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CES – one of the world’s largest annual tech conferences – has been home to countless wacky gadgets over the years. We’ve seen finger-munching robots, ovens that can live stream your cooking, and even an RGB face mask.
But today I’d like to draw your attention to a silly device from CES 2023, one you might not have realized is even that ridiculous: the Asus ROG Swift Pro PG248QP; it’s a gaming monitor with an absurdly high maximum refresh rate of 540 Hz.
At first glance, the new monitor from Asus doesn’t seem crazy. Having a high refresh rate is a fantastic feature – if a brand wants its display to rank on our list of the best gaming monitors, that’s one of the most important factors we’ll be judging its tech by.
That’s because increasing the refresh rate of your game setup can give you the edge, especially in multiplayer matches. Thanks to your smoother gameplay and lower input lag, you can more easily follow your opponents’ actions and react better to the information on the screen than if you were using a lower-spec system.
But you don’t just need a fast monitor, you also need a gaming setup that can take advantage of your screen’s high refresh rates by running games at a higher level. And unless you want your graphics to look like ugly, unrecognizable blobs of pixels, you almost certainly don’t have a rig that can hit 540 frames per second (fps) in your favorite games.
Who needs such a good monitor?
If you’re exclusively a console gamer, you shouldn’t even be looking in the general direction of this monitor, let alone thinking about buying it. The PS5 and Xbox Series X top out at 120Hz, a far cry from the 540Hz maximum offered by the Asus ROG Swift Pro PG248QP.
Instead, this screen is aimed at PC gamers, but for many of you, Asus’ latest screen still isn’t a good fit.
Let’s take a look at the number one pick in our best gaming laptop guide, the Asus ROG Zephyrus G15. It packs an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS CPU, an Nvidia RTX 3070 GPU, and 16 GB of RAM, which is an above-average setup (based on Steam user data (opens in new tab)). In our tests for Total War: Three Kingdoms and Metro: Exodus – both with HD resolution and low-quality graphics – the laptop managed only 164 fps and 125 fps respectively.
As for our pick of the best gaming PC we’ve tested, the Maingear Turbo, the situation is better, but still not good enough. The model we got used an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, an Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti, and 32 GB of DDR4 RAM to achieve a maximum of 320 fps in Total War: Warhammer III and 221 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 (both in HD with low quality graphics settings). ). Only 60% of what the Swift Pro PG248QP monitor can achieve.
So what if we traded in an Nvidia RTX 4090? In our tests, we found that the best (and most expensive) graphics card from Nvidia had a frame rate about 55% higher than that of an RTX 3080Ti. Factoring this into the performance of the Maingear Turbo, you’d be looking at a total of 498 fps for Total War: Warhammer III and 344 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 – still shy of the 540 target.
With the right expertise (and game choice), you can probably win over this setup and other similarly powerful PCs. But most of us don’t own an RTX 4090 – heck, many of us don’t even own a 3090 (or a 3080 for that matter).
Asus’ latest monitor is certainly impressive, but based on the rest of the PC space, it’s an absurd item that is of practically no use to anyone. If you want to pick it up when it goes on sale so you can say you have the world’s fastest gaming monitor, then you have power, but I’m telling you now: it’s probably a waste of your money.
Those of you looking for a more sensible place to start might want to check out our best gaming monitor buying guide and look for monitors that better match the performance your PC can realistically achieve.