ASUS ROG Swift Pro PG248QP  Monitor Review

The ASUS PG248QP has a strong gamer-oriented design with a gray plastic body and an aggressive claw-style stand. It also has a lit ROG logo on the back and etching in part of the rear plastic housing.

The build quality is good, and the plastic body has minimal creaking and flex. The height adjustments are stable and smooth, and the swivel and tilt mechanisms work well. The stand is solid, and while mostly plastic, a metal frame supports the base of the stand. While you can hear the monitor's fan quietly whirring if you put your ear close to the vents, it's not significantly loud.

The ergonomics are very good. It has a good range of adjustments, so you can place the screen in your preferred position. Lastly, the stand features a loop for cable management.

The monitor's stand provides quick recovery from wobble for a steady image when playing esports or doing other activities. The monitor's stand legs are retractable and can be adjusted between the maximum and minimum extension. The monitor is more stable when you fully extend the legs, providing a steadier platform while gaming or playing esports. Fully retracting the legs decreases the width to 10.2 inches and increases the depth to 10 inches. There's a screw hole for a camera mount at the top of the stand.

The back of the monitor has a joystick to adjust the on-screen display, a button to exit the on-screen display, two configurable shortcut buttons, and a power button.

• DisplayPort cable
• HDMI cable
• USB-B to USB-A cable
• Power brick
• Power cable
• Documentation

The monitor has a mediocre contrast ratio. Deep blacks appear gray next to bright highlights, and the monitor has no local dimming feature to improve the contrast further.

This monitor doesn't have a local dimming feature. However, it has a Variable Backlight setting, which reduces the monitor's backlight brightness when your screen has darker content. The setting improves the appearance of deep blacks in dark scenes, but deep blacks still appear gray if there's a lot of bright and dark content on the screen simultaneously. The level '1' Variable Backlight setting slightly increases the contrast ratio to 1,419:1. When you set Variable Backlight to levels 2-4, it responds quite slowly to changes in average scene brightness.

Though this monitor doesn't have local dimming, we still film these videos on the monitor so you can compare the backlight performance with a monitor that has local dimming.

The SDR brightness is great. It gets bright enough to fight glare and maintains its brightness well across different content. These results are from after calibration in the 'RTS/RPG' GameVisual mode with the Brightness at its max and Variable Backlight at '1.'

The HDR brightness is adequate, though it doesn't get bright enough for highlights to pop. It follows the PQ EOTF curve fairly well, as most scenes display at their correct brightness, though it has an early roll-off, so highlights don't get the brightest they could.

These results are from the 'RTS/RPG' GameVisual setting with Variable Backlight at '1' with Brightness locked at max.

The horizontal viewing angle is sub-par. The image appears washed out from the sides, particularly with blue colors.

The vertical viewing angle is poor, though it looks notably better from above than below. If you stand up and look down at the monitor, the image is washed out. Additionally, the colors of the image appear inverted when viewed from a substantial angle below the monitor.

The gray uniformity is good. While the edges of the screen are somewhat darker, there's minimal dirty screen effect in the center.

The monitor has reasonable black uniformity. In a darker room, the backlight is visible in distinct areas toward the center of the screen as well as the edges, but there's no local dimming feature to improve it further.

The ASUS ROG Swift Pro PG248QP has mediocre accuracy before calibration in the sRGB mode. Though the monitor has an sRGB mode, color accuracy is disappointing, and it has a high color temperature, so everything looks cooler than it should. The white balance is also awful, and most scenes are too dark.

Unfortunately, using the 'sRGB' GameVisual setting locks other settings, including Brightness and Contrast. So, if you want to use those settings, you need to change GameVisual to something else, which results in worse performance, as you can see here.

The accuracy after calibration is superb. Though very bright scenes are slightly over-brightened, there are minimal inaccuracies. Additionally, you can use any of the settings that are locked out in the sRGB mode.

The SDR color gamut is fantastic, and the monitor has incredible coverage of the sRGB color space. However, it has more limited coverage of the Adobe RGB color space used in photo editing, and it doesn't display most colors accurately in that color space.

The HDR color gamut is good. It has great coverage of the commonly used DCI-P3 color space, though it struggles to display white accurately. It has more limited coverage of the Rec. 2020 color space and struggles with tone mapping colors that are a mixture of blue and green, and it doesn't display white accurately.

The HDR color volume is decent. It's mainly limited by its color gamut, and it can't display bright and dark colors very well.

The ASUS PG248QP has decent text clarity. With ClearType on (top photo), diagonal lines appear bolder. These photos are in Windows 10, and you can also see it in Windows 11 with ClearType on and with ClearType off.

Although this monitor's matte coating spreads light out, it still has some direct reflections.

