Asus Swift PG 279 Monitor - First Impressions

OK so I ordered one of these suckers off Amazon. Took forever to get here (or at least it felt like forever). Complained about how long it took to prepare my order (almost 5 days in "Preparing for shipping" status) and after some back and forth with customer service they offered me a 10% discount for my trouble "if I would like to accept."

Ummm...yeah, I would!

Anyway it arrived today. And. It's. Big. Very nice design, thin bezels, gorgeous to look at. Ridiculously large base, but it does keep the monitor very stable, so there's that. There is no screen wobble at all when I type.

Funny thing about a 27" screen is it creates the optical illusion of being shorter (in terms of height) than it really is. But the ruler don't lie. It's just as tall as my old 24" (which was actually a 21:10 aspect ratio) screen, despite my initial impression. But it's quite a bit wider.

Being an IPS panel, viewing angles are of course, great. And color quality out of the box seems pretty good. Brightness and contrast were way too high out of the box in my opinion though. I am happy to say backlight bleed on mine well within what I would consider tolerable, though more noticeable than my trusty old Dell ultrasharp (which had almost nonexistent bleed).

Of course as soon as I got it setup I had to check out some games. As expected, going from 1200p to 1440p did result in the loss of some framerate. Some games handled it better than others.

Borderlands 2 barely changed at all (everything maxed out). I went from around 100-120 fps at 1200p to...about 100-120 fps at 1440p. Shadow of Mordor (Ultra settings) went from 100 to around 85-90 though I did drop down to 65-ish at one point. If I recall correctly though, that game is actually capped at 100fps so who knows what my "real" framerate was at 1200p.

Way at the other end we have Agents of Mayhem, which...I love the game, but I think it's pretty widely accepted that it is not particularly well optimized. At 1200p (sort of medium-high custom settings) I was getting around 80-85 fps running around the temple area. That dropped to around 50-60 fps at 1440p. Bizarrely, running around the Ark really tanked my framerate and I was dropping as low as 40 (compared to 100ish at 1200p). Very odd. Where the other games were more or less consistent, Agents was all over the place, spiking and dropping like crazy. But thanks to the Gsync, it was still nice and smooth.

Tomb Raider (Very High settings) went from around 80-90 fps in the snowy camp area I last saved to 45-65 fps. The benchmarks dropped around 10-20 average fps depending on which part I was looking at, with the Mountain Valley section being the least impacted. And then I realized I wasn't even running in Direct X 12 mode this whole time and felt like a big dumb idiot. Switching over to D12 got me back 5-10 fps.

So far, I'm quite happy with this new monitor. 27" gaming is the bees knees. Even the reduced framerates don't bother me. Worse case scenario, I can drop the antialiasing (or something) down on some of the games if I really find myself needing to recover frames.

I'll add more thoughts later as I become more acquainted with this lovely beast of a screen. But for now, I will say this is a very, very nice monitor (and for that price it damn well better be).

My CPU is an i5-7500 and GPU is the 1070 with whatever modest overclocking DS does (it was free when I ordered so why not). 16GB of Ram. It's kind of weird how smooth even moving my mouse cursor around is.

The OSD does take a bit of getting used to and I would say it's not as intuitive as it could be.

Still fiddling around with the RGB values.

As for the bleed, I understand the first batch of this model was really hit or miss, and things got ironed out in the production process later. Still, the bleed is there, but outside of specifically looking for it (turning off all your lights and bringing up a completely black screen), I doubt you'd notice in day to day use. It's just that if you do decide to specifically look for it...yeah, there's some bleed.

P.S. The Witcher 3 looks amazing on a 27" display. Just saying.

No prob.

After a couple hours of fiddling around, I think I've determined (in a very unscientific fashion admittedly) that around 100fps is my personal "whoa" threshold. That seems to be the point at which the framerate registers to my own eyes as being something different than what I'm used to.

It's something I noticed right away when I jumped into Borderlands 2, and to a lesser extent Shadow of Mordor.

While the other games were still impressive, I think that was more a function of Gsync doing its job (and without giving that weird effect that my eyes sometimes picked up with vsync). But those two games that ran at 100fps or close to it were definitely...well, it was quite an experience.

nice monitor.  are you running it overclocked or at its native (144Hz) speed?  with that 1070 i'd probably recommend running it w/o the overclock.  it's hard enough to drive 1440p at its native speeds and you are kind of at the entry level with that card w/o having to compromise in-game settings for some of the more demanding titles.  you might see better performance in some of those games you mentioned struggling some with. 

IPS glow can often be mistaken for BLB.  BLB will usually manifest in a particular quadrant (corners usually) of the screen no matter the viewing angle, whereas IPS Glow you mostly can see by an off angled viewing of the screen. 

i've largely gotten used to the IPS Glow and i can live with it over the weird color transitions caused by poor viewing angles of TN panels, especially the vertical ones i see just by changing my head level. 

thanks for the review of your experience with this monitor. 

In case anyone else is thinking about picking one of these up, I should point out, it's kind of...odd.

Don't get me wrong, it's a very nice monitor...but the dimensions just seem a bit strange in my opinion.

Originally posted by ArkansasWoman777 Umm you are aware you can turn it sideways....right? Unless you are totally joking with this picture and already knew this...lol

+1

You mean it's not normal to tilt your head to the side when you're gaming? Daaaamn.

In all seriousness though, I once saw a picture of someone using three of these monitors in portrait mode. That's...a lot of money to spend on monitors.

But but then my printer isn't working right!

Originally posted by Snaike But but then my printer isn't working right!

Just turn the printer upside down...  Fixed.