Asus ROG Swift (PG27AQDM) review: OLED meets brightness

The ROG Swift OLED looks stunning, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Asus makes some beautiful looking monitors, and the ROG Swift OLED brings some much-needed style to the growing world of OLED gaming displays.

Combine all of this with how thin the panel is, and the ROG Swift OLED feels like a futuristic gaming monitor. Asus carries that spirit forward with some unique features. For example, the top of the stand has a 1/4-inch thread if you want to mount a camera, similar to the Asus ROG PG42UQ.

Asus actually took a few lessons from that big 42-inch OLED, too. The heat sink inside, according to Asus, leads to a 5% lower temperature with a 17% increase in brightness compared to the PG42UQ. I don’t have a PG42UQ to compare with, but I can say that active cooling was never audible in the ROG Swift OLED during my testing.

better control

There’s nothing too exciting going on with the ROG Swift OLED 27K’s ports. You have two HDMI 2.0 ports, along with a DisplayPort 1.4 connection. You’ll want to use a DisplayPort connection if you can—HDMI 2.0 locks the monitor to 120Hz.

You also get some USB 3.2 Gen 1 connections via the USB-B port, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Even if you don’t need a USB hub, you should connect a USB-B cable to DisplayWidget Center.

It’s a great addition, but you don’t need to use DisplayWidget Center if you don’t want to mess with extra cables. The four-way joystick is easily accessible, and Asus has a clean and concise on-screen display. Thankfully, there are dedicated power and input buttons alongside the joystick, so you don’t have to push it in every direction to find what you need.

glitter solution

This was the biggest criticism of LG’s move – it was too bland. I measured just 204 nits of peak brightness on the LG monitor, while the ROG Swift OLED reached 297 nits of peak brightness. That’s a lot less than Asus advertises, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise. OLEDs tend to be dimmer than LCD monitors like the Samsung Odyssey Neo G8.

That’s around the brightness of the Alienware 34 QD-OLED in SDR—but keep in mind that QD-OLED is primarily impressive because of its brightness advantage over OLED. HDR is where the ROG Swift OLED gets interesting.

As usual, the full screen display doesn’t reach 1,000 nits. It kicks off with a 3% window, though, topping out at 931 nits and validating Asus’ brightness claims. Stretch it up to 25% of the window, and brightness shrinks to 406 nits. It’s still not the brightness of a high-end LCD, but the brightness is much higher than what LG showed off earlier this year.

Brightness and contrast are the best part of OLED quality; Remember, OLED allows each pixel to reach true black levels, theoretically providing infinite contrast. Color is a different story entirely, and that’s where the ROG Swift OLED struggles.

In SDR, color coverage is solid with 97% DCI-P3 and 91% AdobeRGB, but color accuracy is all over the place. Out of the box, blues and reds were separate, resulting in a color difference of 9 (most monitors aim for less than 2). Asus claims the monitor comes calibrated, but my results say otherwise. HDR performance is poor, as is to be expected from an OLED panel with white subpixels.

The good news is that this is a problem with the monitor’s calibration, not the panel itself. Using the SpyderX, I was able to get 1.3 color difference, which is more than acceptable for a panel of this caliber. During my review period, Asus released a firmware update to improve HDR color accuracy, which helped, so hopefully a future update could improve the default color performance even further. The sRGB mode on monitors is pretty accurate, so you can limit the monitor to that color space.

Only he In fact Matters if you want to do content creation. The default color profile is technically wrong, but it looks great nonetheless. i played through some cyberpunk 2077The new Overdrive mode is with the default profile, and I had to wean myself off of it to write this review. It looks great, but if you want to do some video or photo editing, a significant calibration is in order.

OLED crisis

The ROG Swift OLED looks great, and with calibration, you can use it for content creation. OLED comes with some problems, though, and the ROG Swift OLED isn’t above those issues.

Asus includes a lot of migration features. By default, you’ll get a notification every eight hours of continuous use to run the pixel-cleaning feature, but Asus goes further than that. There is an automatic screen saver with a setting that will automatically dim the static logo. There’s always a small risk of burn-in, but some minor maintenance will keep the ROG Swift OLED running for years into the future.

If anything, the more pressing problem is WRGB subpixel layout. It’s a problem seen on the Alienware 34 QD-OLED and the LG UltraGear OLED 27, and it comes down to text clarity. In short, there’s a bit of fringing on the text due to the extra white subpixels.

This isn’t a problem for me, even on a 27-inch, 1440p screen held fairly close to my face. However, this is definitely something that comes down to preference, and you may find this to be a problem if you’re looking at text all day. For my part, I have no problems with text clarity, and I use the Alienware 34 QD-OLED every day to write articles.

Best of both worlds gaming

The HDR experience on the ROG Swift OLED 27 is superb, especially with cinematic titles such as Cyberpunk 2077. This is outweighed by the superb HDR due to the shorter response time of OLED. Asus claims 0.03 milliseconds, and although the monitor is closer to 0.2ms, it’s still one of the fastest response times you can get out of a monitor right now.

Beyond motion clarity, the monitor supports adaptive sync, allowing you to use G-Sync with Nvidia GPUs and FreeSync with AMD GPUs. Asus includes a few extra settings, like a frame-per-second (FPS) counter, timer, and genre-specific presets, but I imagine they won’t be selling points for most users.

The gaming experience on the ROG Swift OLED is one of the best you can buy right now, combining the excellent motion clarity of an eSports monitor and the world-class HDR performance of OLED. It’s only matched by the Alienware 34 QD-OLED and the LG UltraGear OLED 27, and the Asus has a few key areas where it’s made improvements.

We’ve already seen what a 27-inch OLED gaming monitor can do, but the ROG Swift OLED 27 builds on LG’s design with higher brightness and a more robust range of features. Color accuracy is a killer out of the box, but hopefully Asus can address more of the color issues with future firmware updates.

Of the two 27-inch OLED monitors we currently have on hand, this is the one to buy. However, the Alienware 34 QD-OLED still poses a major threat to the ROG Swift OLED 27. The Alienware monitor has better color performance before calibration, and is around the same price Asus is charging. Between the two monitors, I’d still choose the Alienware, but the Asus is easier to justify if you’re not into the 21:9 aspect ratio.

There’s no doubt that the ROG Swift OLED 27 is competing with the best gaming monitors you can buy right now. However, it’s important to remember that OLED isn’t for everyone. As impressive as this is for both cinematic and competitive gaming, if you find yourself primarily working on a desktop, an LCD display will serve you better.

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