ViewSonic XG271QG 27” 1440p 240Hz IPS Gaming Monitor Review

If you happen to have your hands on a top shelf GPU, this is the sort of monitor I’d recommend. This is the Viewsonic XG271QG, a 27”, 1440p, 240Hz IPS gaming monitor with a full-fat G-SYNC module, 2 HDMI ports, one DisplayPort and a USB 3 hub. Not bad eh? They even claim it has a “1ms GtG response time”. You should know what I think about that… Styling wise, it’s fairly tame on the plastic front, although it does feature RGB lighting on the back and bottom of the display. You can turn it off in the menu though if you’d prefer. The stand’s foot is pretty massive, but it’s very flat so it isn’t too intrusive, and the stand itself is fully adjustable – meaning tilt, swivel, height adjustment, and even the ability to rotate the panel into portrait mode if you’d like. Viewsonic also likes to throw in some extra gamer touches like the headphone hanger and the dual mouse bungees that swing out from the bottom edge of the monitor.

As for the on screen menu, that’s controlled with a joystick style switch on the bottom lip, and is pretty simple. Strangely they’ve listed “brightness” as “Peak White Nits” with the maximum being 400 nits, and the minimum being 40. You have three overdrive modes – none of which are “off”. You have “Standard”, “Advanced” and “Ultra Fast”, where standard is very much overdriven, but just lightly. Since this has a dedicated G-SYNC module you have a menu option for its features like NVIDIA’s Reflex Latency Analyser. That means if you hook up your mouse to the USB hub and enable it, in theory you’ll get a latency measurement on screen. In practice this isn’t always too reliable.

Speaking of latency, the Time Sleuth reported around 1.9ms of on display latency which isn’t bad at all, and my open source response time tool (which also does input lag testing!) reported it as under 1 frame of latency which is exactly what you’d hope for. As for response times, well I think it should be obvious their “1ms” claim is the same pointless lie everyone is making these days. Even on the maximum overdrive mode, and ignoring the obvious overshoot, OSRTT still reported a 3.7ms average, or if you include the overshoot it’s more like 7ms. That’s almost two frames at 240hz, which with some high speed footage of the UFO test you can see quite clearly. The old frame disappears quickly, replaced by a bright inverse-ghosted image instead. I’d argue that’s less desirable than a regular ghosted frame!

If you step it back to “Advanced” you get a very similar initial time at around 4ms, but the average perceived time actually comes down to more like 6ms thanks to a lot less overshoot. That’s shown in the UFO test too, where it clearly renders the image within the refresh rate window, and has the previous frame clear generally within the same time. It’s still no OLED, but for an IPS panel this is about as good as you’ll get.

That means the gaming experience is pretty great. It’s smooth, responsive and even for fast paced shooters it’s not bad. Sure, a 360 Hz TN might be the choice of a genuine pro esports player, but if you want to feel like a pro while getting a beautiful, crisp view, this is a great shout. The fact that this is a 1440p panel makes pretty much any genre look good, and the bright, vibrant colours only help make the visual experience top notch. For content consumption – and creation – this is surprisingly good too. The only catch is the peak brightness at 400 nits is nowhere near enough to get a good HDR experience out of it. But personally that’s not a big deal for me so I’m sold.

Speaking of the brightness, I did check that 400 nit rating and it’s spot on. The only catch is that it’s only 400 nits in the centre. The edges are generally about 10% lower – although that seems to be a pretty common trend and it’s not something I notice when using it. Sadly the contrast ratio is lacking at just 710:1, meaning darker scenes will be washed out and grey, further quashing the dynamic range of your content. Happily their rating of 99% of the AdobeRGB colour space, or 95% of the DCI P3 spectrum is actually under-reported. It covers OVER 100% of the Adobe RGB space, meaning it’s pretty great for light creative work. The accuracy is good with a deltaE of under 2, 1.8 actually, but there were a few measurements over 2 so you’d still want to calibrate it for perfect accuracy.

So if this is a perfect monitor for practically everything, what’s the catch? Well in short: it’s the price. This is listed for around £700, which is something like £150 more than the Gigabyte M27Q-X, an equally amazing 1440p 240Hz IPS monitor with very similar specs and performance. If it was my money, I’d be buying the Gigabyte model, as paying a premium for I guess the G-SYNC module you get in this one. This is still a great monitor for sure, and if it happens to be on sale for a decent discount I wouldn’t have many reservations about recommending it – but at MSRP… You can find other options for cheaper.