Asus PG259QNR Review – 360Hz GAMING MONITOR!!
This is Asus’ PG259QNR, a monitor you do not need. But damn is it cool. It’s main selling point is it’s astonishing 360Hz refresh rate – yes you heard that right, 240Hz is old news. It’s other selling point is in the name, the ‘R’ on the end that distinguishes it from the ‘standard’ PG259QN version, with ‘R’ standing for Reflex Latency Analyser. That’s NVIDIA’s new tool that lets you hook up a mouse to the monitor and have it track the total system input lag. So that’s the headlines, what’s it actually like?
We have to start with that monster refresh rate. I’ve said plenty of times that I generally don’t care for 240Hz monitors, I know on a technical level they are better but I just can’t feel a difference. This though, is different. I can’t explain why, but this feels so crisp and smooth, almost like I’m staring through a window into the game rather than looking at a display. It’s really, really nice to game on. Of course you need to be playing a game at 360FPS to get the full benefit, which limits you to games like CS:GO and Valorant, but those are the exact titles you’d want this sort of high refresh rate for so it fits well.
Playing on it I felt it was easier to hit shots quickly, and possibly more importantly I was able to react to enemies popping out from cover or rushing around a corner quicker. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still awful, but if I can improve as much as I felt I did I can only imagine how much better an actual esports pro would play with one of these bad boys.
On the note of actually feeling a difference, I’ve got a theory on that. The trouble with higher and higher refresh rates is the law of diminishing returns. Hertz is cycles per second, or in this case frames drawn per second, so as you draw more and more frames per second the frame times decrease less and less. Put it this way, at 60Hz, each frame is on screen for 16.67ms. At 144Hz, that’s dropped massively to just 6.9ms, so almost 10ms faster. That makes it really easy to perceive the difference, you are getting more than double the frames shown to you each second and because that frame time gap is so massive it’s easy to notice. But going from 144Hz to 240Hz, you go from that 6.9ms frame time to 4.2ms. Despite you getting almost double the number of frames again, each frame is only on screen for 2.7ms less time. That’s much less of a difference than the 10ms from 60 to 144.
At 360Hz, each frame is on screen for 2.8ms, which when you compare that to 240Hz is an even smaller gap of just 1.4ms. That’s diminishing returns for sure, but the thing is I’m used to a 144Hz monitor, that’s what I use day to day and for most of my testing, so to then jump to 360Hz which is a full 4.1ms faster per frame, it’s a lot easier to notice.
It’s all well and good having a fast refresh rate, but if the panel can’t keep up it’s pretty pointless. Luckily, this AU Optronics panel, despite being IPS, offers insanely fast response times. The black to white time was just 3ms with overdrive set to normal, although as usual the white to black time was slower at around 6ms. That’s still really impressive and means that there is at worst just a single trailing frame of ghosting and a remarkably sharp image even without ULMB enabled which is a good thing as ULMB or backlight strobing can only be enabled with G-SYNC disabled and at just 240Hz.
Input lag is also important to check as it affects your experience greatly, and again it’s good news. My time sleuth reported just 1.2ms of input lag at the top of the display, which while it isn’t the absolute best I’ve recorded is certainly a good result. Even measuring the total system input lag with NVIDIA’s LDAT tool, and in the G-SYNC esports display mode with G-SYNC enabled, it averages around 26ms of total system input lag which is great.
The end result is a gaming experience like no other. I’m genuinely blown away when playing on this, and honestly feel frustrated that I’m not an esports pro because I know I’m not getting the most out of this. It’s important to note though, that’s who should be using this. Esports pros, CS:GO and Valorant teams competing at the very top level. The average gamer like you and me don’t need this, and it’s very possibly a waste of money if you don’t exclusively play at 300+ FPS in fast paced games.
The other headline feature solidifies that point well. NVIDIA’s Reflex Latency Analyser is basically like their LDAT tool but built into the monitor and integrates with the GeForce Experience overlay to show you your instantaneous and average input latency. You plug a mouse into the red USB port on the rear I/O, hook up the USB downlink cable, then enable it in the menu and you are set. In theory. You can enable the monitoring square visibility so you can see where the monitor is looking for muzzle flashes, but in CSGO at least it was very picky even on high sensitivity. If you stand still it would register 1 on 5 shots, whereas moving it flat out refused most of the time.
It seems like a really cool feature, and if you can get it working it’s a really useful tool for adjusting settings to get the lowest input lag possible. But it’s really only useful for esports pros, sure you could spend a few hours tweaking every possible setting to reduce your input lag by a few milliseconds, but unless you are good enough to take advantage of that, why bother?
The rest of the monitor is pretty good. The panel lacks colour accuracy, only covering 94% of the sRGB spectrum, and has a peak brightness of 400 nits, but for it’s target market that’s plenty fine. Content consumption is decent, colours do look good to the eye so if you did get one it’d be versatile enough. The stand has plenty of adjustability including height, tilt, swivel and rotation and even comes with a clamp mount in the box if you prefer that to the rather large footprint base. You of course have some RGB lighting on the back, it’s pretty subtle though so no big deal, and has just one HDMI port and one DisplayPort – plus this really annoying lip that means your cables are difficult to insert and being constantly forced at an angle trying to snap the connectors – why Asus is this here?!
All of this luxury comes at a luxury price. £800. That’s a hell of a lot for a 1080p monitor, even if it is one the best 1080p monitor money can buy. That price tag puts this squarely in the eyes of professionals, or people with money to burn. But wait! There is good news! I’ve got one simple trick to save a full £100 on this monitor. Buy the PG259QN instead. That’s the version of this exact monitor without the Reflex Latency Analyser. Trust me, if you aren’t an esports pro it’s not worth the extra cash, and even if you are an esports team looking to upgrade your screens it’s best to buy one of these QNR’s to dial in your settings, and get the standard QN’s from the rest of the team.
So, conclusion time. This is one of the best gaming experiences I’ve had for fast paced FPS games. It made me a marginally better player, at least in terms of my accuracy and reaction time, and I really enjoyed using it. Would I spend £700 or £800 of my own on this? Definitely not. 1440p 144Hz is plenty for me and that’s a lot to spend on a monitor I can’t get the best out of. If you’ve got that much money to burn, and you’d rather not get a stunning 1440p 240Hz IPS monitor like the Aorus FI27Q-X, then sure pick one of these up. It’s great. For the rest of us, I wouldn’t be worried.
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