ASUS details their upcoming XG438Q FreeSync 2 HDR Gaming Display

Back at CES, ASUS announced their 43-inch XG438Q gaming display, which offers users a resolution of 4K, refresh rates of up to 120Hz and support for AMD’s FreeSync 2 technology, delivering a high-end, large-screen PC gaming experience at a cost that’s much lower than Nvidia’s Big Format Gaming Displays BFGDs. 

Now, ASUS has revealed a lot more information about their XG438Q gaming display, confirming that the screen exceeds the DisplayHDR 600 specification by offer peak brightness levels of 750 nits, delivers gamers an anti-glare screen and offers what ASUS calls “Gamefast Input Technology” to minimise input latency. 

This isn’t one of Nvidia’s Big Format Gaming Displays (BGFD), this is an ASUS ROG Big FREESYNC 2 Gaming Display, supporting AMD’s FreeSync 2 HDR standard with a variable refresh rate (VRR) range of 48-120FPS. This is more than enough to active AMD’s low framerate compensation technology. Input-wise this TV-sized monitor supports three HDMI 2.0 inputs as well as a single DisplayPort 1.4 connection, making this monitor usable with both gaming consoles, home entertainment systems and PCs. 

With Nvidia’s announcement of VESA Adaptive-Sync support, it is likely that this ROG Strix monitor will also be supported by Nvidia’s hardware, though this has not been verified. Nvidia will allow PC gamers to activate Adaptive-Sync support within their drivers on uncertified displays, so we will have to wait and see how well this monitor works on Geforce hardware.  

This monitor is expected to use a VA type panel and should deliver respectable levels of HDR support with 10-bit image processing, 750 nits of peak luminance, local dimming and both FreeSync 2 HDR and VESA DisplayHDR 600 certifications. The screen will also cover 90% of the DCI-P3 colour space and offer users three distinct HDR modes, SUS Cinema HDR, ASUS Gaming HDR and FreeSync 2 HDR. 

Please note that this display does not support Display Stream Compression (DSC), a technology which AMD recently highlighted with their Radeon RX 5700 series launch. This technology can be used to enable 4K monitors to run at 4K 144Hz without Chroma Sub-sampling when using DisplayPort 1.4.