While we all know we need a monster GPU, CPU and RAM to play the latest games at their fullest potential, all of that is pretty moot if you don’t have a decent monitor to show it all off. Yes, smaller monitors at 1080p might give you the best FPS, but sometimes, we like to enjoy our games at maximum resolution.
Enter the LG UltraGear OLED 45-inch Curved Gaming Monitor or the 45GR95QE-B for all the humans who can’t prove they aren’t bots.
This monitor pulls no punches and is stacked to the brim with every feature you could ever want for the ultimate gaming setup. How do I know? Well, for one, I play games for a living, and second, I already run an ultrawide 49-inch monitor as my daily driver for maximum productivity.
While most gamers tend to shun ultrawide monitors because some games out there just don’t support the resolution, this LG UltraGear OLED Curved Gaming Monitor does things a little differently.
The dimensions of this bad boy are set up to make the monitor feel less ultrawide than it actually is. It’s pretty tall and features an 800R curvature. To help explain that, it’s said that with peripheral vision, the human eye can see a 1000R curvature from 1 meter away. That means an 800R curvature will give you the full display angle from just 800mm away, which is nice and close for those using their monitors on a desk. In other words you wont be needing to turn your head from left to right every 2 milliseconds to enjoy the beauty of the OLED panel when playing games. All this while maintaining the ultrawide 3440×1440 (21:9) resolution is impressive. Being OLED also means that the colours and darks are extra juicy, too, with a 1.5 Million to 1 contrast ratio.
It’s worth noting that LG has also considered screen burn, which can be pretty common with OLED panels, and they have included OLED care features. Screen Move is a feature that slightly shifts the screen display at regular intervals. This is noticeable at first, but it does not feel like it interferes with gameplay once you get used to it. You can switch this function off if it bothers you. A built-in screen saver and an image clean function that flushes the LED colour array to deter burn-in are also included in the feature list.
To add to the beauty of the display, the LG UltraGear OLED 45-inch Curved Gaming Monitor also includes a blisteringly fast 240Hz frame rate and a 0.03ms grey-to-grey response time, eliminating screen tears and ensuring the best possible frames if you have the rig to push them out. The monitor is also compatible with both AMD Freesync and Nvidia G-Sync.
Other gaming features built into the monitor include an on-screen crosshair, a black stabiliser that helps bring out enemies in darker corners, and an on-screen FPS counter. Weirdly, you can’t have both the FPS counter and crosshair enabled simultaneously, but that’s nothing a little piece of Prestik can’t fix.
Sadly, there are no built-in speakers on the LG 45-inch UltraGear OLED Curved Gaming Monitor, which I was a little bummed about. Yes, it does come with an optical out port to connect your beefier sound systems and a DTS HP:X 4-pole 3.5mm audio jack for your headphones, which delivers an excellent sound experience. Still, I found I would much rather just use the ports on my gaming rig.
Regarding productivity, which I found myself unable to be while playing as many games as possible with the monitor, the LG UltraGear OLED 45-inch Curved Gaming Monitor includes some nifty picture-in-picture features.
When you have two different input sources to the monitor, both can show up on the display at the same time. You can have both inputs displayed side-by-side, which helps a lot with working between the two devices, or you can have one take up a small space in the corner, which I thought would be pretty useful for streamers who use dual setups.
Of course, with all this good comes a little bit of bad. A much larger monitor means your PPI, or pixels per inch, will be significantly lower than a 24 or 32-inch monitor. Some perfectionists may see the dip in quality here, with a PPI of only 83.8, especially when put side-by-side with a smaller monitor, but I rather enjoyed the extra screen real-estate for that immersive experience. The bigger “bad” here is when it comes to this monitor’s price. As one of the quickest ultrawide OLED monitors out there, you can expect to see a considerable price tag, and you’d be right. Sitting at just over R40,000 for this monitor means it certainly won’t fit the pocket of many gamers out there. This monitor is for enthusiasts, and the price clearly shows that.
After all is said and done, the LG UltraGear OLED 45-inch Curved Gaming Monitor is an absolute dream to game on. It has stacks of gaming features, and its fancy RGB lighting on the back and sleek-looking mount make it even gamier. The 800R curve makes me feel like I’m sitting in my very own gaming cockpit, ready to be absorbed into whatever game I have on-screen, and its impressive speeds make that absorption even more real. I also love that LG went the extra mile and included both an HDMI 2.1 and Display Port 1.4 cable in the box. The low PPI may turn some away, but the real sticking point with this beast of a monitor is the hefty price tag that will undoubtedly cause most people to drink secondhand noodle water for months following the purchase.
