[Degrader]

The Acer X32FP is to be expected next week in stock in the Netherlands. In Germany alternate.de has already the monitor in stock.

As this monitor is one of the few that uses an AUO Amled panel I’m curious how the HDR performance will be. I’m hoping to order it next week.

[PCM2]

Your thoughts on the monitor would be very welcome if you do get hold of it. 🙂

[Degrader]

I’ll let you know my comments on it then!

[EsaT]

Indeed looks like some shops have gotten X32 FP into stock.
Though price premium over Tempest GP27U is rather hefty 60%…

Now we just need good review of it.

Btw, did some calculations and 27″ needs to be 15½% closer than 32″ to show at same (angular) size.
https://www.1728.org/angsize.htm

[EsaT]

According to this doesn’t look like much happened during delay with X32 FP still being barely half baked turd:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monitors/comments/z62ul0/acer_predator_x32_fp_new_firmware_v009_on_the/j55r4kt/

[PCM2]

Hmm… That’s not good to see! Will be interesting to see if other feedback echoes that, but I really feel that at this sort of asking price you should expect those 576 dimming zones to be put to the best use you could imagine (within the confines of an IPS panel). There shouldn’t be any flickering and whilst some ‘halos’ or ‘blooming’ is unavoidable, it sounds from that user’s description to be more significant than you might expect. Like there are some real tuning issues with the local dimming. Sigh.

[EsaT]

I wonder if AUO just copied that excessive brightness biased turd of FALD algorithm from panel of PG32UQX… While panel of GP27U has different algorithm.
I kinda remember people saying that some previous 27″ (lower zone count?) Asus had better FALD control when PG32UQX came out.

And if Acer is still having same super badly chosen slow or strong overshoots at 160Hz overdrive modes, this will stay as no brainer to bypass…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZhyAEuiaLk

Who ever decide these algorithms need some “cognitive recalibration” to put some sense into them.

[Degrader]

I’ve received the X32FP today. Some very brief comments: highlights got as bright as 1200 nits in HDR. The local dimming setting has three options. Fast makes the highlights especially small highlights the brightest, but there is some flickering, for example stars in a nightly sky. Average makes the highlights a little more dimm but haloing is also reduced, still flickering is visible in certain scenario’s. Low has the same brightness for highlights, but no flickering. Haloing is also the same as that of the average option, which is as good as invisible, while blacks are very deep.
The biggest complain is that the settings in osd are not saved. Switching between the different picture and color or between SDR and HDR settings resets the osd settings. I’ve already updated to the latest firmware (v. 010). What’s nice of the latest firmware is that you have access to the picture and color settings in HDR mode which were previously greyed out.

[PCM2]

Thanks for the feedback so far, Degrader.

It’s good that there’s some flexibility with the local dimming settings to adjust the dark vs. bright biasing behaviour and that wasn’t something the critical poster on Reddit even mentioned. Does this flickering occur only with smaller bright shades against darker surroundings or is it apparent elsewhere? And does it require a particular speed of movement to trigger it? If it doesn’t occur at all using the ‘Low’ setting at the setting performs well in general, that’s good to know.

[EsaT]

Well, guess some marketroid must have been ill to let one usable local dimming setting through.
Have you tried different overdrive modes?

But that dementia for OSD settings is sure facepalm considering how much time Acer has had.

[Degrader]

I saw the flickering also in more subtle brightness changes. And even slow movement triggers it. The high and average options are just too aggressive. It was nice if they combine the bright highlights of the high option and the transition speed of the low setting. It is good to know that the low setting does not enable more zones for smoothing out halo’s. So the zones surrounding the ‘highlight’ zone are completely turned off (or almost) resulting in deep blacks. To be honest I didn’t expect such a good result of a 576 zones FALD, let alone for a 32 inch screen.
The coating is quite grainy unfortunately. Even my wife said what are that for pixels but those were the sparkles of the coating layer.

