AOC AGON Gaming AG273QCX - 27 Inch QHD Curved Monitor, 144Hz, 1 ms, VA, HDR400, FreeSync, Speakers, Height adjust (2560x1440 @ 144Hz 400 cd/m², HDMI/DP/VGA/USB 3.0)

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Things appear significantly less saturated than factory defaults and there is an underlying green tint. The ‘black crush’ and ‘VA glow’ were of course still there, but neither really took too much away from the overall atmosphere of the film. The lettering also shows partial subpixel illumination, whereby some subpixels have the top or bottom half completely ‘on’ whilst the other half is ‘off’.

MBR (Motion Blur Reduction), which is a strobe backlight feature that can be used if ‘FreeSync’ is disabled. This model’s backlight is controlled as one unit, which as noted in the contrast section means there is no contrast advantage to using HDR. There were some weaknesses in places, but these were less distinct than the significantly higher frame rate game content.Where frame rate dipped below the floor of operation (48fps – 48Hz), the monitor employed LFC to keep the refresh rate at a multiple of the refresh rate. With our lowly Radeon RX 580, it certainly wasn’t easy to maintain a constant 144fps, even on single player without particularly intense action on screen. It appears that this dithering stage is handled by the monitor if set to 120Hz or 60Hz, but offloaded to the GPU if the monitor is set to 144Hz. The issue is tied to the pixel response behaviour at different refresh rates rather than frame rates, so you don’t observe this increased overshoot with FreeSync disabled and running the monitor at a static 144Hz.

Following adjustments made to our ‘Test Settings’, we recorded a static contrast ratio of 3240:1 which is pleasing. It’s important to remember that individual units vary when it comes to all aspects of uniformity, including backlight bleed. Another perhaps smaller issue is that, when LFC activates or deactivates, there is momentary stuttering. The greatest deviation from this occurred at ‘quadrant 9’ towards the bottom right of the screen (132.

This worked very effectively to remove tearing and stuttering from less clean divisions of refresh rate and frame rate. There are various ‘DTS Sound’ presets and the ability to customise the graphic equalizer settings if preferred. There were some standout weaknesses on this model where these transitions were concerned, even using our preferred ‘Strong’ setting for ‘Overdrive’.