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Comment by PaulRobinson | Hacker News Reader

I upgraded recently, by buying a friends old Samsung Odyssey G9 49" curved monitor off him (he was emigrating). Before that I had 2 x 27" monitors, a setup I had used for ~10 years.

I honestly think the curve is essential when dealing with such a wide display. The alternative would be - as article states - to set it back a little and have a deeper desk so you can actually see the edge of the screen properly. I don't see the point in having a large screen with high pixel density if the edges are not actually easily visible to me without moving my head or body laterally.

The lack of bezels is great though - I'd definitely agree on that front, having 3 web browsers or editors open side by side suits me really well.

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As weird as the aspect ratio can be on a curved ultrawide, I think it's also more natural and ergonomic to keep your head/eyes at a constant height and just move them side to side. With a monitor that has a lot of verticality you're gonna have to tilt your neck back more.

It’s different from person to person!, whether the curve is good or not.

I have a ruler flat 55” OLED TV as main monitor. It’s perfect for me. I’m like… 1-1.5 meters from it where I’m closest to it, haha. The edges are further away. It’s fine! – imo / ime.

(The need for the curve is also subtly different depending on how the panel was made. I tried a flat 43” IPS 4K monitor, expecting IPS to be good. And it wasn’t very good. The IPS features in that panel were large enough to affect viewing angle.)

> It’s different from person to person!, whether the curve is good or not.

The amount of curve also varies a lot between models so there's some nuance even within that. The curve might be as strong as 800R or as weak as 2300R depending on the monitor, where the number corresponds to the radius of the circle the panel follows in millimeters.

I have the 57" version, 7680x2160. It's ... indispensable ... all my Konsoles, app windows, etc. all on one screen with no overlaps.

Got it on a Samsung sale for ~$1500 IIRC, one of the best upgrades I'd ever done.

Same, though I'm also on 49" (5120x1440). They're selling them for extra cheap on Amazon with extended (36mo) warranties because they're prone to breaking, but I had the Samsung contractors out here this month and they did a great job fixing mine that randomly died one day -- for free! If you're a chill soul, I'd say it's worth the risk.

I sound like a shill, so Samsung plz hmu. $999 for a beautiful OLED monitor that fits a terminal, a browser, and 4 (font size 8...) 100col text editor windows is a gamechanger.

> OLED

I use mine for productivity only (I don't game at all) and it seems the consensus is OLED's no good for things like Kconsole/xterm (-style) windows and general text readability, though.

Huh, interesting! The pure blacks are gorgeous to me, but it’s possible I don’t know what I’m missing. Never noticed a problem with size 8 font

32" Odyssey G7 is the pick for me, I wouldn't mind an upgrade to the 4k version, but the 1440p version is more than good enough.

I also don't see the point in having a screen so big I have to move my head, or contrarily a screen so big that I have to push it back so the pixel density matters much less.

Why are these monitors sold as "gaming" monitors?

Low response time (i.e. time it takes for a pixel to change color) to reduce ghosting, and a high refresh rate up to 240 Hz.

These monitors are expensive and do not have very high resolution. If you're not a hardcore fast reflex gamer, and you spend a lot of time looking at text, then IMO it's better to buy a higher resolution monitor for less money.

4K gaming monitors do provide a reasonable middle-ground between "extremely fast but only 100-110ppi" and "extremely high res but only 60hz" now though. You can get 163ppi at 144hz without breaking the bank, which isn't quite retina by Apples definition, but it's good enough for me considering the benefit of high refresh rate.

These days you can buy 4K/240Hz displays that have a 1080p/480Hz mode.

Even 240Hz is usually enough for really good players. 480Hz is just for the 0.01% who can take advantage of it.

https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Swift-Gaming-Monitor-PG32UCDP/dp...

https://www.amazon.com/LG-‎32GS95UE-Ultragear-DisplayHDR-Dis...

https://www.amazon.com/LG-‎32GS95UV-Ultragear-DisplayHDR-Dis...

https://www.amazon.com/Predator-Monitor-FreeSync-Premium-100...

Note that these are all 32" panels so the PPI is on the lower side of 4K monitors.

If you want pixel density first and speed second then you should go for a 27" 4K instead.

Or just sit a bit further, you will get the same exact FoV.

> 480Hz is just for the 0.01% who can take advantage of it.

I'm skeptical that any human can take advantage of that. Even 240Hz is stretching it.

I have a 144hz monitor and a 240hz. I can definitely see the difference.

I think at that point it’s not really conscious any more? It always takes me a little while to realize my monitor somehow went to 30hz, and that’s why I’m feeling something is off.

I'm guessing because it allows you to set the Field-of-Vision to be pretty wide?

I mostly play simulation games, particularly flying, and having a wider FoV makes things easier, until you're ready to go to the top step of using VR instead so you also get depth perception and essentially 360 FoV since you can rotate your head.

A curved, very wide fov screws up the camera projection for most games though.

I wonder what the math would look like to properly render 3D scenes onto a curved display. Could it be accelerated as well as the regular matrix operations used for perspective projection onto planar screens?

During the pandemic I did try out my 4K TV as a game monitor. I had a combination of furniture so that I could sit rather close with my eyes approximately half way up the screen, with a keyboard and mouse in a reasonable position. Then, using an older FPS game I got it to where my laptop GPU could hit good frame rates and I adjusted the game's viewing angle to match how the screen fit my field of view.

It was deeply immersive in spite of me being so close I could "see the pixels". The only time I've felt more immersive was demoing Quake in a 3 wall + floor CAVE at a national lab decades ago.

> I wonder what the math would look like to properly render 3D scenes onto a curved display. Could it be accelerated as well as the regular matrix operations used for perspective projection onto planar screens?

The math is pretty simple to account for a curved viewport, even though I don't think any apps actually care about that. Most displays aren't curved enough to make it a meaningful difference.

We don't have fixed function pipelines anymore either so that could definitely be handled by hardware.

This used to be much more true, but almost all PC games support 21:9 now and 32:9 support pretty common too. "most games" screwed up is an exaggeration IMO. Even on games that don't officially scale, on PC they almost always have customizable FoV that gets the perspective correct again. Many modern games are even smart enough to rearrange the UI so that the critical info (health bars, ammo counts etc) is in the center of the display and not attached to the edges.

PC games have kinda been forced to support ultrawides whether they like it or not - the 21:9 class especially has exploded in popularity for gaming PCs.

I've gamed in 32:9 for years now - I wouldn't go back. The curve is not exaggerated enough to be a meaningful projection issue on most curved displays and games.

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