[PCM2]

I’ve split this into its own thread instead so it’s easier for people to find. 🙂

I’m glad you’re happy with one of the dimming settings on the X32 FP, at least. It’s a bit of a shame to hear about the screen surface, at least for those sensitive to it (waves hand) that could be a bit annoying. Still, it sounds like you’re enjoying the experience with everything set up to your liking so hopefully that doesn’t sour the experience too much for you. How are you finding the colour output of the screen and its motion performance?

[Degrader]

Nice that you’ve made a separate thread, thanks!

I was forgotten to answer the question about the overdrive (OD) settings. OD has three settings: Off, Normal and Extreme. But these settings are only availabe if you disable FreeSync Premium Pro (FSPP) which is enabled by default, otherwise it is set to Normal and greyed out. You cannot force another setting, so for example: if you turn off FSPP and set the OD setting to Extreme and turn on FSPP again, then the setting will be resetted automatically to Normal (a Reddit user reported that there was a bug in a previous firmware version that the set OD setting was saved when turning on FSPP, but that’s been fixed now unfortunately 🙂
The setting Extreme is in my opinion usable, but there is definitely overshoot visible, but it doesn’t bother me to much (maybe this is improved in the meantime in the firmware as there were several Reddit users complaning about a lot of overshoot with the Extreme setting, but it could also be that I’m not really sensitive to it). The Normal setting has less overshoot but more blur. All settings were tested with the maximum refresh rate of 160Hz.
Just in case if you may wonder: by disabling FSPP the G-Sync compatibility is also lost.

Colors in SDR in the Color Space mode Standard are really nice and saturated, I’ve measured the following: X32FP measurements

Also in HDR the colors are rich and saturated, but green is than a little bit undersaturated. I saw this also with the Philips 27B1U7903 (DisplayHDR 1400) but it was even worse!
The HDR experience is quite impactful with highlights up to 1200 nits while dark parts are dimmed extremely well. Maybe a little exaggerated, but Forza 5 for example has even something dramatic in HDR. The sun is shining in your face while you see the vegatation on the ground with dark shadows and still dark details are visible. Then you really have the feeling of a good high dynamic range experience!

Another nice thing to mention of the X32FP: Thanks to DSC (Display Stream Compression – which is enabled by default in OSD) the color depth can be set to 12-bit even in combination with 3840×2160 and 160Hz with full range RGB enabled (forced in Nvidia control panel). This really makes gradients smoother, I was surpised about the results (while there’s is still a tiny amount of banding visible, it is clearly better than 10-bit).

Luckily you can save your OSD settings to a profile (there are in total three profiles). Still, the local dimming setting is not saved in the profile unfortunatley.
If Acer could fix this, or just split the option for local dimming into SDR and HDR like the 27B1U7903 has, that would be nice.
Also the aggressiveness of the High local dimming setting needs to be changed to similar behaviour as the Low setting without sacrificing the high brightness for small highlights.

So that was it for now 🙂

Edit: Oh yeah, forgotten to add the link to a video which I’ve made of the flickering of the High local dimming setting. In real it is even worse!

Flickering Local dimming High setting

[PCM2]

Thanks for sharing your extended impressions and the flickering demonstration! I can’t see the measurements as it says “access denied”, so it looks like the file or folder is set to have restricted rather than public access currently. That’s the standard way as far as Acer’s OD control goes – though you were right to see if changing the OD setting and then enabling ‘FreeSync Premium Pro’ made a difference! It does with some models and seems it used to with earlier revisions of the X32 FP. I assume there’s quite a bit of overshoot if you use ‘Normal’ (or have ‘FreeSync Premium Pro’ active) in the OSD at lower refresh rates such as 60Hz? That’s what usually happens and it’s a criticism I’ve passed onto Acer from various reviews, I really don’t know why they decide to lock the OD setting like that.

