ASUS and ROG Extend Display Leadership for Creators and Gamers at CES 2020

World’s first 360Hz gaming monitor with NVIDIA G-SYNC, 300Hz gaming laptops, and Mini LED HDR panels

LAS VEGAS, January 6, 2020 ASUS and the Republic of Gamers (ROG) today announced an ultrafast new lineup of gaming displays at CES 2020 in Las Vegas, including the world’s first 360Hz gaming monitor with NVIDIA® G-SYNC® in the ROG Swift 360Hz, new 300Hz gaming laptops, and superfast HDR panels.
Display technology is advancing rapidly, especially for gamers. Higher refresh rates and quicker response times make gameplay smoother and sharper, while richer colors and deeper contrast enhance picture quality. Displays play a significant role in defining the frames per second actually experienced by viewers, which is why ASUS and ROG are committed to being at the forefront of panel technology.
The collection of new models starts with the ROG Swift 360Hz, now the world’s fastest gaming monitor, and follows with a CES Innovation Award winning 300Hz version of the ROG Strix SCAR III, featuring the fastest display available for gaming laptops. The ProArt Display PA32UCG desktop monitor was also honored with a CES Innovation Award for taking 4K Mini LED technology up to 120Hz with HDR, while the ROG Swift PG32UQX pushes the same panel up to 144Hz with NVIDIA G-SYNC ULTIMATE for a silky smooth gaming experience. Similar themes manifest in laptops, where ROG is demoing the benefits of PANTONE® validation and showing a new Mini LED laptop display that takes portable HDR to the next level.

World’s fastest gaming monitor

ROG continues to break boundaries in the field of high-refresh gaming monitors. Back in 2014, the ROG Swift PG278Q became the first WQHD display to reach 144Hz with a native NVIDIA G-SYNC implementation. ROG pushed to 165Hz the following year, and then turned a Full HD panel up to 180Hz with the PG248Q. That display was the precursor for ROG Swift PG258Q, which was the first gaming monitor to reach 240Hz.
The PG258Q gaming monitor has powered top tournaments and esports teams for years, but the latest GPUs can deliver much higher performance than the 240 FPS it’s capable of showing. NVIDIA approached ROG engineers with a challenge to create an even faster gaming monitor, and the resulting ROG Swift 360Hz raises the bar considerably. Its 360Hz refresh rate is up to 6X faster than traditional gaming displays and TVs. The Full HD resolution allows graphics cards to sustain a high enough frame rate to keep up, while the 24.5-inch panel offers a comfortable view of the battlefield.

Ultra-fast gaming laptop displays

Scaling display technology down to sizes suitable for laptops presents a greater challenge, and ROG has been aggressive in the pursuit of higher speeds across a wide variety of gaming laptops. ROG started back in 2016 with a 120Hz IPS-level display that doubled the speed of conventional notebook panels available at the time. ROG laptops were the first to reach 144Hz thanks to a special project with chemical giant Merck to develop a new liquid crystal structure and suspending solution capable of operating at faster frequencies. Then ROG matched the former top speed of desktop monitors by taking gaming laptops up to 240Hz.
The ROG Zephyrus GX701 was the first gaming system available with a 300Hz display, beating even the fastest desktop displays available at the time. That 300Hz Full HD panel has now migrated to a special version of the ROG Strix SCAR III, which was honored with a CES 2020 Innovation Award. This esports-oriented laptop puts the display in its native environment on the front lines of competitive gaming.
While the move to 300Hz is especially important for pros, everyone can benefit from life beyond the 60Hz. That’s why ROG was adamant about having a high-refresh option in the new ultraslim Zephyrus G14. There were no 14-inch displays up to the task, so ROG worked with panel providers to create one specifically for the machine. The display’s 120Hz refresh rate strikes the right balance for the system’s mid-range GPUs and dramatically improves the gaming experience compared to the 60Hz panels typically found in other ultraportable laptops.

