LG is looking to launch what seems to me one of the most well-rounded monitors for our use cases, with the LG 43UD79-B. Barring the enormous size of the monitor (I for one don't think a 43" on my desk would be the best way of going around computing), this monitors ticks almost all the boxes. It features 4K resolution (3840 x 2160) and an IPS panel with non-glare coating, which delivers a peak brightness of 350 cd/m2, a contrast ratio of up to 1000:1, and an 8 ms gray-to-gray (GTG) response time, which is the only sour point I see here (though it's still miles ahead of most 4K television sets.) The panel ticks on at 60 Hz, which, let's face it, is probably right for the resolution your graphics card will have to be driving anyway. The presence of Freesync here is mighty welcome indeed, ensuring you can make the most of those 60 FPS. LG mention support for 1.07 billion colors which come factory-calibrated, but the absence of any information regarding this being a 10-bit panel (which manufacturers naturally jump towards marketing) probably indicates this is actually an 8-bit panel using A-FRC to achieve a 10-bit color depth.

Today at NAB, HP Inc. announced a true Cinema 4K display, arming color professionals with new features, like color-critical accuracy and automatic calibration, to produce the films and animations of tomorrow. Designed in collaboration with top visual effects and animation studios, the new HP DreamColor Z31x Studio and HP DreamColor Z24x G2 displays are enabling artists, photographers and filmmakers to do what they do best -- create -- without having to worry about lackluster display performance.

"From the purest black to the most vivid rainbow of colors, our new DreamColor display for Cinema sets the gold standard for color accuracy and ease-of-use at a disruptive price point to outshine the competition," said Josh Peterson, vice president of product management for Z Workstations. "The new DreamColor Z Displays will be a gamechanger for studios and digital creatives who rely on color-critical accuracy and extreme performance."
An early pioneer in the color-critical display market, HP DreamColor Displays, for PCs and Mac computers, have been an integral technology for major movie production and visual effects studios around the world. Since 2011, 80 percent of Academy Award Nominees for Visual Effects have used HP DreamColor displays. In 2015, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored the HP DreamColor Display and its developers with the Scientific and Engineering Award.

AOC has been one of the most aggressive companies when it comes to launching new displays, with its gaming "AGON" series seeing the addition of multiple monitors in the past few months. The new C4008VU8 doesn't quite tick the gaming aesthetics box, however, which isn't all that bad. Personally, I much prefer its clean, no-frills design, absent of some over-design features.

The panel seems to be an interesting one, nonetheless, with its 40" size, 16:9, 4K (3840 x 2160) resolution on a 10-bit MVA panel, with a 60 Hz refresh rate. Its 5 ms response time is relatively good, though the absence of any VRR (variable refresh-rate) technology such as AMD's FreeSync or NVIDIA's G-SYNC is puzzling. The lack of HDR support, however, is kind of a downer, but a necessity when one considers the display's maximum 300 cd/m² brightness. The panel boasts an 85% NTSC wide color gamut with 1.07 billion colors, with 178º horizontal and vertical viewing angle on a 1800R curved display. As for adjustments, the monitor can only be tilted: 5 degrees down, and 13.5 degrees up. Connection-wise, the AOC C4008VU8 boasts 1x HDMI 2.0, 1x HDMI 1.4, 2x DisplayPort 1.2, and 1x VGA connector (only 8 months ago I would be using such a connection myself, so I really shouldn't judge. There are legacy use cases, after all, and more options are always better.) There are also 4x USB 3.0 ports available, one of which can be used for fast charging devices. The AOC is available with a MSRP of $899, though you may find some retailers selling these for less already.

EIZO Corporation today announced the new ColorEdge PROMINENCE CG3145 - a 31.1-inch reference monitor with DCI-4K resolution (4096 x 2160) for the professional HDR post production workflow. HDR (high dynamic range) approximates the human perception of color and light as content is shown on a display device. ColorEdge PROMINENCE CG3145 is able to correctly show both very bright and very dark areas on the screen without sacrificing the integrity of either - a process which cannot be achieved with SDR (standard dynamic range) monitors.

