Asus has been on a tear releasing gaming monitors this summer, taking full advantage of the hype surrounding new OLED technology. Its latest release, the ROG Swift PG32UCDP, proves exactly why the hype is warranted. It takes everything we loved about the PG32UCDM and adds to it: killer HDR, high peak brightness, infinite contrast, and oh-so-much speed. And it’s there that the PG32UCDP kicks things up a notch, offering the choice of 4K at 240Hz or 1080p at 480Hz. It has esports players directly in its sights, and although it’s not quite perfect, it’s more than a little impressive. But if you’re intrigued, be ready to pay handsomely for it.
Asus ROG Swift PG32UCDP – Design and Features
If you didn’t look at the settings menu, the PG32UCDP and PG32UCDM would be virtually indistinguishable. They share a common design, common stand, and with only a few exceptions, a common feature set. They’re also priced identically at $1,299. The differences they do have are deal-makers for different types of gamers. The PG32UCDP, as we’ll see soon, is pretty much the esports version of the PG32UCDM.
To get the basics out of the way, the PG32UCDP is a high-end 4K OLED gaming monitor with a non-glossy finish. It runs natively at 240Hz and can reach a peak brightness of around 1,300 nits. It offers 10-bit color, and because OLED panels control the brightness of each pixel independently, it’s able to offer infinite contrast for true, pure blacks. It supports variable refresh rate (VRR), including Nvidia G-Sync and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro. It’s a stunning display with a lot going for it.
Its most defining feature is its ability to change resolution to 1080p and double its refresh rate to an impressive 480Hz. While we’ve seen several monitors hit 480Hz, and one of the best 1080p monitors even hitting 500Hz, toggleable refresh rates are still very new to gaming monitors. With two clicks of the monitor’s joystick, you can enable Frame Rate Boost mode and enjoy one of the most responsive, clear gaming experiences money can buy right now.
Its other core difference is that it uses a WOLED panel. Unlike QD-OLEDs, which the PG32UCDM uses, WOLEDs feature a dedicated white LED. They generate less heat and therefore are expected to degrade more slowly than a traditional OLED or QD-OLED might. The downside is that WOLEDs are thought to be less bright and have less vivid, accurate colors. Brightness hasn’t been an issue among the Asus WOLEDs we’ve tested so far – in fact, it’s the opposite – but color accuracy has. Thankfully, that’s not the case at all here.
Tthe PG32UCDP is packed with useful gaming features. Hidden within its OSD, you’ll find a new AI Assistant, which allows some of those settings to kick in automatically or change dynamically based on what’s being displayed. This includes an onscreen reticle that changes color to remain high contrast no matter what you’re pointing at, Shadow Boost that automatically turns on and ramps up or down depending on how the amount of shadows in a scene, a MOBA map enhancer that highlights enemies in red, and an automatic Sniper mode that’s supposed to automatically add a magnifier to the center of the screen when enemies pass in front of your reticle.
I couldn’t get the AI Sniper to work no matter what I tried. Single-player, multiplayer, it didn’t matter either way. Asus caveats these AI features in some of the documentation it shared with us that it expects these features to improve over time. Until then, you can manually turn on sniper mode for “practice.”
It sure has the construction of a premium display. The panel is so thin around the edges that I’m always worried I’ll press too hard adjusting it on its stand and risk damaging the screen. But the frame is solid and has never flexed that I could feel. This level of thinness is common in high-end OLEDs, so it’s not unique but it’s still impressive every time.
The back is illuminated with a dot-matrix ROG logo that can be customized within the OSD. There are also red LEDs throughout the stand. The back glows with “Swift” lettering and the bottom of the arm is encircled by red chevrons. It also has the red down firing LED that projects the ROG logo onto your desk courtesy of a swappable lens. There are a couple of blanks in the box, too, so you can create your own. The ROG eye also shines from the bottom of the frame opposite the joystick and two buttons behind it.
