Has Monitor Tech ACTUALLY Improved?? Old vs New IPS Gaming Monitor

I don’t know about you, but it kinda feels like monitors haven’t really improved much over the last like… 10 years? At least when looking at the same panel type. Like, this is an Asus PG279Q – it was released in 2015, over 8 years ago now, and yet it’s a 165Hz 1440p IPS gaming monitor. You know, the sort of specs we’d look for today. It peaks at 350 nits which isn’t amazing, but isn’t exactly awful either, has the usual 1000:1 contrast ratio and claims a 4 millisecond response time average. Considering most modern displays are outright lying about having “1 millisecond” response times anyway, surely there isn’t much of a difference here? Well, let’s put that hypothesis to the test.

I should mention that our modern representative here is the Gigabyte M32Q. This isn’t a perfect match, you know 27 inches versus 32 inches and all, but they are both IPS panels, with the M32Q being from 2021. It’s also what I have available. So, what’s different with the M32Q? Well it uses a Super-Speed IPS panel, but otherwise it’s pretty similar specs wise. It lists 350 nits of peak brightness, a 170Hz refresh rate, and a 1000:1 contrast ratio. So… nothing has changed then? Well, the devil’s in the details.

One of the biggest changes has been to do with how the panels produce the wonderful variety of colours they do – specifically their colour gamut coverage, and their colour accuracy. Colour gamut coverage is basically a test to see how much of any given spectrum the display can produce.  In this case, our old PG279Q can do well over 100% of the sRGB spectrum, and 77% of the AdobeRGB colour space and 81% of the DCI P3 spectrum. Now that’s actually pretty good – it isn’t absolutely amazing but I’d call it good enough for sure. The much newer M32Q doesn’t do allllll that much better, with more like 83% AdobeRGB and 88% DCI P3, but there are a myriad of other 1440p displays – many I’ve tested myself – that can do more like 100% of either AdobeRGB or DCI P3. The M27Q springs to mind there.

Colour accuracy is the big one here though. Using the SpyderX’s largest test pack with 48 different colours tested, the PG279Q is literally off the charts for inaccuracies. A DeltaE of under 2 is what you are looking for to be considered ‘accurate’, but some of these results are over 5, 7, or even over 10! While you do get a final average of 2.61 which isn’t all that bad, that’s purely because the greyscale colours are reasonably good – anything with actual colour is way off. Contrast that with the M32Q’s results and.. Just.. wow. A DeltaE of 0.96, with the WORST result only being 1.94. This is what you want to see. This isn’t a calibrated profile either, this is raw from-factory accuracy.

Of course, one of the major areas of change is all to do with my favourite niche topic, response times. That’s basically how quickly the pixels change colour – the faster that is the smoother and more crisp motion looks, and the better a playing experience you get. The times they quote have always been complete BS – the PG279Q is meant to be a 4ms monitor, and this M32Q is meant to be a 1ms grey-to-grey monitor. Yeah, and the sky is green and pigs can fly. Let me crack out my trusty open source response time tool – which I sell over at OSRTT.com if you want to test your own stuff – and see just how BS it really is. 

On the maximum, most ridiculous, pointless, worthless overdrive mode, “EXTREME”, the PG279Q averages… 7.74 milliseconds – IF YOU IGNORE THE ABSOLUTELY HORRENDOUS OVERSHOOT TIME! If you include the overshoot time that average literally doubles to 14.79 milliseconds. I mean one of these errors is 74 RGB values too high – it’s meant to be a mid grey but ends up basically full white. You can’t just ignore that. Only 6.67% of the transitions fall within the 6 millisecond refresh rate window. That’s baaaaaaaad. 

To be fair to the PG279Q, Gigabyte’s “1 millisecond grey to grey” claim is equally BS. On their maximum, utterly pointless overdrive mode, “Speed”, the M32Q averaged 3.81 milliseconds if you ignore the significantly worse overshoot. If you include that time it’s more like 9 milliseconds – and one of the results is 111 RGB values too low. In graph form that looks like this. It is meant to hit that same mid grey, but ends up at practically full black. That’s frankly amazingly bad. 