The monitor achieves the 1000 cd/m2 (typical) high brightness level needed for HDR content display. It is also the world's first LCD monitor to achieve a typical contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1 for displaying true blacks. The name "PROMINENCE" refers to the phenomenon known as a solar prominence - a flame-like eruption which extends from the Sun's surface. This image of the bright sun shining against the deep black of space lends to the monitor's ability to accurately display both bright and dark content.

Here it is. The OLED monitor to beat all others. Sate your image quality needs with the new, $3500, 4K OLED monitor from Dell. Its 30" displays a 3840 x 2160 resolution, and presents a response time of just 0.1ms at a 60 Hz refresh rate - with no support for Freesync, sadly. It can 1.07 billion colors (Anandtech assumes it's probably a 10-bit presentation), and covers 100% of the Adobe RGB color space, 97.8% of the DCI-P3 color space (which is expected to be adopted in home movies and cinema in the future), as well as 85.8% coverage of Rec2020. Dell declares a 1,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, which is basically only truly achievable on OLED displays, due to their ability to turn off individual pixels.

When it comes to inputs, the Dell Ultrasharp UP3017Q features 1x mini-DisplayPort 1.2 connector,1x HDMI 2.0 port, and 1x USB type-C port, which is compatible with video and data connectivity as well as power delivery up to 100W. The monitor's stand supports Tilt (5~21°), Pivot (+90°, -90°), and Height (100 mm) adjustments. AnandTech reports that Dell has implemented a special pixel-shifting technology to try and inhibit the possibility of static image burn-in, which is one of the drawbacks of this panel technology, and perhaps one of the reasons its transition towards a desktop environment wasn't made sooner. What do you think of this? Are you looking forward to having an OLED monitor in front of you, or would you prefer to keep high-frequency monitors?

The 32UD99 is to be LG's flagship consumer monitor, if its specs are anything to go by. And while it isn't mainly marketed towards gamers, it seems to be a good bet for image quality enthusiasts, ticking the 4K, HDR10, and Freesync (between 40 and 60 Hz via DisplayPort) boxes in a 32" panel. The LG 32UD99 carries a IPS panel with a native 3840×2160 resolution, and its 1.07 billion colors cover more than 95% of the DCI-P3 color space, and 100% of the sRGB gamut - with factory calibration to boot. The panel features 350 nits typical brightness, a neither great-nor-bad 5 ms response time, a 60 Hz refresh rate for those who don't need a million frames in a microsecond, and the 178° viewing angles that are par of the course for IPS.

The monitor's stand supports Tilt (2~15°), pivot (90°) and height (110 mm) adjustments. Input-wise, it features 1x DisplayPort 1.2, 2x HDMI 2.0a (HDCP 2.2), 1x USB Type-C (with DP 1.2 support), and a 2-port USB 3.0 hub with support for Quick Charging. There is also a pair of 5 W speakers. Availability is expected in late May. And it's a good thing this monitor is such a looker up-front, because its profile somewhat reminds me of Quasimodo.

We are at the 2017 Game Developers Conference, and were invited to one of the many enlightening tech sessions, titled "Is DirectX 12 Worth it," by Jurjen Katsman, CEO of Nixxes, a company credited with several successful PC ports of console games (Rise of the Tomb Raider, Deus Ex Mankind Divided). Over the past 18 months, DirectX 12 has become the selling point to PC gamers, of everything from Windows 10 (free upgrade) to new graphics cards, and even games, with the lack of DirectX 12 support even denting the PR of certain new AAA game launches, until the developers hashed out support for the new API through patches. Game developers are asking the dev community at large to manage their expectations from DirectX 12, with the underlying point being that it isn't a silver-bullet to all the tech limitations developers have to cope with, and that to reap all its performance rewards, a proportionate amount of effort has to be put in by developers.

