing they might’ve been waiting for. Quantum-dot tech offers vibrant, life-like colors that leap off the screen. The display covers 95% of the wide DCI-P3 color gamut for smoother gradations and heightened realism. To ensure the accuracy of each pixel, the ROG Swift PG32UQXR is factory pre-calibrated to achieve an average ΔE value of less than 2 — a professional-grade result. A new era of 4K gaming But don’t let that deter you – the investment will be worth it for the unmatched gaming experience this monitor promises to deliver. Should you buy ASUS ROG Swift PG32UQXR when it launches?The variable here is that we don’t know much about it except the features, and the price is usually the deciding factor when it comes to investing in high-end hardware.
With all that extra bandwidth to play with, we were able to load out the ROG Swift PG32UQXR with an enviable feature set. This monitor immerses you with its spacious 32-inch panel, and it renders your gaming worlds in glorious detail with its 4K resolution. Its 160Hz refresh rate, kept tear-free with FreeSync, provides fluid, responsive animation in fast-paced games.However, those stats are just the prelude. ASUS aims for ROG Swift PG32UQXR to be VESA DisplayHDR 1000 certified, resulting in some of the finest HDR output available. Also, it has a 10-bit color depth and covers 95% DCI-P3 color space, paving the way for the best color performance you can possibly have. I also enjoyed killer HDR in Call of Duty WWII. This title focuses more on earth tones like green and brown, and they too looked more vibrant than I’ve seen on most monitors. The added contrast was plain to see and even though highlights were bright, the overall image was never harsh or fatiguing. The PG32UQ delivers HDR on par with the very best displays.
The only thing missing from the entertainment experience is Dolby Vision, which is found on 4K Blu-ray and in much of the latest content from Netflix and other providers. HDR10 looks great, but some of the newest series, like Bridgerton, take HDR to another level with Dolby Vision. Meanwhile, colors in Tomb Raider looked vibrant and natural. We tried the wide gamut option and found it too much for this game; it became a display of primary colors rather than the earthy shades that normally frame this title. This is one extended color monitor that should be used in its sRGB mode for SDR content. Game Visual contains the PG32UQ’s eight picture modes. Racing is the default and can be calibrated to a high standard. All modes except sRGB use the monitor’s full color gamut, which is oriented towards Rec.2020. It covers nearly 84% of that huge color space. In HDR mode there are three additional presets: Cinema, Game and Console. They cannot be adjusted, but their color accuracy is solid.Unfortunately, ASUS is keeping tight-lipped about the release date of the ROG Swift PG32UQXR. Expect to hear more from ASUS in the upcoming few months, but for now, we can only hope that it will come soon enough. We were also able to use HDR in Windows for workday tasks without the harsh look that most other monitors impart. You can’t change the brightness setting, but most of the apps and content we looked at were rendered at a comfortable level. Small highlights were nice and bright but not too much so. Color also took on a bolder look in HDR mode, even with photos encoded in the sRGB gamut. Text-based applications were sharp and detailed with no apparent edge enhancement or softness. The Asus ROG Swift PG32UQX is a high-quality panel, and it shows in every kind of content.
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