A 165Hz refresh rate, well over twice the industry standard of 60Hz, makes games run smooth as silk. The ‘FPS’, ‘RTS’ and ‘Racing’ presets restrict options in the ‘Color Setup’ menu and grey out adjustments on the ‘Luminance’ menu, which means brightness is locked at a fairly high level and can’t be adjusted. The monitor has a matte black chassis with red accents and a satin silver base which differentiates it from the 24G2SPU which has USB ports.

It’s a budget model, but its build quality is decent enough to be comparable with its more expensive counterparts. He has gone through several pieces of hardware in pursuit of every bit of performance gain, much to the dismay of his wallet. This means that you can comfortably use the monitor in well-lit rooms without worrying about glare and that you get a bit deeper blacks than that of regular IPS monitors, which usually have a contrast ratio of ~1,000:1. This is a good practical speed to take such photographs at and highlights both elements of perceived blur well. On both titles the monitor demonstrated good colour consistency, with shades appearing fairly similar regardless of where on the screen they’re displayed.

The ‘Office’ and ‘Reading’ settings in particular provide a bit of a green tint to the image, though not as extreme as on some models we’ve used. The aliasing at the edges of the UFOs can also be clearly seen due to the very strong motion clarity. Generally, it’s only noticeable when you have a pitch-black background on your screen with a high brightness setting and no ambient lighting whatsoever in your room. The pursuit photographs indicated that the monitor performed reasonably well here, but not perfectly. The AOC 24G2 FreeSync range is 48-144Hz, and it works with compatible NVIDIA GPUs without issues as it’s officially certified as ‘G-SYNC Compatible.

And more generally, some vegetation just appeared a livelier than intended shade – though not to the eye-catching and perhaps ‘neon’ extent that some models with more generous Adobe RGB coverage might show.So it doesn’t give strong depth to dark shades or an atmospheric look to darker content – particularly if observed in a dim room. The numbered ‘Gamer’ presets allow access to the ‘Luminance’ menu, but the ‘Color Setup’ menu remains greyed out and various changes are made to colour reproduction which can’t be counteracted. These artifacts are masked on the image by the horizontal lines that are seen in the background – your eyes don’t see these lines in the background, they’re due to how the images are captured. Similar observations were made on Shadow of the Tomb Raider, so a pretty fluid 165Hz experience overall.

The secondary trail of strobe crosstalk is more visible as well, for the dark and medium backgrounds. The monitor didn’t give a particularly atmospheric look here, even if its contrast was above average for the panel type. The central point was recorded as closest to 6500K, with significant but not extreme deviation recorded towards the top left (DeltaE 3. The reddish push to earthy browns was also apparent on some skin tones, such as that of the lady herself Lara Croft.Strong’ didn’t provide a significant improvement in our view but introduced some rather eye-catching bright overshoot in places. This significantly enhances the ‘connected feel’, describing the precision and fluidity felt when interacting with your character on the game. The technology did its thing to significantly reduce perceived blur due to eye movement, with the clarity of the main object and most texture detail remaining sharper and more distinct during movement than with MBR disabled. Overall we feel this setting will have utility for some users and they’ll feel it provides a competitive edge whilst not finding the issues we’ve highlighted too distracting.

The screen surface provides a light misty graininess to the image which is less noticeable than on many competing models. Some users prefer to leave VSync enabled but use a frame rate limiter set a few frames below the maximum supported (e. You get some dark detail eaten away by ‘IPS glow’ and the contrast isn’t really high enough to provide amazing distinctions there.It also offers 1080p Full High Definition (FHD), low input lag, IPS panels, 2W stereo speakers and a wide colour range. You may still wish to run through the ClearType wizard and adjust according to preferences, however. The colour shifts for the mixed desktop background and game scene are reduced compared to what you’d observe on VA or TN models. The final pattern was a bit fainter than it could be and masked just a touch by a bit of misty graininess (or slight layering) from the screen surface.