The presentation begins with the speaker talking about the disillusionment consumers have about DirectX 12, and how they're yet to see the kind of console-rivaling performance gains DirectX 12 was purported to bring. Besides lack of huge performance gains, consumers eagerly await the multi-GPU utopia that was promised to them, in which not only can you mix and match GPUs of your choice across models and brands, but also have them stack up their video memory - a theoretical possibility with by DirectX 12, but which developers argue is easier said than done, in the real world. One of the key areas where DirectX 12 is designed to improve performance is by distributing rendering overhead evenly among many CPU cores, in a multi-core CPU. For high-performance desktop users with reasonably fast CPUs, the gains are negligible. This also goes for people gaming on higher resolutions, such as 1440p and 4K Ultra HD, where the frame-rates are low, and the performance tends to be more GPU-limited.

Adding to its staple of monitor offerings, NEC has just announced the EX341R Curved Ultrawide QHD Display 34" display, which boasts a 3440 x 1440 resolution, an 1800R curvature, and an SVA panel. The panel makes do with a 5ms response time, which while not being great also isn't the worst we've seen on this kind of panels. It also boasts of 16.7 million colors, a 3,000:1 contrast ratio, and brightness is rated at 290 cd/m².

The EX341R is certified for Low Blue Light Content and Flicker-Free operation, which should help reduce eye strain and other health issues. It also features NEC's ControlSync technology, which works with DisplayPort's daisy-chain functionality to simplify multiple monitor configurations; the monitor also features a picture by picture mode. As to connections, the EX341R has 2xHDMI ports, 4xUSB 3.0 ports, and 1xDisplayPort 1.2 I/O.

Ashes of the Singularity seems to be the benchmark tool of choice for upcoming AMD products, for some reason; and it was once again used to benchmark an upcoming AMD Ryzen processor. The benchmark results were quickly deleted after they were posted, but the hardware enthusiast should never be underestimated, and timely screenshot skills always help keep alive these little slips of the trade.

Unlike some previous benchmark leaks of Ryzen processors, which carried the prefix ES (Engineering Sample), this one carried the ZD Prefix, and the last characters on its string name are the most interesting to us: F4 stands for the silicon revision, while the 40_36 stands for the processor's Turbo and stock speeds respectively (4.0 GHz and 3.6 GHz). This is the 8-core, 16-thread SMT-enabled monster of a processor that AMD will be bringing to the table in its uphill battle against Intel, with the Ryzen chip having achieved CPU Framerate scores of 81.4 (normal batch, 73.4 (medium batch) and 60.2 (heavy batch), paired with a Pascal-based NVIDIA Titan X (which would likely point towards the test having been done by an independent, off-AMD labs part).

Eurocom launches the fully upgradeable, high performance 15.6" Tornado F5 with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 graphics, Intel Core i7 7700K processor, 64 GB DDR4 memory via four slots, dual M.2 SSD slots and a 4K 15.6" display.

EUROCOM Tornado F5 users who own an Intel Core i7-6700K SKU can upgrade to the i7-7700K since the two processors share the same LGA 1151 socket. The EUROCOM Tornado F5 is one of the few laptops with a Z170 chipset, LGA 1151 CPU socket and MXM 3.0 graphics slot for a wide range of customization options. Two M.2 SSD PCIe x2/x4 or SATA SSD and one 9.5mm SATA3 6Gb/s storage drive is also supported to offer a great combination of capacity and speed. Four memory slots are available to support up to 64 GB of DDR4 SODIMM. Customers have a 15.6" FHD matte display and a 4K matte display to choose from as well.

ASUS ProArt series of monitors are designed to look good on a corporate hotshot's desk, and the PA32U is no exception. This 32-inch monitor features a Quantum Dot display panel, which can reproduce 99.5% of the Adobe RGB color-space, 85% of REC.2020, 95% of DCI-P3, and 100% of sRGB. The star attraction here is 4K-HDR support, which is achieved using a full 384-zone direct-LED backlight matrix. The LED driver electronics operate at 1 ms, for more realistic HDR in videos. The monitor takes input from Thunderbolt, in addition to DisplayPort.

