Asus XG438Q Review & Perfect Monitor Settings

You’re correct. My current display is BGR.

I just bought one of these yesterday at the Dallas Micro Center for $999. Pretty happy with it so far after making the suggested cleartype and OSD tweaks to make the text look better. I use the Dell 43in at work, so I knew what I was getting into size wise. Initial gaming impressions are that at my view distance I prefer playing FPS games windowed in at 2560x1440 or 3440x1440. I think to play FPS at full screen I would need to move it back quite a bit to prevent headaches. I did fire up some Tomb Raider this morning and was able to play it at full screen. I’m going to need a GPU upgrade to be doing much at 4k native anyway; I’m just running a 1070 at the moment. I’ll probably hold out until next year and see what AMD/Nvidia come out with. I’m hoping AMD makes a proper high end card soon.

Here’s a pic of my setup:

I have a new cable and now my behavior is like yours, if I’m watching a movie, and I move the mouse, the color changes a little. But no-where near as badly as a previous cable where I had to keep moving the mouse to keep the colors from being washed out. Interesting note, the cable tester said all 3 cables were fine (continuity, sweep tests) but only the last cable seems to work well. My son is bringing over the red dragon 5700 XT to test with it tomorrow, my rx 580 has limits for testing this display.

ya i also order some cabel to test will see
but thers stil some other weird things in this monitor like it always says its running on 2160 but i have my ress set to 1440 my other asus monitor does not have this problem

With my son’s 5700 XT, the new cable, and the settings everyone provided, the monitor is working just fine. But I needed all 3 of these, with my old cable, RX 580, and default settings, I would have returned it for sure.

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Hi Folks,

Not sure if anyone is still watching this thread but thought I thought I’d add my story… I just purchased the new PG43UQ, which I assume is the 144hz version of this panel and I’ve got the exact same problem and came to pretty much the same conclusions as you guys did above… Here’s a post I just put up on reddit:

Before I send this monitor back and cry myself softly to sleep while staring at the prepared empty place for it on my desk I thought I’d see if anyone here has any wisdom they’d be willing to share.

Photos don’t really capture it very well, it manifests mainly as text just looking a bit fuzzy and generally wrong . You kinda get used to it after a while but then if you look at another monitor and back again it’s glaringly obvious again. Here’s a picture of some text. Can you see how blurry it is across the top of the letters?

While it’s kind of hard to describe the text problem the lagom monitor sharpness test is really damning.

The idea with this test is that each square has the same average colour. If you allow the image to blur buy taking an out of focus photo or by squiniting a bit they are all supposed to look the same shade of grey.

And this is a photo of it displayed on my screen:

It seems that when there are two rows of grey pixels together, the top row of is dimmer than the ones underneath? I think the monitor is applying some sort of smoothing filter or something, there definitely seems to be some sort of processing going on, I don’t think it is an issue with the panel itself.

Here’s a purposefully out-of-focus photo (missing as I can only put two photos up being a new user) of my monitor displaying the test image; this should look a uniform grey (and does on a spare monitor old 27’ I tried) but as you can see it is far from it:

There is a sharpness setting on the monitor OSD, which defaults to 50% (which I am assuming means ‘off’ – lowering it blurs everything and increasing it ‘sharpens’ things, but it fail the sharpness test whatever the setting).

Let me know if there is any more information I can provide! I would be super interested to know if anyone else can replicate this on another pg43uq if you have one, or otherwise have any ideas about what might be up. It looks fabulous when gaming or watching fims but it’s unpleasant to use for coding which is what I do most of the time!

Stuff I have tried:

  • This is a BGR monitor not RGB (didn’t even know that was a thing until a couple of days ago) I have spent the best part of a day messing about with cleartype settings and turning the screen upside down, I’m pretty convinced that isn’t the bother here.

  • This is running at 98Hz, 4k native RGB mode. No chroma subsampling or anything. I’ve tried at different refresh rates up to 144hz (though that required chroma subsampling due to displayport limitations, and my 1080 graphics card not supporting DSC) and the problem is the same.