Now the ridiculous overshoot ridden overdrive modes are interesting, but I want to see what the raw panels can do – no overdrive. The PG279Q averages out to 18.5 milliseconds, or over three frames to actually change colour at 165Hz. That means you will never get anything close to a crisp gaming experience with this – it can’t even get close to finishing drawing the new frame before the next one starts getting drawn. You can think of this as a 54Hz native panel – that’s what the average response time says it can run at without ghosting. Now looking at the M32Q with no overdrive, that averages out to 7.77 milliseconds. That’d be 129 Hz, which is pretty close to the 170 Hz refresh rate it actually runs at. That’s not bad, and means you have under one frame of ghosting on average. That’s decent. Could be better – we could have no ghosting, but that’s what overdrive is for. The thing that’s interesting to me is that in 8 years we’ve gone from a top of the line monitor using what you might call a 54 Hz panel, to a mid range model now running a 129 Hz panel. That’s a sizable improvement.

Of course once you introduce overdrive, the game changes again. The PG279Q doesn’t improve all that much on its medium “Normal” setting, only going from 18.5 milliseconds down to 13 milliseconds – that’s still only 77 Hz equivalent. There is no overshoot at all here, and it’s important to note that a tiny bit of overshoot is fine – good even. It’s almost impossible to notice 5 RGB values too low or high, and it’s still perfectly fine to have up to 10 RGB values too. Asus didn’t find that sweet spot here. Gigabyte on the other hand really has. The M32Q’s “Balance” overdrive mode drops the average to 5.47 milliseconds which is 183 Hz equivalent, or 13 Hz higher than the monitor’s maximum refresh rate. That’s fantastic, and while there is a touch of overshoot in the middle transitions, it’s pretty reasonable and not something you’d notice in games. This, I think, shows that not only have the panels improved, but the overdrive tuning has too. 

Something else that’s important for gaming is latency – specifically the on display latency. That’s how long it takes for a new frame to leave your graphics card and start being displayed on screen. The lower that is, the better of a gaming experience you’ll have. The faster you can react to enemies or hit racing lines. Now this PG279Q is a G-SYNC display – as in the monitor’s scaler is actually made by NVIDIA and means the latency here is really pretty good. My OSRTT Pro unit recorded a 3.3 millisecond average which is spot on. The M32Q wasn’t that much faster at 2.75 milliseconds average, although some of that is due to the slightly faster refresh rate. If we were looking at a non-G-SYNC display from 2015 I think we’d see a much more considerable difference. Most monitors I’ve tested in the last three years have all been very good on latency, even the more budget options have been great, whereas almost 10 years ago? Not so much.

The other big changes have all been in the features. G-SYNC is a great one to start with, as 8 years ago G-SYNC monitors were very much peak performance. Freesync was launched in 2015 too, although that was just the VESA adaptive sync standard with added branding, so wasn’t nearly as polished or high performance. Nowadays though, it’s really quite rare to see a G-SYNC display – or specifically a “G-Sync Ultimate” display. That’s the same NVIDIA hardware in the monitor, rather than “G-Sync Compatible” displays which are just Freesync displays using the manufacturers choice of hardware that supports Adaptive Sync. Adaptive sync has improved too, both supporting new things like HDR, and improving things like latency. The only thing that hasn’t improved is the adaptive sync range – as in how low will the monitor let your frame rate drop before it takes over and starts repeating frames. That’s almost always 48 Hz – so if you get 47 FPS, your monitor will repeat a frame before then re-engaging adaptive sync. 

Now seeing as I mentioned HDR, that’s worth talking about too. There’s a number of – still IPS – displays that can output upwards of 1000 nits of peak brightness, allowing for a pretty decent high dynamic range experience. I still am not that big a fan unless it’s an OLED, but the option is there. Something that can help with that is having a MiniLED backlight. That’s where instead of a small number of LEDs behind the panel that create the backlight, you have hundreds or thousands, often that can be controlled independently to allow for a good full array local dimming experience, creating effectively infinite contrast ratios as there is a complete absence of light in dark areas, while brighter areas can be hundreds or thousands of nits. There’s also quantum dot which helps improve the colour accuracy and gamut coverage on newer displays too. Lastly I thought I’d mention that the build quality has generally improved too. IPS panels often suffer from an imperfect seal around the edges of the panel, allowing for light to bleed through and create lighter areas. Generally speaking, I’ve seen that issue a lot less often on modern displays – and outright backlight bleed has generally been improved too. 

So it turns out that monitors, specifically IPS monitors here, have actually improved over the last ten or so years. Add to the fact that the PG279Q was an $800 monitor, while the M32Q is a $500 monitor, and it’s not even the best value around – the M27Q is probably a better example which is more like $330 at MSRP – so you get a significantly better monitor for less than half the price. That’s progress.