In the "Are we crazy enough to do this" pages of CES 2017 (company's words, not mine), Razer announced what they call "the world's first triple display laptop". Project Valerie remains a prototype as of this time, but it certainly is an interesting one, particularly for professionals who are frequently on the move and require a humongous amount of screen real-estate.

The UHD Alliance (UHDA), the inter-industry group charged with fostering an ecosystem that fully realizes and promotes the consumer benefits of Ultra HD entertainment technology, announced today the completion of performance specifications for portable devices. Viewing high quality content on laptops and other mobile devices has increasingly become a staple in entertainment consumption, and with continued improvement of screens on devices ranging from smartphones to laptops, the specifications define performance criteria for delivering a premium experience across the spectrum of portable devices.

Consumer adoption of Ultra HD hardware and software has seen incredible growth since its introduction, with an estimated 100 million households worldwide currently enjoying an Ultra HD experience, and an estimate 450 million households with UHD TV's by 2020.* As the category has grown, so has the UHD Alliance, which was founded in April 2015 by 10 companies and now counts more than 50 global leaders in consumer electronics, entertainment, content distribution and technology among its membership.

Unigine has announced the impending release of a new benchmark suite, supposedly to be released at the end of 2016 (well, that ship has sailed, but the benchmark Is still coming). It features an interactive VR experience with support for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. The description, such as it is, reads as so:

"A lone professor performs dangerous experiments in an abandoned classroom, day in and day out. Obsessed with inventions and discoveries beyond the wildest dreams, he strives to prove his ideas.

Once you come to this place in the early morning, you would not meet him there. The eerie thing is a loud bang from the laboratory heard a few moments ago. What was that? You have the only chance to cast some light upon this incident by going deeply into the matter of quantum theory: thorough visual inspection of professor's records and instruments will help to lift the veil on the mystery."

You can check a 4K teaser of the benchmark, after the break.

At CES 2017, AMD set-up a demo room in which it showcased a PC powered by a Ryzen CPU and a Vega GPU playing Star Wars Battlefront at 60 FPS, reportedly at Ultra HD, with confirmed Ultra quality settings. Some sources do report that the frame rate at 4K Ultra settings occasionally dropped to 57 or 58 fps, but it still remains a strong showing from the company's upcoming Vega graphics architecture, as well as the prowess of its Ryzen CPUs.

Already an industry leader renowned for integrating cutting-edge technology into its premium, high-resolution monitors, LG Electronics (LG) is pushing the industry to the next level with plans to introduce a HDR-compatible 32-inch UHD 4K monitor at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas next month.

The availability of HDR content continues to expand, covering a wide range of fields from movie to games. The enhanced picture quality offered by HDR technology is instantly recognizable to even the most casual user and manufacturers are already pushing this promising technology to its fullest potential. With professional-grade picture quality and exceptionally vibrant colors, HDR compatible monitors will appeal to creative professionals, gamers, and anyone else that takes image quality seriously.

BenQ, internationally renowned provider of digital lifestyle devices, today announced the SW320 photographer monitor, a 31.5-inch 4K display with class-leading color performance and High Dynamic Range (HDR) capability. Spanning a wide color gamut covering 99% of Adobe RGB and 100% of sRGB, Rec. 709, and the digital cinema industry's DCI-P3 color space, SW320's true 10-bit IPS panel and advanced 14-bit lookup table (LUT) deliver spectacular color quality with precise ≤2 Delta E values.

"SW320 represents the pinnacle of BenQ color-critical display technology," said Conway Lee, President of BenQ Corporation. "This wide color gamut HDR monitor takes professional imaging to new heights, fulfilling the demanding and exacting requirements of photography enthusiasts."

