ASUS ROG Swift OLED PG34WCDM Monitor Review

The ASUS ROG Swift OLED PG34WCDM has a gamer-oriented design with thin bezels and a tripod stand. The back of the monitor has RGB lighting, which you can see here. While it has RGB lighting on the stand, ours didn't work.

The build quality is excellent, with just a small amount of creaking in the monitor's plastic housing. The triangular stand pieces are metal, while the pillar is plastic, and the stand has minimal flex or plastic creaking. However, in our model, the pins that connect the monitor to the stand for RGB stand lighting don't contact properly, so our base lighting doesn't work. You can see a picture of the pins here.

The ergonomics are decent. It has excellent height adjustment, so you can easily place it at your preferred height, and it also has a great tilt range. However, its swivel range is limited, though the monitor’s strong 800R curve is designed to be viewed from the center anyway. It comes with a mounting bracket if you want to mount the monitor. The stand offers cable management.

The tripod stand works well, and there's room to put peripherals between the stand legs. The monitor has minimal wobble when bumped at the corners and recovers quickly.

A joystick controls the on-screen display; it's located on the back of a lip at the bottom of the monitor. The right button is the monitor's power control, while the left button switches between inputs.

• DisplayPort cable
• HDMI cable
• USB-C cable
• Power supply and cable
• USB-B to USB-A cable
• Mounting bracket (100x100)
• Down-facing light accessories
• Accessories bag
• ROG sticker set (see here)
• User documentation, including calibration report

The ASUS PG34WCDM has an outstanding, near-infinite contrast ratio. Its OLED panel displays deep, inky blacks next to bright highlights.

OLED panels like this one don't have a backlight, so they don't require a local dimming feature. However, with a near-infinite contrast ratio, there isn't any blooming around bright objects, and it's the equivalent of a perfect local dimming feature. We still film these videos on the monitor so you can see how the screen performs and compare it with a monitor that has local dimming.

The SDR brightness is satisfactory. While it gets bright enough to overcome glare in most lighting conditions, it has trouble fighting glare in a very bright room. These results are from after calibration in 'Racing Mode' GameVisual, which is the name for the picture mode, with the Brightness at its max, Uniform Brightness disabled, and Auto Logo Brightness turned off.

If you want the monitor's brightness to remain the same no matter what content is on the screen, you can use Uniform Brightness. Turning Uniform Brightness 'On' works as expected, locking maximum brightness between 236 cd/m² and 240 cd/m² for the 2% to 100% windows, both sustained and peak. Real scene brightness is 225 cd/m² with Uniform Brightness 'On.'

The monitor has decent HDR brightness. Small highlights get bright enough to truly pop, but larger ones don't pop as much. Additionally, dark scenes are too dark, causing a loss of shadow detail, but it has an excellent sharp cut-off at peak brightness, ensuring it doesn't tone map before your computer does.

These results are in 'Gaming HDR' HDR Setting with Brightness Adjustable 'On,' Uniform Brightness 'Off,' Auto Logo Brightness 'Off,' and Brightness locked to its max. Adjusting the brightness to maximum improves the EOTF curve, and you achieve a slightly higher peak brightness. You can see what the EOTF looks like with brightness at its default setting here.

If the monitor is receiving a 16:9 signal, and you don't stretch it to fill the screen, the real scene brightness is 554 cd/m², which is substantially higher than the 21:9 real scene brightness.

The ASUS PG34WCDM has an outstanding horizontal viewing angle. Although it technically isn't perfect, you won't see any inconsistencies when viewing from the sides or if you sit close to the screen.

The vertical viewing angle is remarkable. The image looks the same even if you're standing up and looking down on it or have it mounted above eye level.

The gray uniformity is great. However, while there's minimal dirty screen effect, the screen is darker in the right corners. Additionally, during testing, we noticed that the monitor retained faint images of HUD elements from three repeated playbacks of our warmup video. We fixed this after running pixel cleaning. You can see what we observed here.

The ASUS PG27AQDM has perfect black uniformity as its OLED panel can turn individual pixels on and off, so there isn't any blooming.

The ASUS PG34WCDM has excellent accuracy before calibration in the sRGB mode. Though colors are slightly oversaturated, it has good overall color accuracy and white balance. Additionally, scenes are consistently too dark before calibration.

Unfortunately, using the sRGB mode locks many settings, including Uniform Brightness and Contrast. If you do want to use those locked-out settings, you can use the 'Racing Mode,' which, before calibration, makes the gamma curve more accurate for all but the darkest scenes, though it oversaturates colors. You can see this here.

The accuracy after calibration is fantastic. The color temperature is almost perfect, and it now follows the gamma curve very closely. Color gamut and accuracy are also slightly improved. Additionally, by calibrating it, you can adjust settings that are locked out in the sRGB mode, like Uniform Brightness.

The SDR color gamut is incredible. It has perfect coverage of the sRGB color space used in most web content. It also has great coverage of the Adobe RGB color space, though it doesn't display greens or reds accurately, which isn't ideal if you need to work with those colors in Adobe RGB.

The HDR color gamut is superb. It displays almost the entire range of colors in DCI-P3, and colors are very accurate, though white isn't displayed properly. However, in Rec. 2020 it has significantly less coverage, and colors are less accurate.

The HDR color volume is good. While it's excellent at displaying darker colors well, bright colors are less vivid.

