Acer XB280HK 4K G-SYNC Gaming Monitor Review

While the Lagom tests on the previous page lay out a monitor's performance in black and white (and blue and green and red and...), we also take into consideration a subjective analysis. After all, you're not purchasing a monitor to view test patterns for hours on end. To see how the Acer XB280HK performed in the real world, we viewed a series of HD video clips and fired up a few games. Torturous, we know, but hey, you guys are worth every minute of our entertainment.

Subjective Tests HD Movie Playback and Gaming

Watching movies on the Acer XB280HK was very pleasurable. The screen offers bright whites, dark blacks and even without any fine-tuning, colors seems well saturated. The panel's high-resolution and fast response time meant there was no visible ghosting either. For video and multi-media tasks, the Acer XB280HK should satisfy most users.
 

We also did quite a bit of gaming on the Acer XB280HK, both with and without G-SYNC. We played some older titles like Left 4 Dead 2 (which can run at very high frame rates), and some newer titles like Crysis 3 and Metro Last Light.

When playing games that run at very high frame rates the effects of G-SYNC aren't quite as noticeable. We're sure if you stopped and stared and looked specifically for visual artifacts, you'd find some, but during actual gameplay, they weren't always noticable.

When playing more taxing games, however, with framerates that may fluctuate above or below say 40-50 FPS or so, the effect G-SYNC has on the on-screen imagery and / or lag is awesome. Disabling V-SYNC may eliminate lag, but tearing is evident. And enabling V-SYNC may eliminate the tearing, but the lag can be annoying--especially with a high-resolution display like this o ne. With, G-SYNC though, the on-screen images don't suffer from visual artifacts and the tearing is gone too.

We wish there was an easy way to visually convey how G-SYNC affects on-screen animation, but there isn’t. We don’t have a means to capture DisplayPort feeds and shooting video of the screen and hosting it on-line doesn’t capture the full effect either. In lieu of an easy visual method to show how effective G-SYNC is, you'll just have to take our word for it. G-SYNC is great.

We're sure some of you are curios as to whether or not this display supports higher than 60Hz refresh rates, when operating at lower resolutions.  Unfortunately, it does not. When gaming at lower resolutions, it scales images properly to fill the screen (unlike some other 4K displays), but the highest refresh rate available was 60Hz.