[PCM2]

Our review of the MSI MPG 341CQR QD-OLED X36 is now live. This is a 34″ 3440 x 1440 (21:9 ultrawide) monitor with slight (1800R) curve and glossy QD-OLED panel, supporting up to 360Hz. DP 2.1 (UHBR 13.5) and full bandwidth HDMI 2.1 (48 Gbps) is included, alongside USB-C and KVM functionality. The monitor provided a similar overall experience to other QD-OLEDs, but it offers some notable improvements. The screen surface is more scratch-resistant (apparently – I did feel it smeared less when cleaning) and lightens up less in ambient light (I did notice this). The improved subpixel structure with RGB stripe arrangement reduced fringing, significantly so compared to other QD-OLEDs with this pixel density but the displaced triangle RGB layout.

The screen didn’t offer a high brightness HDR setting that counteracted ‘medium shade dimming’ effectively, but I enjoyed the ‘True Black 500’ experience which I found noticeably brighter than the more usual ‘True Black 400’ experience. Improvements to peak brightness under both HDR and SDR were also evident during testing. Overall, I feel this is a nice evolution of QD-OLED technology and this is one of the more compelling ultrawide models on the market – at least in markets like the US where it appears to be priced relatively competitively.

[ufoman]

How long does toggling HDR on or off take on this monitor when DSC is active?

[PCM2]

That might depend on your GPU and possibly the rest of your system. But with my RTX 50 series GPU it’s the same speed as pretty much any other monitor (with or without DSC active). It takes a few seconds at most.

[ufoman]

I’ve switched from 40 to 50 series with Philips 34M2C8600. At 175Hz, DSC apparently wasn’t used, as DSR/DLDSR was still available, but monitor OSD showed no indication of that, so I can’t be 100% sure. Toggling HDR on/off took 3-4 seconds, and the same behavior of black screen would sometimes occur when games with HDR enabled, displaying in fullscreen windowed, were visible under some other windows. Switching inputs between DP and USB-C took about 5 seconds.
With Asus PG34WCDN, both toggling HDR and switching inputs take 1 second, regardless of DSC toggle state in OSD.

[PCM2]

With the RTX 50 series DSR/DLDSR will always be available even if DSC is used, although that wouldn’t be the case for the RTX 40 series. It varies from monitor to monitor, but usually when monitors aren’t right on the edge of bandwidth limits it would still be available on the RTX 40 series.

But yes, there’s probably more variation between monitors than I realised. HDR switching isn’t something I typically time as it doesn’t really bother me. I don’t have the MSI model any more so I can’t time exactly how long the HDR toggle switching took with and without DSC, unfortunately. All I can recall is it did so “quite quickly” even with DSC used, but I’m not sure it was as fast as 1 second. Next time I’ve got a monitor with DP 2.1 hooked up I’ll see if I notice a difference or a switching time as fast as 1s.

The monitor I’m currently using is a Mini LED IPS model and it switches in ~2.5s regardless of DSC being on or not.

[Author]

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