This monitor has some black level raise in a bright room. As it has a high black level to start with in a dark room, blacks look gray even in a bright room.

This monitor reflects some light back. It spreads it out and reflects it directly back, so visibility can be an issue in well-lit rooms.

The gradient handling is fantastic overall. However, there's a sharp transition between medium and lighter blue, which may be visible with some content.

You can overclock the ASUS ROG Swift Pro PG248QP from 500Hz to 540Hz by setting Overclocking to 'Enable (540Hz).' Refresh rates over 500Hz are only available when using an NVIDIA RTX 20 series and above graphics card with Windows 11 over DisplayPort. However, your graphics card needs to use DisplayStream Compression (DSC) to reach its max refresh rate, and the monitor has a setting to disable DSC if you prefer, at the cost of lower refresh rates.

On top of supporting FreeSync and G-SYNC, the monitor supports HDMI Forum VRR. If you don't need something with native G-SYNC support, you can also check out the BenQ ZOWIE XL2586X, which is G-SYNC compatible.

The ASUS PG248QP has incredible motion handling across its entire refresh rate range with VRR enabled. Using the 'Normal' OD setting, it performs consistently well across the range, as other settings like 'Off' and 'Extreme' have large variation in performance at lower refresh rates once LFC kicks in. Although 'Esports' performs similarly, 'Normal' has the lowest CAD at any refresh rate.

The refresh rate compliance is amazing. It struggles to keep up with changing frame rates at its max refresh rate of 540Hz, which is expected, but it's much better at lower refresh rates, which is ideal for gaming.

The ASUS PG248QP has an incredible CAD at its max refresh rate. The 'Normal' OD setting has incredibly low CAD, and although there's a bit of inverse ghosting caused by some overshoot, motion looks sharp regardless. 'Esports' is similar, but it has more overshoot. If you're looking for a monitor with even better CAD at its max refresh rate, check out the LG 32GS95UE-B, which also has a 480Hz Dual-Mode

The CAD at 120Hz is fantastic. The 'Extreme' overdrive setting has the fastest response time and minimal overshoot, but this only happens if you set the refresh rate on the monitor to 120Hz. As seen in VRR Motion Performance, if you set the refresh rate to 540Hz and use VRR to go down to 120Hz, then the 'Normal' setting has the best performance.

The CAD at 60Hz is good. While the 'Extreme' overdrive setting has overshoot that causes inverse ghosting, it still has the fastest total response time and lowest CAD out of any setting.

This monitor has NVIDIA's ULMB 2 backlight strobing technology, which decreases image duplication when backlight strobing is enabled. The monitor does this by only activating the backlight when its pixels aren't in a transition state, minimizing image duplication. There are a few settings to customize its backlight. The technology is effective, as it reduces persistence blur, but it doesn't eliminate all image duplication. Because this feature only works with 360Hz and 540Hz signals, you need a premium gaming setup to take advantage of it.

The ASUS PG248QP has minimal VRR flicker in games with changing frame rates, which is fantastic.

The backlight remains flicker-free at all brightness levels, which helps reduce eye strain if you're sensitive to flicker.

The ASUS ROG Swift Pro PG248QP has extremely low input lag at 540Hz for a responsive feel. Backlight strobing at 500Hz has 0.5ms more input lag when overclocking is turned off. Apart from this, even when using different aspect ratios or turning on overclocking or backlight strobing, there are no noticeable differences in input lag. Additionally, 500Hz and 540Hz have identical input lag, with 360Hz having 2.2ms of input lag.

The ASUS ROG Swift Pro PG248QP has limited compatibility with the Xbox Series X|S. Since the console doesn't support HDR below 4k, you can't enable HDR on the monitor.

This monitor works well with macOS. HDR works over both DisplayPort and HDMI, though VRR only works over DisplayPort. When using VRR, some flickering artifacts in the menu appear at launch or after the benchmark, though pressing alt-tab and then returning to the program fixes the problem. A maximum refresh rate of 500Hz is available over DisplayPort, with a 240Hz maximum available over HDMI. When using a MacBook, windows return to their original position when you reopen the lid or wake the laptop up from sleep.

The ASUS ROG Swift Pro PG248QP has several gamer-focused features, including:

• NVIDIA Reflex Latency Analyzer: Provides a detailed breakdown of where latency occurs in your gaming setup. You must use a compatible mouse and connect it directly to the monitor for it to work.
• NVIDIA ULMB 2: This is NVIDIA's backlight strobing feature. It significantly reduces image duplication when backlight strobing is on.
• Retractable Stand: Retractable stand arms allow for an adjustable stand footprint.
• GamePlus HotKey Button: Pressing the GamePlus button provides fast access to several gaming features like FPS counter, Crosshair, Timer, Stopwatch, and Display Alignment.