a 480Hz and 4K OLED gaming monitor in one

On paper, the LG Ultragear 32GS95UE is one of the most desirable and capable OLED gaming monitors around. Combining a large 32-inch screen size with a 4K resolution, it delivers a really sharp image while also being able to skip along at a speedy 240Hz refresh rate. But that’s not all. Tap its dual-mode button and it will switch to 480Hz at 1080p, for an ultra-fast experience that’s ideal for competitive first person shooters.

The combination, along with its superb overall image quality and ultra-fast response time means this screen is easily one of the best gaming monitors around. However, with a high price and, also with LG OLED technology having previously disappointed us in some ways, it’s worth digging deeper into whether this is the right screen for you.

Design

The screen itself also doesn’t opt to highlight the incredible slimness that can be achieved with OLED panels. While the newly announced LG 27GX790A is just a few millimeters thick at its thinnest, with a chunkier part on the back to house all the extra electronics, here the whole screen is thicker and has a gentle curve to it from the slim edges to the thicker central part. This doesn’t look as strikingly thin from some angles but makes the screen easier to handle, which is important for a larger, heavier screen such as this one. Even more beneficial, though, would be an actual handle on the top of the stand, as we saw in our AOC AG276QZD review.

Meanwhile, the stand offers height, rotation, pivot, and tilt adjustment, so you can easily set the panel to your preferred position and access the connections on the back by pivoting the panel. The stand can also be removed to reveal a 100 x 100mm VESA mount for use with most standard monitor arms. You can read about a great choice of monitor arm for this panel in our Secretlab Heavy Duty Monitor Arm review.

The screen’s surface here uses a fairly matte finish to reduce reflections, and it works well, as you can see from the image above compared to a glossy screen below. However, this finish can slightly impact some aspects of image quality, which I’ll discuss more below.

The display also incorporates a hexagonal ring of RGB lighting on the back. It’s a neatly incorporated feature, but it doesn’t really glow bright enough for the light to reflect off your wall and be visible from the front.

One of the bonus features of this display is a surprisingly excellent pair of 10W speakers. Many LG gaming monitors of the past have completely forgone including speakers, so it’s great to see LG include some here for day-to-day listening. The sound is good enough to render cheap soundbars and speakers, such as the Trust GXT 1619 / Redragon GS560, a pointless upgrade.

They can’t work miracles, and basically any speaker that costs more than $30 – let alone some of the great options on our best gaming speaker guide – will be a marked improvement, but if you like the idea of remaining clutter-free and using a gaming headset for most purposes, then just having decent speakers in your monitor for occasional use is a welcome addition.

Onscreen display menu

Most aspects of the screen – other than Dual-Mode – are controlled via a single mini joystick on the central, lower back of the screen. You can tilt this to bring up quick menus for volume and brightness or tap it in to bring up the main menu.

The menu itself is quick to respond and intuitive to navigate, with all the key settings we’d expect for adjusting image quality and gaming performance. For the most part, though, you can leave the display set to its defaults, as the out-of-the-box image quality is excellent and most gamers will want to leave the display at 100% brightness, keep G-Sync/Adaptive Sync enabled, and so on.

However, there are a few settings to tweak if you want to get the best from the screen. These include the Dual-Mode option (in the Game Adjust menu), which lets you choose the 27-inch or 24-inch cropped views instead of the fullscreen mode.

You might also want to turn on the OLED Screen Move setting (in the General section). This makes the screen slightly move its image (by a fraction of a pixel) to reduce the time any one pixel is showing the same color, in turn prolonging the life of the screen. It’s a setting you might want to turn off for tournament-level gaming sessions but is otherwise essentially unnoticeable in normal use.

First and foremost, one of the biggest issues we’ve found with OLED monitors we’ve tested so far is fixed with this screen. In our Acer Predator X45 review, MSI MPG 271QRX review, MSI MPG 491CQP review, and particularly in our LG 27GR95QE review, we noted that these displays produce slightly fuzzy-looking text with distracting colored fringing its edges, and also on other high-contrast edges, such as a black box on a white background.

This is down to the way the red, green, and blue sub-pixels are arranged and combined to form each pixel on OLED panels, which means the display doesn’t work well with the font smoothing technologies used to make text look good on flat-panel displays. LCDs suffer far less from this issue.

Crucially, the problem used to be worse on LG’s OLED monitors, as they use an extra white sub-pixel, along with red, green, and blue sub-pixels (giving them the name WOLED) to form each pixel. With its new WOLED panels, though, LG has slightly changed the sub-pixel layout, reducing this problem.

What’s more, the problem in general is greatly reduced by increasing the pixel density of a screen, as it means the screen has far more pixels (and  thus sub-pixels) at its disposal to smooth out the look of text and other high-contrast edges. And that’s precisely what the LG 32GS95UE provides. With the 32GS95UE being such a large screen, its 137ppi pixel density isn’t a huge step up over the 110ppi of most of the above other OLEDs, but it’s just enough to noticeably reduce the problem.

The image still isn’t quite as sharp as an equivalent LCD, but it’s more than good enough to make this display easy to use for reading and working with documents such as spreadsheets. You can see the 32GS95UE on the left above vs a 27-inch 4K LCD, which isn’t quite a direct comparison but you can still make out the cleaner edges of the text in the right part of the image.