The stand is very nice and offers the same set of adjustments we saw on the PG32UCDM. It’s height adjustable by three inches, can tilt upward 20 degrees and down 5 degrees. It swivels 15 degrees in either direction, though you may not need to with how great its viewing angles are. It also has the same ¼-twenty thread on the top of the stand to mount a camera or other streaming gear. Oddly, you can’t rotate the display into portrait mode. Maybe Asus assumes no one wants to use a $1,300 32-inch screen as a side monitor, and maybe Asus is right, but I still expect all the bells and whistles at this price.
On the underside, it offers excellent connectivity. There are two HDMI 2.1 sockets which are perfect for consoles, a DisplayPort 1.4, and a USB Type-C that supports DisplayPort and power delivery up to 90 watts for fast charging devices or keeping a laptop powered. There’s a built-in USB hub with three USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5Gbps) ports and a USB Type-B for connecting to your computer. There’s also a headphone jack and an SPDIF output to make up for its lack of speakers.
The USB hub powers the display’s SmartKVM feature, which can be game changing if you regularly use two systems or have a console connected alongside your PC. It’s very intentional that Asus has provided enough ports to connect a mouse, keyboard, and headset. Enabling picture-in-picture (PiP) or picture-by-picture (PbP) allows you to move your cursor into that window and switch systems in real time.
Asus ROG Swift PG32UCDP – Software and OSD Features
The PG32UCDP uses the same OSD and software combination as every ROG monitor we’ve looked at this generation, but with a few additions. It offers your usual range of picture controls, including brightness, contrast, saturation, and gamma, as well as color temperature and a six-axis color mixer for custom calibration. It also features a range of picture presets for different genres and movies and defined modes for sRGB and DCI-P3 color spaces aimed at creative professionals and hobbyists. And, of course, it’s also where you’ll access its OLED Care options.
The big additions this time around come in the form of the AI Assistant and the Smart KVM. The AI Assistant is a new feature that uses artificial intelligence to make several of its gaming features reactive to what’s occurring on the screen. Right now, there are AI Assistant functions for the crosshair, shadow boost, sniper mode, and enhancing the map in MOBAs to highlight enemy player positions.
We’ve already covered this in the previous section, it’s hard to tell how much it’s actually using AI technology to pull any of this off. Even if it wasn’t at all, I can see the utility here. Even though AI Sniper mode wouldn’t work in my testing, nothing stopped me from turning it on manually, so the core feature is still available if you want to give yourself a one-up and were born without morals (I kid!).
The SmartKVM and the picture-in-picture/picture-by-picture options that I talked about previously are also set up here. Note that this menu is grayed out in the OSD until you’ve connected the second system, but DisplayWidget Center allows you to see the different options ahead of time.
Like the prior monitors we’ve covered, Asus’s DisplayWidget Center software provides control for the monitor’s settings right in Windows. It’s easier to interact with than the OSD and even allows you to map certain options and controls to keybinds for easy access. You can also pull up the OSD with a keybind once this is installed, so it’s worth downloading if you don’t want to futz around with the monitor’s joystick.
Asus ROG Swift PG32UCDP – Performance
The ROG Swift PG32UCDP is a joy to game and watch movies on but it’s not without its faults. I tested the monitor with my Calibrite Display Checker Plus colorimeter to gather specific metrics on its performance, but just as importantly, I used it as my main monitor for gaming and work for an entire week. The monitor is impressive, no doubt, but whether it’s right for you will depend entirely on what you’re looking for and what your expectations are.
Beginning with the basics, if you’ve heard scary stories about the pitfalls and risks of OLED gaming monitors, you can rest assured that many of these are no longer big issues. With some common sense best practices (not leaving static images on the screen for long stretches, hiding desktop icons, etc.) and the PG32UCDP’s built-in OLED Care features, it should last years into the future. Asus is also backing this monitor with a three-year warranty that covers burn-in for peace of mind.