  • I’ve tried a few displayport cables including the one that came with the monitor.

  • I’ve been through the OSD and twiddled every setting that seemed it could conceivably could be related, no joy.

  • Running at, e.g. 125% display scaling mostly masks the problem by making text thicker but I really don’t want to do that.

Sorry for the wall of text. I probably just need to send it back but I wanted to give the thing a fair chance first :slight_smile:

I figured PG43UQ would have the same problem and you have confirmed it. Thanks.

You are right, the BGR subpixel arrangement has almost nothing to do with the problems in this panel. Many panels of this size use BGR and people don’t even notice unless some other worse problem makes them look closely.

I also got one of the Acer CG437K and it had the same kind of sharpness problem. It was a little different than the XG438Q, slightly less annoying because it primary affected blue pixels, but still definitely a problem. It even got better toward the bottom of the panel, just like I observed with XG438Q. That fact tells me it is not just image processing, but instead a common defect with the panel these monitors all use. I had to return both monitors. The Acer actually had even more annoying problems with going to sleep and waking up.

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No problem, I’m glad to have found some other people with the same issue - I was starting to doubt my sanity, the wife was telling me she wouldn’t see anything wrong with it!

I’m sure buying displays used to be easier than this! One day I will find one I can develop and game with? (any other suggestions? 4k, preferably 16:9, 32-43 inch, high refresh rate a big bonus, flexible budget within reason)

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Yes, I’ve never seen displays with the problems this generation of 43" 4K 120hz monitors has, and it amazes me that so many people aren’t bothered by it.

I have used LG 43UD79-B since June 2017. http://amzn.com/B0711MP768

It maxes out at 60hz, but it has a pretty good IPS panel and the only flaw that bothers me at all is around all 4 edges about 10-20 pixels aren’t properly lit unless you look at them from straight on. I am able to mostly ignore this issue. It has really good speakers for a monitor. I don’t use its picture-in-picture / split display options because they add input lag. They’ve also got a slightly updated version “LG 43UN700-B” with basic HDR support if you care about that enough to spend an extra $100.

You can save a little cash by buying a low-end Samsung 43 inch TV. A few of my co-workers use them and they don’t have any major image quality issues, but as they are TVs they do have on/off quirks unlike normal PC monitors, and relatively invasive GUIs, and you’ll probably want to go in and turn off some of the image processing options. I’ve also tried an LG 43 inch TV but wasn’t able to achieve comparable image quality on it. Samsung seems to do a great job though.

I’ve also considered some of the higher-res ultrawides (3840 x 1600 or 5120 x 1440) that can hit 120hz or above. You can go to Nvidia’s G-Sync monitors list and filter by resolution 3840 x 1600 to see some other options.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/g-sync-monitors/specs/

Samsung also has a 5120 × 1440 monitor (basically equivalent to two 27 inch panels made into one ultrawide) that is not qualified as G-Sync compatible but I’m guessing would be pretty good anyway. Samsung CRG9 (49", 5120 × 1440, 120hz) - http://amzn.com/B07L9HCJ2V I have not read reviews of it though because I would not buy that particular model. I would wait for this one instead which is not yet released: Samsung Odyssey G9 (49", 5120 × 1440, 240hz) - https://www.anandtech.com/show/15396/sausng-odyssey-2020-monitors-g7-g9-up-to-240hz

A few more true 4K options open up if you are willing to go with a physically smaller monitor and use it with DPI scaling, but I haven’t really researched them much. The Nvidia G-Sync monitor list is a good place to look.

Thank you very much for your comprehensive reply - I’ll take a good look at those this weekend :slight_smile:

This is the Asus 43” setup? is worth the trouble doing all this detailed settings? and comparing this to the Dell 43” which is better overall?..Not adding the 60Hz vs 120Hz

What specific SpaceCo Monitor Arm you have for that 43”…? Can it handle the size without sagging after awhile?

