AMD announced their new GPU lineup, starting out with their flagship RX 7900 XTX. We’ll be getting the full reviews soon, but for now we’ve gotten a look at the main features offered by their new models, with their DisplayPort 2.1 implementation standing out as a very valuable advancement for the monitor industry. We also got a glance at AMD’s plans to start moving into 8K gaming, as we’ve finally reached the ideal point for 4K@144Hz gaming.
If you’re planning to buy one of these flagship graphics cards, you’ll need a good monitor that can take full advantage of its power. Since the RX 7900 XTX is capable of running 4K at high refresh rates even when running the games at their highest quality settings, you’ll want a 4K 144Hz monitor, so we’ve written this article to help you find the best monitor.
Connectivity
Displaying a 4K 144Hz output requires a high-bandwidth connection, as it is transferring a staggering 1.2 billion pixels per second, which at 10-bit color, requires a minimum bandwidth of 43Gbps. On the RX 7900 XTX, you can use either the HDMI 2.1 or DisplayPort 2.1 outputs and run the monitor at its maximum performance.
(Image Credit: RTINGS)
While DisplayPort 2.1 is capable of running 4K at incredibly high refresh rates, at this moment no monitors offer a DisplayPort implementation higher than 1.4, and though DisplayPort 1.4 is capable of running 4K at 144Hz, its 32Gbps bandwidth means it can only achieve it using 4:2:2 Chroma subsampling, which will reduce the quality of the signal by transferring only half of the color information provided by the source device.
HDMI 2.1, when implemented according to the full 48Gbps spec, can transmit the 4K@144Hz video signal without any compression. This makes it the ideal option to make the most of the RX 7900 XTX. It is important to note whether a monitor does offer the full HDMI 2.1 bandwidth, as some monitors have reduced the bandwidth to as low as 24Gbps, making compression necessary to run high refresh rates.
Color Performance
If you’re looking to buy a monitor for your new graphics card, aside from resolution, refresh rate, and connectivity, you should also look at the monitor’s color accuracy. The three main specs you should look for are sRGB coverage, DCI-P3 coverage, and Delta E.
sRGB, which stands for “Standard Red Green Blue” is the most popular color profile for consumer devices, and is used on operating systems like Windows, in most web browsers, and in many modern games. Having good coverage of this space will ensure the image displayed by your monitor represents the source content as intended. While it’s great for most use cases, it is limited to 8-bit color, and offers a reduced coverage of the color spectrum compared to a larger standard like DCI-P3.
For uses that require wider color coverage like video, movies, or modern video games, you’ll usually be able to enable HDR, which makes use of the DCI-P3 color space. Since you’re using a high-end GPU which runs games at their highest quality settings, you’ll surely want to use HDR to experience the game at its best quality, so you’ll want to find a monitor that offers good coverage of the DCI-P3 space.
Both color spaces can be found in the monitor’s specs as a percentage, with 100% being the ideal coverage of the space. Some monitors have an implementation with a coverage over 100%, which, while the higher number may make it seem better, will lead to an oversaturated image.
Finally, Delta E (or ΔE) measures how much the color displayed by a monitor will differ from the source image. To ensure the best image accuracy, you ideally want this measurement to be as close to 0 as possible, but any measurement below 1.0 will not be perceptible by the human eye. A professional calibration report, like the one provided with each Dough Spectrum unit, will show the deviation for each color, but on a product spec page, you can find the average Delta E, which will show the deviation average for all colors measured.
To ensure the best performance in these areas, you can calibrate your monitor with a professional calibration tool. These tools unfortunately aren’t very cheap, so at Dough, thanks to our community feedback, we calibrate each unit individually at the factory. This allows the Spectrum 4K@144Hz monitor to boast a 100% sRGB and 98% DCI-P3 coverage, along with an impressive 0.65 ΔE, which ensures any image displayed will be reproduced exactly as intended.
What's Next?
Thanks to the advancements brought by AMD, the monitor industry will soon be moving forwards with implementing DisplayPort 2.0 and 2.1 in high-end monitors. Most exciting, now that 4K@144Hz monitor technology has matured and is easily achievable by consumer hardware, we'll start seeing some incredible advancements on the panel technology used with some manufacturers even venturing into 8K monitors.
At Dough, we're keeping a close eye on these advancements and discussing them with our partners so we can implement them into our product lineup as soon as they become available.