AOC Q27G3XMN thoughts and impressions (Multi-platform gaming)

I already have a Gigabyte M28U and MSI G274QPF, both respectably solid IPS panels for their price and performance but I impulse purchased the AOC Q27G3XMN based off Monitors Unboxed and RTINGs review hypes...

There are some big things I need to address as I have tested this for both PC and console gaming with PS5. After 5 days of testing, my thoughts on this monitor are "mixed." It's a pretty solid monitor for PC gaming but it's extremely disappointing for PS5. For a quick side reference, I checked the back of my monitor and it has a manufacture date of October 2023. My model did not have that infamous red shift in color that others have reported.

PC:

Starting with PC, all HDR testing on PC was conducted with the monitors included display port cable. Monitor settings were: local dimming set to medium, overdrive set to medium, and refresh rate set at 180hz with adaptive sync enabled. The colors look extremely washed out with HDR on. It is impossible to get good looking saturation in any of the monitors HDR modes without intervention through GPU/display control panels. After doing windows 11 HDR calibration for the 90th time and ensuring that my color saturation and SDR brightness were set at their maximum values, I went into Radeon Adrenaline and set the color settings to Vivid and enabled custom colors (leaving everything at their default values except saturation) to slide the saturation up to 150%. This was the only way I could get the saturation I wanted close enough to my Gigabyte M28U.

HDR Picture/Movie/Game all fail to give vibrant colors and looked worse with Radeon Adrenalins Vivid + saturation adjustment. The monitor brightness fluctuates a lot in HDR mode, with reported peak brightness levels of 1040 nits up to the highest being 1230. That's a lot in brightness fluctuation. I have had instances where the monitor failed to activate HDR mode, despite being in HDR and refused to go above a reported 460 nits of peak brightness (which happens to be its SDR peak brightness values) and confirmed this by running the HDR calibration tool only to see the brightness completely white out at 440 nits. This problem was only corrected when turning the monitor off and on, or altering the adaptive sync to off/on in the monitors OSD. It's as if there is some kind of communication error between the PC and the monitor. I tested Tekken 8, Resident Evil 2, 3, 4 remakes, Elden Ring, Dark Souls 1-3, Cyber Punk 2077, Doom Eternal, and Star Field (which has terrible colors no matter what you do), so I could have a decent variety combination of HDR supported + Auto-HDR enabled experience.

After the mind-numbing color tweaks and getting everything dialed in on the PC side, HDR gaming on PC was outstanding. The most impressive thing so far was the minimal dark smearing. I hardly noticed it, and I tried fast moving gaming content at 60 fps up to 180 fps. When playing Elden Ring on my older VA panel (an LG 32GN650-B) and turning the camera in Siofra River (known for it's darks and hazy purples), the black smearing was very noticeable. Running those same scenes on this AOC Q27G3XMN and they are almost completely non-existent to my eyes. A true testament to the quality of VA panels in 2023 - 2024, or at least this specific panel (which is apparently a TCL HVA panel of some sort).

PS5:
Now for the most disappointing thing for me as a multiplatform gamer.... PS5 HDR performance. I have spent hours, frustratingly adjusting PS5s settings for HDR and I got nothing but a washed out image. I even followed popular youtuber "HD TVtest" video for PS5 HDR calibration for HGiG calibration and no luck. The monitor reportedly supports 1440p HDR 60hz on PS5 but regardless of what I try on both the monitors OSD and the PS5, the colors are washed out, the gamma and brightness/darkness levels are terrible and the display still looks dim. I have had no problem running the PS5 in SDR mode with 1440p 60hz, 120hz, and down sampled 4k 60hz modes with full RGB range. The 460 nits peak brightness were adequate here and I was able to get proper blacks and color saturations through OSD adjustments (game color set to 18 for my saturation preference), but when local dimming is enabled, the display is dimmed pretty significantly, looking like a 250 nit brightness level which is too low for my eyes as I am used to playing SDR content at 450+ nits of brightness thanks to the Gigabyte M28U and MSI G274QPF (non QD model).

This monitor still looks great in SDR mode. Don't get me wrong, but to really take advantage of the full array local dimming, HDR is a must and it's frustrating that I can only really get a good HDR experience on PC. I have an Xbox Series S but have not hooked it up to the monitor for testing. I do know that Microsoft has a solid history of supporting monitor gaming for it's consoles. For example, Xbox One and one X both have had Freesync and 1440p output support since 2017 and Xbox Series Consoles can output 1440p as well as take advantage of DSC (display stream compression), LFC and Freesync. PS5 on the other hand, does not support DSC or Freesync, so unless a monitor has the full bandwidth of HDMI 2.1, the PS5 is limited to 4k 120hz YUV 4:2:0 on most HDMI 2.1 capable monitors. I still think this is a great monitor for it's price point, but I had to fiddle around a lot to get what I wanted out of it on the PC side, and the lack of true HDR support on PS5 is disappointing but this is probably Sony's fault. There's no reason why the HDMI 2.0 implementation isn't sufficient enough for 1440p 120hz HDR support.