I like the picture on the Dell better(I haven’t done a side-by-side comparison since one is at work and the other is at home), but for gaming the 120hz makes all the difference. I do pretty much all of my gaming on it at 1440p currently since my GTX1070 can’t really handle 4k. Playing through The Wicther 3 on it has been awesome even at a lower resolution.

If you don’t ever plan on gaming on it I’d say go with the Dell, but if you want to game the Dell isn’t enough better to make up for the lack of 120hz.

I do game, but mostly just Battlefield Series. I’ve been playing for years @60hz and have no issues, but I know the higher the better. I just don’t get why there isn’t any good Dell 43" reviews in details like Wendell’s does.

I’ve been waiting for years for the right 43" gaming monitor and finally here we are, I personally fell in love with Asus 43" when I first saw on CES 2019. I just want to make sure is worth the money and headache to get it setup right as far as the BGR issue and hopefully not get a defected monitor.

It is misinformation that BGR subpixel layout is responsible for the rendering problems with this generation of 43 inch 4K 120hz monitor. BGR subpixel layout only causes minor and often 100%-correctable issues rendering text in some fonts. It isn’t a very good reason to not buy a monitor. The rendering problems go far beyond that.

I’ve used many 4K BGR panels (39 to 43 inches) which I am very happy with, but I returned my Asus XG438Q and Acer CG437K for their shared rendering issues. Based on what pgs31 told us, Asus PG43UQ has the same problem. It is disappointing that Asus and Acer accept this quality of panel as normal.

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Text did look “off” when I first plugged it in, but I went through the Windows font wizard thing and got it fixed. After that it looks fine; maybe not quite as good as the Dell but if I didn’t have the Dell at work I wouldn’t have any complaints.

Btw once you start gaming at >60hz you’ll never want to go back; it’s SO much better. I actually to a slight refresh rate downgrade when I got my XG438Q; I’d been gaming on a 1080p 144hz TN panel for the past several years. TBH I would still pick the old 1080p 144hz monitor for FPS games, but I don’t have a way to have it and the XG438Q setup where I can game on both. I could definitely tell the pixel response time was worse on the XG438Q, but I’m used to it now so it doesn’t bother me.

Hello,
i did the BGR registry fix, and it helped for the windows fonts, but in Chrome i still get the wrong subsampling. Does anyone know how to fix this?

subpixel-font

Rebooted?

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App support for RGB / BGR choice is spotty so there may not actually be a fix short of figuring out a way to change the font to something that uses neither type of subpixel AA but still looks good. I imagine the fault is actually in Windows, but I don’t know that for sure. I see in my own Chrome, the tab names, address bar, bookmarks bar, context menus are all incorrectly doing RGB while actual web page content uses BGR. For a long time Thunderbird was stuck doing RGB no matter what, but now I see it is doing BGR correctly and I can’t explain what changed.

It is a mess. Non-RGB panels are becoming more popular all the time and a lot of devices (even desktop monitors!) are designed to be used in landscape or portrait orientations, which also breaks subpixel antialiasing implementations. I wish Microsoft would do a serious pass on either fixing or eliminating this type of AA from Windows altogether.

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Wendell,
I love the channel and have been a fan for a wile. I have been looking for a decent 4K replacement to mt 1K TV I have been using for several years. After seeing your review on this monitor I was sold and bought one. I really appreciate all the effort you put in to making your channel and sharing the info to get the most out of this monitor. One thing I didn’t see was where you suggest getting the Cable matters cables. I don’t want to fall victim to garbage cables on amazon so if you would please let us know where a trustworthy reliable source is.

Again thank you so much for all your hard work and dedication to your community.

-=EDIT=-
Went to the cable matters site and ordered one. Prefer to not pay shipping when I have an amazon account but didn’t want to risk the monitor getting here and not being able to use it. With the color profiles you uploaded, how do I used them? I have never used displaycal before. Do I need to have one of these display reading tools?

I should have this Saturday and I’m very excited.

DrClaw