Japanese developer and publisher Capcom has publicized that the PC version of their anticipated Resident Evil 7 game will support up to 4K resolutions and HDR. Naturally HDR will remain dependent on being connected to a compatible TV or panel, whereas high resolution support could provide additional levels of image quality through the use of super sampling on screens that do not support such resolutions natively. It is said that HDR will complement the immersive experience, better enabling the game to deliver overwhelming fear and ultimate horror.

As previously revealed by Capcom, Resident Evil 7 will also support cross saves between the PC and Xbox One versions of the game, however this will only be possible if you purchase it for PC on the Windows Store. Resident Evil 7 is also available on Steam and this version will not support cross saving. Resident Evil 7 will be available for PC on the 25 January, 2017.

High-dynamic range or HDR is all the rage these days as the next big thing in display output, now that hardware has time to catch up with ever-increasing display resolutions such as 4K ultra HD, 5K, and the various ultra-wide formats. Hardware-accelerated HDR is getting a push from both AMD and NVIDIA in this round of GPUs. While games with HDR date back to Half Life 2, hardware-accelerated formats that minimize work for game developers, in which the hardware makes sense of an image and adjusts its output range, is new and requires substantial compute power. It also requires additional interface bandwidth between the GPU and the display, since GPUs sometimes rely on wider color palettes such as 10 bpc (1.07 billion colors) to generate HDR images. AMD Radeon GPUs are facing difficulties in this area.

German tech publication Heise.de discovered that AMD Radeon GPUs render HDR games (games that take advantage of new-generation hardware HDR, such as "Shadow Warrior 2") at a reduced color depth of 8 bits per cell (16.7 million colors), or 32-bit; if your display (eg: 4K HDR-ready TV) is connected over HDMI 2.0 and not DisplayPort 1.2 (and above). The desired 10 bits per cell (1.07 billion colors) palette is available only when your HDR display runs over DisplayPort. This could be a problem, since most HDR-ready displays these days are TVs. Heise.de observes that AMD GPUs reduce output sampling from the desired Full YCrBr 4: 4: 4 color scanning to 4: 2: 2 or 4: 2: 0 (color-sub-sampling / chroma sub-sampling), when the display is connected over HDMI 2.0. The publication also suspects that the limitation is prevalent on all AMD "Polaris" GPUs, including the ones that drive game consoles such as the PS4 Pro.

LG Electronics (LG) is introducing two new displays designed specifically to integrate seamlessly with the newest MacBook and MacBook Pro models. The new UltraFine 27-inch 5K display and its 21.5-inch 4K display from LG are ideal for creating an expanded work space in the home or office and the perfect complement for MacBook and MacBook Pro users who desire expansive, high-quality resolution at all times.

Designed and optimized for the new MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt 3 running macOS 10.12 and later, the stunning 27-inch UltraFine 5K display appeals to a range of creatives, including video and photography professionals. With a breathtaking resolution of 5120 x 2880 and 218 pixels per inch (ppi), the color reproduction capabilities of the UltraFine 5K display allow it to cover 99 percent of the P3 color space. What's more, the monitor's advanced IPS display technology minimizes color shift and color loss from any viewing angle, ensuring that users see the original content as it was meant to be seen.

Sony today announced an addition to its PlayStation family of entertainment systems, with the new PlayStation 4 Pro (PS4 Pro). The PS4 Pro isn't meant to succeed the PS4, and is still a "current generation" console, in that all of its games are compatible with the PS4, and there won't be PS4 Pro-exclusive games. What sets it apart is higher-resolution game rendering that looks best on 4K Ultra HD TVs. This doesn't necessarily mean that the games are being rendered at 3840 x 2160 pixels. They could be rendered at resolutions higher than 1080p, and using just the right upscaling algorithms, made to look significantly better than 1080p. Another key visual component is hardware HDR. The PS4 Pro falls in line with Sony's big push for 4K HDR TVs this holiday shopping season.