Which gradients are you viewing that appear smoother with 12-bit selected in Nvidia Control Panel, by the way? Most content is 8-bit (for SDR) and shouldn’t appear different regardless of the setting you have selected there. Unless the monitor is enforcing additional dithering regardless of the content requiring that (possible, but unusual) or is somehow calibrated differently with different signal bit-depth selected. 🙂

[Degrader]

I play Forza 5 for example with the framerate ingame set at 53 fps, while the X32FP is set at a refreshrate of 160Hz. Then there is certainly blur visible. I can imagine that fast gamers will be disappointed with it. Personally I prefer high quality graphics above motion performance.

It is also in Forza 5 that the gradients in the sky are smoother, almost no banding visible, with 12-bit. While in 10-bit and also with my Z27xs with 10-bit banding is visible then. Same result for Forza 4, so it looks like these Forza games make use of higher color depth.

Another interesting thing to mention is that the X32FP has a low glow panel, IPS glow is almost absent. So the image quality of the AmLED panel is very good.

I’ve set the folder with the picture to public, so you should now be able to open it. Sorry for not checking that before.

[PCM2]

The frame rate wouldn’t affect the overdrive, it would have to specifically be the refresh rate that is low for overshoot to become potentially problematic (e.g. if VRR is enabled perhaps or the monitor is set to 60Hz). I’m not quite sure what’s going on with those Forza titles, perhaps there is an enforced dithering stage in play – to confirm, is this SDR or HDR? It’s also possible the game is detecting a 12-bit signal and loading superior textures, which would be unusual but is a possibility. 10-bit used properly should have very smooth looking gradients, too. So unless the game is intervening in this way and loading higher quality assets, I wouldn’t expect a distinct difference even with fine gradients when comparing a 10-bit and 12-bit signal.

I’m glad to hear it’s a ‘low glow’ panel, I’d hoped that would be the case. And thank you for making the folder public, the gamut is very similar to the PG32UQX which uses a very similar QD LED ‘formula’. 🙂 Just for reference, are you able to record the gamut using the ‘sRGB’ and ‘DCI-P3’ settings? They’re usually under ‘Color Space’ in the ‘Color’ section of the OSD for Acer models.

[Degrader]

Sorry for not being clear.
I meant that the refreshrate in the control panel is set to 160Hz while G-Sync is enabled. So indeed VRR, so the refreshrate is then also around the set framerate of 53 fps.

And the smooth gradients in the Forza games is in HDR. I haven’t tested it yet in SDR. Will do tomorrow and let you know. Same for the gamuts in the sRGB and DCI-P3 mode. Nice to have such a forum as this!

[EsaT]

I play Forza 5 for example with the framerate ingame set at 53 fps, while the X32FP is set at a refreshrate of 160Hz. Then there is certainly blur visible.

Low FPS adds visibility of blur already from eye’s sample and hold effect.
But is there inverted ghosting from overshoot?
At least original “normal” overdrive setting was pretty horribly tuned with overshoot even at 160Hz:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZhyAEuiaLk

Another interesting thing to mention is that the X32FP has a low glow panel, IPS glow is almost absent.

Local dimming doing it’s actual work of dimming, instead of just blowing out highlights to huge blooms/halos can also mitigate IPS glow.
So for seeing actual glow level of the panel you need to disable local dimming completely.

[PCM2]

Quite a few models I’ve tested with a claimed 48 – x Hz VRR range actually have a ~55 – x Hz VRR range. It’s possible the Acer is an example of this, so if a game is running at 53fps the monitor may be running at 106Hz, which I wouldn’t expect to show particularly strong overshoot even if lower refresh rates do. There should be a ‘Refresh Rate Num’ setting in the ‘Gaming’ section of the OSD which will show the actual refresh rate the display is running at. 🙂

[Degrader]

There is overshoot visible in Normal, but I don’t know if this is less pronounced than with previous firmware versions (I’m using the latest).

Regarding the glow, I meant with local dimming disabled. I think it is almost as good as a monitor with an ATW polarizer.

There is indeed Refresh Rate Num option in OSD present. I’ll check the actual framerate with it.

I’ve uploaded the measurements of the sRGB and DCI-P3 modes: Measurements in sRGB and DCI-P3 modes

[Author]

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