The 4K resolution here also makes for a generally sharp-looking image for anything else. Videos, pictures, and games all look great, though if we’re being really picky, you don’t get quite that sense of the image being “just like real life” when viewed from a normal 50cm (20-inch) viewing distance. To truly stop being able to sense the presence of pixels, you have to sit back at a distance of about 1-1.5m (3-5ft) with a larger display such as this one. In contrast, 4K on a 27-inch screen nets you that effect from a much closer distance.

As for overall color reproduction, this screen is fantastic. The improvements in overall brightness compared to older LG displays are really noticeable and, in particular, there’s no longer the hugely distracting constant variation in brightness that afflicted the 27GR95QE.

With that panel, the brightness of brighter parts of the display would constantly rise and fall depending on how much of the rest of the image was also filled with bright or dark pixels. So, if you had a small white window on a dark background, it would look really bright, but if you then open a full white window – a typical webpage or email client, for instance – the overall white brightness would drop drastically. It was super distracting and I’m glad to see it’s now gone.

That said, we did have to run the display at near to full brightness most of the time. At 100 brightness it hits near enough to LG’s claimed brightness figure with us measuring a brightness of 270cd/m². This is actually a touch bright for a typical more dimly-lit office but about right for a brighter room.

Drop the brightness to just 90/100, though, and you’re already down to just 225cd/m² while 80/100 hits 176cd/m². Running at 100% means you’re asking the panel to run at its maximum all the time, which has the potential to reduce the life of the panel, as OLEDs do degrade over time, and they degrade faster the brighter they run.

Still, the issue is alleviated somewhat by the WOLED tech. The extra white pixel means it can deliver the bright white background windows (or white text on black windows, if you’re using dark mode) of many app interfaces while not having to run its red, green, and blue subpixels at as high a level. In theory that could result in longer overall life than Samsung’s rival QD-OLED tech if the panel is used as a daily work display, although it’s too early to say how this will actually play out in real-world use, as it will still take years for any degradation to be noticeable.

Speaking of QD-OLED, among the advantages that rival tech has over LG’s tech is slightly brighter peak color vividness. This LG panel can produce amazing, dazzling colors, but Samsung’s QD-OLED tech can push extreme red, green, and blue hues just a touch further. As a result, for HDR content, QD-OLED can look more vivid, though LG’s tech can produce brighter white levels, so it’s a compromise either way.

Speaking of HDR, this screen has three main modes. You can opt for Peak Brightness to be off, which means HDR only hits the normal 270cd/m² max of the screen. At Peak Brightness Low this maximum HDR level hits around 625cd/m² and then Peak Brightness High goes up to 675cd/m². In theory, the latter should allow for hitting that 1300cd/m² peak level but our testing couldn’t produce a small enough white HDR window to confirm this. The above image shows the same video in SDR (top left) and HDR (bottom right).

Coming back to the issue of the matte finish of this screen, it’s far from the coarsest matte finish I’ve seen but you do still get a very slight shimmering effect on plain white backgrounds. Some people find this effect really distracting compared to the completely flat look you get with glossy screens, but I didn’t find it too bad on this panel.

I happily played Fortnite No Build on this panel at 4K on an RTX 4070 Super, getting over 200fps and it felt amazing. Meanwhile, a quick dip in Stalker 2 for our Stalker 2 best settings guide really showed off the incredible image quality of the panel in dark scenes. The true blackness of OLED works amazingly in those opening at-night scenes, and again the speed of the panel worked superbly with the game, even though I couldn’t get much above 100fps in that game with my setup.

Switching the screen to 1080p/480Hz mode the difference is surprisingly noticeable. By all means, 240Hz on an OLED panel is as much speed as many gamers could ever want, but the step up to 480Hz makes 240Hz feel downright choppy. We’re absolutely reaching the physical limits of what humans will ever be able to perceive at these sorts of refresh rates but we’re not quite there yet. You can see this monitor’s excellent handling of fast frame rates in the image below. This motion blur test is often a smeary mess with slower screens but is crystal clear here.

Meanwhile, there are only so many games that can actually run at 480Hz or above, with even the likes of Apex Legends being capped at 360Hz. However, Counter-Strike 2, Valorant, and more can run this fast and you can feel the difference.  There’s just no perceptible sense of there even being a frame rate to the game: your movements and interactions just happen on the screen as smoothly and perfectly fast as though they were in real life, other than them only happening at a 1080p resolution.

For these sorts of games, I settled on using the 27-inch cropped mode, as the fullscreen view is a bit large, but I found that the 24-inch crop was too small to view with the distance between me and the monitor.

Nonetheless, until those lower prices settle into being the absolute baseline, regular price of this display, we have to somewhat consider its value at its higher price, and at a penny shy of $1,400, it’s a very expensive panel. You can get huge 49-inch super wide OLED monitors for less. It’s good that this monitor largely delivers on being the one panel to do everything.

Read our full MSI MPG 491CQP review.

Asus ROG Swift PG32UCDP

The Asus ROG Swift PG32UCDP uses the exact same LG-supplied panel as the 32GS95UE, so it should deliver near-identical overall image quality and gaming performance. As such, whoever model is cheapest at any given moment is likely to determine which monitor is the best buy.