I’m in the market for a new monitor and I wanted to get a ultrawide, I almost exclusively play videogames on my PC. I found some good candidates, but because of price I’m heavily leaning towards a flat panel instead of a curved one, namely AOC U34G3X.

Is a flat ultrawide panel much worse than a curved one for gaming? I’ve used flat panels since they started selling it, but the longer diagonal scares me a bit. I’m currently using a 27" flat panel.

Thanks in advance for any and all suggestions!

  • @[email protected]English
    2•1 year ago

    I think you have to decide on a panel type first. For mid-range you can get IPS or VA panels. VA generally hs nicer colours and better contrast but can have black level smearing.

    I really wanted to avoid black level smearing so I went for a flat panel one as this was the only ips I could find in my price range. For high end there are some good VA panels with very low/not noticeable smearing.

    This is probably a more important difference than flat vs curved.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      0•1 year ago

      According to my finances, I can only afford the bottom tier panels haha that’s why I will get the AOC: inexpensive for the specs. I’m not too fussy about colors and greys, as long as I can get a decent picture by using a color profile plus gamma/contrast settings. As I said, my PC is for gaming, so I don’t need accurate colors etc. as long as it doesn’t look awful I’m good!

      • @[email protected]English
        1•1 year ago

        This is what I ended up going with. The colours were definitely a bit disappointing at first but after tweaking the osd I got a nice enough picture. Good enough that it doesn’t bother me next to my other screen I can’t measure performance but the monitor feels fast and there is no smearing whatsoever. Viewing angles are sadly limited especially for an ips display, so much so that this screen prpbably would’ve actually benefitted from being curved.

        Would I recommend it overall? Maybe. If you are dead set on an ultrawide at this resolution there weren’t any other ips screens available this cheap when I bought it ~2 years ago, not sure how it is today. The VA panels at a similar price will look nicer, if smearing doesn’t bother you. Having the screen fill up your field of view is great and the monitor looks perfectly fine for gaming. You definitely pay a large premium for the aspect ratio, there are much cheaper 16:9 screens that perform better then this one picture quality wise. 21:9 is nice when it works (~85% of games I play, some sweaty e-sports games don’t support it on purpose for example) but you are paying extra for black bars when it doesn’t.