Mini LED innovation

Higher refresh rates can make gameplay smoother by showing more frames per second, but they don’t affect the contents of each frame. Improving visual fidelity requires greater dynamic range with brighter whites, deeper contrast, and a broader spectrum of colors. ASUS ProArt monitors have led the way in using the Mini LED technology to enable exceptional HDR displays fit for professionals.
ASUS introduced the first professional Mini LED monitor at CES 2019 with the ProArt Display PA32UCX. This 32-inch 4K display employed full-array local dimming with 1,152 individual backlight zones for precise illumination. The backlight boasts up to 1,200 nits of maximum luminance with improved whiteness and color uniformity compared to larger OLED panels. Unveiled at IFA 2019, the new ProArt Display PA32UCG keeps the Ultra HD resolution, 10-bit color depth, and wide color gamut of its predecessor but achieves new firsts in brightness and speed for this class of display. Its backlight produces an intense 1,600 nits of peak luminance. The local dimming is also more precise, with control over 1,152 zones to minimize the halo effect that can manifest as light bleed around brighter objects in the picture.
The PA32UCG’s ability to vary its refresh rate from 48Hz to 120Hz with adaptive sync technology provides a more immersive gaming experience than typical professional monitors that are locked at lower fixed rates. For professional level content creation, factory calibration ensures near-perfect color accuracy with delta E 1, and dual Thunderbolt 3 ports are ready for the high-speed devices, external storage, and additional displays found in fully loaded workstations.
The ROG Swift PG32UQX sets a new standard for balancing fidelity and performance by supporting 10-bit color all the way up to 4K and 144Hz. The Mini LED backlight is capable of 1,400-nit peak brightness, which far surpasses what’s possible with common types of HDR displays, like OLED TVs. With local dimming across 1,152 zones and wide coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut, the Swift PG32UQX exceeds the requirements for NVIDIA G-SYNC ULTIMATE certification.
ROG pioneered high dynamic range for gaming laptops with a special version of the Zephyrus GX701 introduced one year ago at CES 2019. This edition of the GX701 brought HDR to a high-refresh panel with a quick response time and slim bezels for the first time. Leading-edge technology like this is often ahead of its time. At release, the panel’s potential was limited in part by the existing support for HDR throughout the gaming industry. Still, these HDR panels offer a glimpse into the future of gaming graphics, and as the software ecosystem matures, so will the capabilities of the hardware.
The HDR display in the GX701 has a Full HD resolution with a 144 Hz refresh rate, 400 nits of peak brightness, and local dimming across 16 zones arranged in vertical strips. At CES 2020, ROG is demoing a next-gen panel from AUO with a 4K resolution that can push up to 1,000 nits.
The new panel currently supports local dimming across 240 zones arranged in a grid, which dramatically reduces the halo effect evident on displays with fewer zones. A cutting-edge backlight made with mini LEDs is responsible for this fine-grained detail, and its potential is only just being explored. The backlight is capable of local dimming across over a thousand individual zones, promising unprecedented granularity.

Calibrated for color accuracy

It’s no longer necessary to sacrifice picture quality to reach higher speeds. Internal research at ROG has shown that a significant portion of gamers use their gaming laptops for content creation. For gamers who also create their own graphics, edit photos and pursue other creative enterprises, it’s critical to have a display that generates accurate colors.
From the beginning, the high-refresh gaming laptops at ROG have used IPS-level panels with rich colors and wide viewing angles. More recently, ROG has added factory calibration with PANTONE validation to ensure faithfulness to an industry-standard palette. Color accuracy is quantified with delta E, which measures the difference between the color displayed and the intended shade. Across a large sampling of affected displays, the factory calibration at ROG has reduced the average delta E by at least 40%, delivering a clear improvement in fidelity. At CES 2020, ROG is illustrating the difference factory calibration makes with 4K Ultra HD panel demos running inside Zephyrus GX502 and GU502. Almost all Zephyrus ultraslim gaming laptops come with PANTONE Validated displays, making the family ideal for gamers who are also creators.
CES 2020 provides another opportunity for ROG to show its leadership with cutting-edge displays. ROG continues to bring high-refresh, high-resolution panels to an increasingly broad audience that spans esports professionals, hardcore gamers, mainstream players, and content creators. In addition to improving the everyday gamer’s visual experience today, close relationships with panel providers will help ROG shape the future of what’s available in the gaming laptops of tomorrow.