Under the hood, the PlayStation 4 Pro features an all new semi-custom SoC designed by Sony and AMD. The CPU component sticks to the "Jaguar/Puma" architecture, with 8 cores, but features higher CPU clock speeds. The 8 GB GDDR5 memory is said to run at higher clocks, too, and is bolstered by new lossless memory compression tech by AMD. The GPU component is where the action is. The GPU features over double the shading power of the PS4, and is based on the "Polaris" GPU architecture. The PS4 Pro also ships with a bigger 1 TB hard drive. There is seamless interplayability between PS4 and PS4 Pro. PS4 games you already own are being added with higher-resolution content meant for PS4 Pro. The console also has the muscle for PS-VR. For those still holding on to 1080p HDTVs, the PS4 Pro rewards with higher visual detail, more geometric complexity, and better effects, at that resolution. The PS4 Pro starts at $399.

Futuremark released the latest addition to the 3DMark benchmark suite, the new "Time Spy" benchmark and stress-test. All existing 3DMark Basic and Advanced users have limited access to "Time Spy," existing 3DMark Advanced users have the option of unlocking the full feature-set of "Time Spy" with an upgrade key that's priced at US $9.99. The price of 3DMark Advanced for new users has been revised from its existing $24.99 to $29.99, as new 3DMark Advanced purchases include the fully-unlocked "Time Spy." Futuremark announced limited-period offers that last up till 23rd July, in which the "Time Spy" upgrade key for existing 3DMark Advanced users can be had for $4.99, and the 3DMark Advanced Edition (minus "Time Spy") for $9.99.

Futuremark 3DMark "Time Spy" has been developed with inputs from AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, and Microsoft, and takes advantage of the new DirectX 12 API. For this reason, the test requires Windows 10. The test almost exponentially increases the 3D processing load over "Fire Strike," by leveraging the low-overhead API features of DirectX 12, to present a graphically intense 3D test-scene that can make any gaming/enthusiast PC of today break a sweat. It can also make use of several beyond-4K display resolutions.DOWNLOAD: 3DMark with TimeSpy v2.1.2852

Here some of the first pictures of an NVIDIA add-in card (AIC) partner branded SLI-HB (high-bandwidth) bridge. This kind of bridge is recommended for use with GeForce "Pascal" graphics cards, at high resolutions, such as 4K @ 60 Hz with HDR, 4K @ 120 Hz, 5K, and above. Pictured here is a 2-way SLI HB bridge with 2U spacing (1-slot gap between the two cards). The bridge appears to have a red LED of its own, lighting up the MSI Gaming dragon logo. At this point it's not clear whether the bridge comes included with the cards, or if it needs to be purchased separately. The cards being bridged in these pictures are the MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming Z, a notch above the GTX 1080 Gaming X the company debuted its custom GTX 1080 lineup with.

AOC, a global leader in display technology, is announcing its new gaming brand: "AGON". All future AOC gaming product releases will be under the AGON name. AGON will also encompass AOC's future gaming-related activities and social media voice. Some of AOC's existing gaming displays, previously grouped together with other products, will be rebranded under AGON.

The name AGON represents AOC's commitment to the PC gaming segment and the spirit of competitive gaming. AGON is an ancient Greek word (ἀγών), which refers to "a struggle or contest". The name is also intended to be an acrostic that represents AOC's vision for AGON.

Ahead of its launch, performance numbers of AMD Radeon Pro Duo were leaked to the web by Expreview. Pitted against the $620 GeForce GTX 980 Ti, the $1,499 dual-GPU monstrosity is about 32 percent faster at 1080p (which sees CPU saturation), and on average 59.4 percent faster at 4K Ultra HD. The card is noted to conjure up more than playable frame-rates for all the games Expreview tested at 4K. Frame-rates were as low as 46 fps, and as high as 61 fps, indicating that the Pro Duo is the go-to single-card solution for Ultra HD. Find the review in the link below.