AOC AG276QSG2 Review – G-Sync Pulsar IS HERE!

This is one of the first G-Sync Pulsar gaming monitors on the market, AOC’s AG276QSG2, and this is supposedly a 1000 hertz equivalent display. How? Well let’s dive in. We obviously have to start with G-Sync Pulsar, NVIDIA’s latest attempt to make LCDs relevant in an OLED world. Bold statement, I know, but it’s kinda true. For those that don’t know, G-Sync, or more commonly known as adaptive sync these days, is a technology that lets your graphics card toll your monitor when a new frame is ready, eliminating tearing as a problem. G-Sync Pulsar adds a new level to it by also strobing the backlight in time with the adaptive sync pulses. This isn’t exactly new, although NVIDIA’s approach, in partnership with MediaTek, is likely the most advanced we’ve seen. For those that don’t know, ULMB, or ultra low motion blur, turns the backlight on and off in time with each new frame. Generally the backlight is only usually on for a fraction of the frame time – often 1 millisecond – but the trouble with trying to time the backlight turning on and off with a variable framerate is it’s real hard to sync the two. Some have tried – AOC themselves offer “MBR Sync” on a variety of their LCD based monitors – but at least in theory G-Sync Pulsar should be the next step up in quality and reliability. So, is it? Let’s get to testing and find out.

I should caveat this part briefly. I truly hate backlight strobing. Having this thing in my eyesight gives me a headache in minutes, so my opinions on this thing are less than stellar. Still, I’ll do my best to be objective, but I think it’s important for you to know my (rather strong) biases before you hear anything even remotely subjective. Cool? Right, the testing, and this involves flashing images so fair warning. First, a look at the monitor at high speed. At 1000 FPS each new frame is one millisecond apart, so three video frames equals one display frame at 360 hertz. If I slow this footage right down, you’ll see that the backlight strobes on and off once per frame, with the lit section being the final millisecond before the new frame starts being drawn. This is (technically) the ideal way to do it, as the LCD’s imperfect response time means it takes time for the frame to be drawn, and so only showing the frame after the transition is complete makes it as snappy as it can be. I’m gonna do a more in depth video on NVIDIA Pulsar next week so if you are interested in the nitty gritty details make sure you are subscribed so you don’t miss that. Using my open source response time tool (available at OSRTT.com by the way, link in the description) and the live view mode we can see that pulsing. It spikes for around one millisecond, then dips back. If we measure between the pulses you’ll find it is exactly one frame – 2.7 milliseconds – and the pulse is between half and one millisecond, depending on how you measure it anyway. 

If you are wondering what the response times for this thing are, well that’s actually kind of irrelevant thanks to the backlight strobing. In fact, it is so irrelevant that the overdrive modes are fully disabled when Pulsar is active, although as we saw in the high speed footage the image was fully drawn with no visible ghosting by the time the backlight turns on for that frame. With Pulsar disabled though (or if you have an AMD GPU), you have a frankly astonishing number of overdrive modes. Technically there are 400. Yikes. Yeah I’m not testing all of them. The default, 100, is actually pretty good with an average response time of 3.17 milliseconds. That isn’t quite the 2.78 milliseconds of the frame time, but it’s close, and that’s nice to see. Upping it to 170 gets you a near perfect result – 2.3 milliseconds on average with only slight and very manageable overshoot, so if you are running this with Pulsar off, setting overdrive to somewhere between 150 and 200 is going to give you the best results. Just for fun I set it to the max (400) and… yeah… this is horrific. The average initial time only drops to 1.8 milliseconds (0.5 milliseconds faster than 170 remember), but the overshoot is unbelievably bad. Actually, even more interestingly if you turn overdrive off to see the native panel performance you’ll find that this thing is actually pretty damn fast. It averages 3.9 milliseconds – that’s remarkably close to the refresh rate window (I think that’s like 250 hertz equivalent) without any overdrive. That’s great! Interestingly though, at least without Pulsar active anyway, the on display latency is surprisingly high. It averaged around 6 milliseconds, with almost a majority of the results taking more than one frame to report. That’s unusual for a gaming monitor like this, and means the monitor’s latency is more than the usual millisecond or so I see in basically every other gaming monitor – this must be more like one frame. 

The actual usage experience of this thing, sans Pulsar anyway, is really nice. It games very well, it’s snappy, smooth and responsive – not as good as a comparable OLED, but still excellent. For fast paced FPS games this is brilliant! With Pulsar, well that’s where I get a little snippy about this thing. In theory this backlight strobing helps trick your eyes into seeing moving objects (ie enemies in game) more clearly and sharply. In practice I can’t look at this thing for more than a couple minutes at a time without getting a rage-inducing headache. Whoever thought it was a good idea to flash several hundred nits of light at you 360 times a second needs to be shot out a cannon. Does it look sharper with Pulsar on? I guess? Does it look as sharp as a fast OLED? Nope. This isn’t for me for sure, and I’m kinda struggling to work out who it actually is for in a world with 500 hertz OLEDs costing the same as this. 

Oh, we should still cover all the normal monitor bits too. Physically this follows AOC’s usual high end monitor styling. Dark and light greys, although this one does have an RGB ring on the back that is fully controllable. The stand has all the adjustments you could want, you have two headphone hangers, and the most unique bit is the webcam looking thing up top. This is not a webcam, it’s an ambient light sensor, and they use that to do essentially automatic brightness control. This is a really cool feature that I’d actually like to see in more monitors, just… not like this. I don’t like that this looks so damn much like a webcam. Build it into the chinbar or something so it’s less conspicuous and maybe it’d stop me freaking out so much. Anyway, IO is two HDMI ports, one DisplayPort, DC in, and a three port USB 3 hub. The on screen menu is controlled with the joystick style switch on the back, and the menu is similar to other AOC displays, but also noticeably different. The main thing is the “G-SYNC Processor” tab which includes the Pulsar toggle, the lower FPS limit setting, the overdrive setting (all 400…), and the adaptive brightness and colour toggles. It’s worth noting too that when Pulsar is enabled, the overdrive settings are disabled. It’s NVIDIA’s way, or the highway. You do have a weird choice in the picture tab as brightness is listed as “Peak White Nits” and is measured in nits from like 50 to 500. I did test this with my SpyderX2 and this setting is actually fairly accurate, up to the final level where it’s 450 nits, not 500. It’s sort of progressively incorrect, but still. The contrast ratio isn’t impressive at a touch under 1000:1. Colour reproduction is equally average, with 93 percent coverage of the DCI P3 spectrum, and 67 percent of Rec2020, although happily the accuracy is at least spot on with an average DeltaE of just 1.2. 

To me, this monitor, and NVIDIA’s G-Sync Pulsar, honestly raises more questions than it answers. I understand the theory behind Pulsar – so much so that I’m doing a full video explaining more about it, and some more testing with my response time tool to see exactly what the panel is doing – but I think I just fundamentally can’t stand it. It’s a hack to attempt to make LCDs still relevant in an OLED world – at least in the pro scene. LCDs are still perfectly fine for home gamers, obviously, but if you want the ultimate pro gaming display, well right now that’s the AOC AG276QKD2, a 500 hertz QD-OLED panel. That has, I’d argue, much better motion clarity, ironically more brightness once you account for this thing quartering its brightness to flashbang you 360 times per second, and the OLED won’t wreck your eyes long term. Oh, and it’s like £40 less than this QSG2. I’m truly struggling to work out who this is actually for, and if it isn’t obvious, I can’t exactly recommend it.