Text clarity is excellent. Ultra HD (4K) is crisp enough, and the panels are improved enough that using them for productivity is perfectly reasonable — and you get to enjoy a way better picture for everything else.
Issues surrounding dimming are also far less of a concern. I mained the Gigabyte FO48U until earlier this year, a first-generation, massive OLED. There, dimming was a major issue. Any time you maximized a window with a lot of light color in it, the picture would get noticeably darker. If you were still for too long, or if there just wasn’t enough movement on screen (like when you’re typing), the backlight limiter would slowly drop brightness until it was distractingly low.
Here, while there is certainly measurable dimming when you go from a small white window to a full white screen, it’s far less perceptible to the naked eye. If the subtler dimming still bothers you, there’s a Uniform Brightness mode that prevents these changes but reduces overall luminance. Additionally, you can type for hours without the screen automatically dropping its brightness. For all intents and purposes, it performs like an LED monitor for productivity.
Where the PG32UCDP, and all current OLEDs, fall short is brightness. In SDR mode, I measured a peak brightness of only 248 nits on a full white screen. If you’re working indoors and away from direct sunlight, it’s not bad, but you may find it too dim if you have a window behind you washing it in daylight. It’s not bothersome for me personally, when competing LED monitors can sustain 500 nits or even higher, there’s no way around its limitation.
Swapping over to HDR, the monitor offers four different modes: Gaming HDR, Cinema HDR, Console HDR, and DisplayHDR 400 True Black. True Black is the only “certified” mode and caps the brightness to around 465 nits no matter what you do. To unlock its full brightness, you’ll need to use Console HDR and enable Adjustable HDR to manually set brightness to 100 instead (as opposed to the default of 80).
With those settings, taking that same full white screen, I was able to measure a peak sustained brightness of 281 nits. Dropping to a 10% window increased brightness to 777 nits. Shrinking the white space all the way to 2% of the screen jumps to 1,189 nits. It’s not quite 1,300, but in the same test the PG32UCDM only hit 1,012 nits. So much for WOLEDs not being as bright.
I was also impressed by the factory calibration. Out of the box calibration was very good, with a DeltaE of just over two. You could easily use this monitor for creative work without any concern.
The monitor suffers the same issues as the ROG Strix XG27AQDMG when it comes to motion blur reduction and OLED anti-flicker settings. There really isn’t a point to using either. ELMB is only available when running at 120Hz and native 240Hz offers the same if not better clarity. OLED Anti-Flicker also disables variable refresh rate, which isn’t a worthwhile trade-off in my opinion.
Gaming at 4K 240Hz on an OLED is a unique pleasure. The display is incredibly responsive for first-person shooters and minimizes motion blur to great degree. As has been the case with all of the OLED monitors I’ve tested this generation, picture quality is very, very good. The improved contrast of its blacks allows colors and highlights to leap from the screen. Paired with the inherent crispness of 4K, the experience is elevated in a way that LED monitors just can’t emulate.
The 480Hz mode leaves me conflicted. On the one hand, the flick clarity and responsiveness is absolutely next level – you don’t have to be a competitive player to notice the difference. Playing as a sniper in Battlefield 2042, I was able to bounce between a window and a nearby hill and clearly make out both positions rapidly bouncing between both. At one point, I even whipped my mouse back and forth to see how much I could blur that window. It didn’t matter – the 480Hz mode gives you enough clarity and responsiveness to see first and fire first, if your skills are up to it.
The problem is that it doesn’t look great since 1080p stretched across a 32-inch screen is soft and stretched out. Even with the motion clarity benefits, the image quality and sharpness of everything else takes a major hit. It’s just not how I would choose to play any game by choice.
But I’m not a pro or pro-aspiring player. I’m content with the already great clarity and responsiveness of 240Hz. That’s why this option is best considered for esports gamers that crave every edge and are willing to sacrifice the more enthusiast-style features for it. It’s awesome that it provides the option, and maybe that alone makes it worth choosing over the PG32UCDM. They are the same price, after all.
