We’ve seen very popular models like the 27″ 27GL850 with 1440p resolution and 144Hz, 34″ 34GK950F with 3440 x 1440 resolution and 144Hz, and 37.5″ 38GL950G with 3840 x 1600 resolution and an overclocked 175Hz refresh rate appear based on their newly updated technology. More recently LG.Display have made excellent advances in the high refresh rate IPS space with their Nano IPS technology. These 4K 144Hz screens we’ve tested in the past have all been based on AU Optronics’ IPS-type panel technology and performed very well, they were first to market with a panel of this spec and it was widely adopted. This seemed to work very well and provides an excellent way to boost the capability of existing DisplayPort 1.4 connections for these kind of screens.

More recently some 4K 144Hz displays like the Asus ROG Strix XG27UQ which we tested in April 2020 worked around this bandwidth limitation by making use of VESA’s Display Stream Compression (DSC) technology, a visually lossless solution available from modern graphics cards that allows you to make full use of the resolution and refresh rate without needing to drop colour depth or chroma. We saw this method used with the Acer Nitro XV273K for instance in December 2018. Later on some manufacturers experimented with using dual DisplayPort connections but while this avoided the need to drop colour depth and chroma for the top end refresh rates, it was restrictive in terms of using features like G-sync/FreeSync and HDR. In practice this wasn’t always an issue, but it put some people off. Those early generation screens were limited by even the most recent DisplayPort 1.4 connection bandwidth and to reach above 98Hz required a drop from 10-bit colour depth to 8-bit, and then to reach above 120Hz you had to sacrifice some colour chroma as well. At the time there was some criticism from consumers about some of the colour sacrifices that were needed to reach the maximum 4K 144Hz. This provided cutting edge technology in the market and finally offered the combination of super-high resolutions and refresh rates, packed in to a 27″ sized screen.

It’s been a while since we tested the first 4K 144Hz desktop monitor back in August 2018, when we reviewed the Asus ROG Swift PG27UQ.

Lg ultragear control center 27gp950