The ASUS ROG Swift PG34WCDM has adequate text clarity, which is worse than many other 34-inch ultrawide monitors. This is because the monitor has a RWBG subpixel layout. These photos are in Windows 10, though fringing is also visible in text when ClearType is enabled in Windows 11, as you can see here. Turning off ClearType removes the text fringing, but letters also look less clear.

The monitor has a feature called Pixel Edge, which aims to reduce fringing. However, text still looks very similar, as you can see here with both ClearType and Pixel Edge enabled.

The ASUS ROG Swift PG34WCDM's reflection handling is remarkable, and it's extremely effective at reducing glare. However, the display's maximum full-screen brightness is limited, making it more difficult to see images on the screen in very bright environments.

The ASUS ROG Swift PG34WCDM has fantastic gradient handling, and you won't see any banding.

We were only able to get 240Hz over HDMI with an RTX 4080, and we couldn't reach 240Hz with either an RTX 3060 or 4070 over HDMI.

The ASUS PG34WCDM has outstanding motion handling across its entire refresh rate range with VRR enabled. CAD remains low throughout, and there's minimal blur with fast-moving objects.

The refresh rate compliance is outstanding. With a near-instantaneous response time, it makes full-color transitions before drawing the next frame.

The CAD at the maximum refresh rate is outstanding. It displays fast-moving objects as intended and motion is extremely sharp, and there isn't any inverse ghosting either.

The CAD at 120Hz is outstanding. Pixels transition to their target RGB level almost instantly, so there isn't any blur trail behind fast-moving objects.

The CAD at 60Hz is outstanding. Pixels transition colors almost perfectly, and any noticeable blur is persistent.

This monitor supports black frame insertion (BFI) to reduce persistence blur. However, it only works at 120Hz, where the screen is off for half the frame time, and the image displays for the other half. You can adjust brightness while BFI is enabled.

This monitor has noticeable VRR flicker with changing frame rates. Although it isn't as bad as some other OLEDs, it's still distracting and bothersome, especially if you're sensitive to it. It's most noticeable in dark scenes, but you can still see it in dark parts of bright scenes. VRR flicker happens with changing frame rates, but it isn't so much of an issue with consistent frame rates.

The ASUS ROG Swift PG34WCDM technically isn't flicker-free because a slight dip in brightness corresponds to the 240Hz refresh rate. However, it isn't the same as pulse width modulation because it isn't a full screen on and off, and you won't notice this flicker.

The monitor has low input lag for a responsive feel.

The ASUS ROG Swift OLED PG34WCDM works well enough with PS5. However, you need to set the aspect ratio to 16:9 if you don't want a stretched image, and using this setting disables VRR. Even if you keep the aspect ratio at 21:9 with a stretched image, 1440p doesn't work at all.

The ASUS ROG Swift OLED PG34WCDM has limited compatibility with the Xbox Series X|S. You need to set the aspect ratio to 16:9 if you don't want a stretched image, and using this setting disables VRR. Even if you use a 21:9 aspect ratio, you need to enable the console's HDMI override setting for 1440p to work, which disables VRR. Keep in mind that the Xbox only supports HDR with 4k signals, so this isn't an issue with the monitor.

This monitor has an SPDIF output, also known as an optical audio output. This allows audio to remain digital and enables processing by a dedicated audio device, like a receiver or speakers with an optical input. This can produce higher-quality audio than a monitor's typical analog audio output.

With the USB-C port, you can connect your laptop and charge it simultaneously, as the 90W of power the monitor delivers is high enough to charge most laptops.

This monitor works well with macOS. When using a MacBook, windows return to their original position when reopening the lid or waking the laptop up from sleep. However, while this happens almost instantly with USB-C, it takes approximately 10–20 seconds with HDMI 2.0 and 5–10 seconds with HDMI 2.1.

This monitor has a few extra features, including:

• Smart KVM: Lets you quickly switch between two computers while using the same keyboard and mouse connected to the monitor. Additionally, this monitor can transition the keyboard and mouse from one computer to another by moving the mouse across a defined line on the screen without changing settings or pressing a button. Additionally, you can move files between the two connected computers via drag-and-drop or via clipboard.
• Aura RGB: Controls the RGB lighting on the back of the monitor and the stand.
• Blue Light Filter: Reduces blue light to help lessen eye strain.
• GamePlus: Includes different gaming features like an FPS counter, crosshairs, sniper mode, stopwatch, and timer.
• Shadow Boost: Adjusts gamma so that you can see opponents better in dark scenes.

Like most OLED displays, there are also a few settings to help reduce the risk of burn-in, which you can find in the Screen Protection section of the OSD:

• Auto Logo Brightness: Dims static logos that are on the screen, like if you're watching TV.
• Pixel Cleaning: Calibrates any issues that may arise on the screen when your monitor is on for a long time. It happens after you turn off the screen and takes about six minutes to finish. There's also a setting to remind you to turn off the monitor so it can perform the cycle.
• Screen Move: Moves the image by a few pixels to one side to help reduce the risk of burn-in.
• Screen Saver: Automatically dims the screen when there's inactivity.

ASUS also offers a two-year burn-in warranty. Burn-in can occur with constant exposure to the same static elements over time, so the best ways to reduce the risk of burn-in is by watching varied content, hiding the taskbar, using a black background, and taking advantage of these settings. You can learn about our current longevity and burn-in test here.