Controls and OSD

The AOC U28G2XU2 uses an archaic and unintuitive control scheme with four buttons (five, if you count the power button) stacked horizontally. Their functions are engraved in the monitor's frame. The first three buttons also have a quick action assigned to them. They are, from left to right, input selection, Game Mode selection (a collection of gaming-oriented picture profiles, which are best left alone), and a virtual crosshair toggle. The virtual crosshair is a fat, red plus sign; there are no other designs or colors available. Assigning it to a dedicated button is nice, as toggling it on and off is very quick. The buttons themselves are narrow and very rigid, to a point where they'll hurt your fingers if used for more than a minute. Navigating through the OSD and adjusting the options feels clunky; a more common four-way joystick would go a long way in improving the overall experience. The entire interface also looks ancient, and is not organized all that well, with some options found in places where you wouldn't look for them at all.


The Luminance menu is where you can adjust the contrast, brightness, gamma (the options are Gamma1, Gamma2, and Gamma3, with no exact assigned numbers), dynamic contrast, HDR and Eco Mode. The Eco Mode basically limits the brightness range of the monitor. Keep it at Standard.


The Color Setup menu is where you'll adjust the color temperature. There are several presets available (Warm, Normal, Cool, sRGB), and you can set it to User to get access to individual RGB color channel gain.


The Picture Boost menu is where you can activate the Bright Frame feature. It creates a rectangle in which you can adjust custom brightness and contrast settings. This is something I found no use for at all, but perhaps you'll think of a scenario where it can be beneficial.


The OSD Setup menu has various OSD-related settings (position, transparency, timeout), as well as, bizarrely, the volume slider and HDMI 2.1 input refresh rate limiter(s).


In the PIP Setting menu, you can activate Picture-in-Picture and Picture-by-Picture modes, assuming you want to show pictures from two connected devices simultaneously. The panel itself isn't large enough to make good use of PiP or PbP modes, but the option is there.


The most important options in the Game Setting menu are Overdrive and AMD FreeSync. This is where you'll directly influence the pixel response time of the panel, as well as turn the adaptive synchronization technology on or off. The MBR slider, when set to 1 and above (up to 20), activates backlight strobing for extra motion blur removal but brings a reduction of actual picture brightness. More on that in the gaming performance section of this review. The Low Input Lag toggle is a strange one. It drastically reduces input lag and has no visible drawbacks. Why is it even an option? The Shadow Control option lets you adjust the black level in order to make shadow content brighter (for easier target acquisition, at the expense of picture quality). The Game Color slider is basically a saturation slider (leave it at 10). For some reason, this menu is where AOC also put the blue light filter.


The Extra menu contains the remaining options, such as general info (current resolution, refresh rate, and SDR/HDR status), off timer, and a factory reset toggle.