My thoughts after switching to Ultrawide featuring the VG34VQL3A

Why an ultrawide?

My work is mainly focused on software development, I already have two 1440p and 1080p monitors that serve my needs. I usually have the former run my code editor and the lower resolution serving as a preview for whatever website I'm building (I built this blog too btw!).

When coding I find myself needing more horizontal space as I work with multiple files in my IDE/code editor. The described configuration is obviously fine for work and I couldn't complain in any way, after all some people still code on square monitors and I deeply feel for those people.

Content consumption is also a very important part of my life and I see a lot of movies being in the 21:9 ultrawide format and looking at those on the standard 16:9 eventually becomes frustrating as there are black bars in a lot of content.

I've decided to buy an ultrawide as it would give me a third monitor to serve as my primary work/gaming/content and give me 2 others for side tasks such as previewing my websites and watching stuff like youtube.

Choosing a good monitor is hard

When looking at which monitor to buy I was obviously constrained by budget, I didn't want to spend more than 450 € on a monitor. This instantly put OLED out of the picture. Having grown up using IPS panels I've always had that frustration regarding the contrast ratio of blacks, they always seemed greyish.

My knowledge of monitors is deeper than the average person and this allowed me to research models already knowing what I wanted. I was convinced I needed a VA panel as those provide much better contrast ratio, they however suffer from worse response times compared to TN and IPS.

Knowing what to search for I settled for a newer 21:9 curved VA that still performed admirably in grey-to-grey (GtG) response times, an advertised < 1ms. The winner in price/performance was the ASUS TUF VG34VQL3A. It delivers a 4000:1 contrast ration whilst maintaining a decend GtG response time coming in at 360 €.

First impressions

I've had the VG34VQL3A monitor for a full week now. Comparing it with the IPS showed the downside of VA panels in the UFO test as it has some black smearing in this highly specialized test, it also suffers from narrow viewing angles that are curbed by the curve. These are however the only downsides. Real world smearing is non-existent even in fast paced gaming, the 1440p resolution is very good and doesn't suffer from the poor text quality of OLEDs. It comes with a 1500R curvature which is not too aggressive and keeps my comfortable at a short distance.

The monitor has a dim brightness in normal SDR mode and couldn't find a way to fix it, turning on HDR fixes it instantly and the colors don't look washed out in windows. The experience has been phenomenal when watching movies or using it day-to-day for coding. I recommend changing the color temperature to your liking in your Nvidia/AMD graphics software.

Gaming

The 165 hz refresh rate (overclockable to 180 hz) is phenomenal, it can even look clearer than my 144 hz IPS (LG 27GN800P-B) and gets much brighter at an advertised 400 nits of peak brightness. Gaming is a breeze and a much more immersive experience, albeit more taxing on the GPU leading to lower framerates.

My 8 GB AMD RX 7600 can run games in lower settings just fine regularly hitting the max refresh rate of the monitor, but of course you would need a much beefier graphics card to run games at higher quality presets.

Productivity

This is truly where an ultrawide shines, I can have multiple coding tabs in the same window to edit different parts of my code whilst keeping a preview on one monitor and having some documentation open on my third.

This truly boosts my productivity by an big margin. Testing my websites for multiple resolutions and screen formats has become much easier and allowed me to fix some UI/UX bugs. The better colors (125% sRGB w/ HDR) made me realize the differences in capabilities of newer monitors.

Conclusion

For anyone on a budget, I strongly recommend the latest generations of curved VA ultrawides as the tech has overcome the serious smearing issues and give us better contrast ratios at no performance costs.

For both productivity and gaming I still recommend having a second monitor to keep a youtube video or discord running on the side for some greater multitasking as 21:9 is still constrained when you have a primary task that takes up all of your screen.

If you've got thicker pockets than me you should definitely consider OLED monitors as those provide superior image quality at any resolution, they are however prone to burn-in and you should only buy the latest gen of panels.