Gaming Performance

The Gigabyte GS34WQC sports a 120 Hz refresh rate VA panel, which supports the adaptive synchronization technology from both AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards. The refresh rate can be "overclocked" to 135 Hz by going to the OSD and selecting Settings > Display > Overclock > ON. The OSD shows a warning about possible side effects of pushing the panel to 135 Hz, but I didn't have any issues when using my sample of the monitor at that refresh rate. The difference between 135 and a more common 144 Hz refresh rate is negligible; I didn't feel any practical difference when gaming, compared to my main 144 Hz monitor.

The adaptive synchronization range is 48–135 Hz, so that's the framerate range your PC should be able to achieve at 3440x1440 resolution to experience buttery smooth, screen-tear-free gameplay. The monitor offers AMD FreeSync Premium support, which means it supports the Low Framerate Compensation (LFC) technology. If the game runs at fewer frames per second than the bottom limit of the FreeSync operating range (48 FPS in this case), the LFC technology displays frames multiple times to stay above the lower limit of FreeSync and maintain the full fluidity of the action. Of course, this "multiplication of frames" is completely invisible to the human eye. Thanks to this approach, the bottom limit of the required number of frames per second become irrelevant and should not be thought about. Of course, for the best possible gaming experience, a high framerate remains something you should strive for.

Response Time and Overdrive

The response time of the Gigabyte GS34WQC is specified as 1 ms MPRT. The MPRT mode can be activated in the OSD, where it's called Aim Stabilizer. If you're using adaptive synchronization, the Aim Stabilizer toggle will be greyed out.

The panel uses overdrive technology to make the pixel transitions faster, and you will find the option under Gaming > Overdrive in the OSD. Overdrive has only two settings: ON and OFF.

I tested the response time with the Open Source Response Time Tool Pro (OSRTT Pro), developed by Andrew McDonald of TechTeamGB. It's a nifty tool that, combined with the OSRTT Launcher app, measures panel response times and presents them through detailed graphs and easy-to-read heatmaps. You can find everything you might want to know about the OSRTT in its technical documentation and on the official website, where you can order your unit, too. The OSRTT Launcher gives us three interesting heat maps to observe.

Perceived Response Time tells us how much time the panel took to transition from one color to another. This measurement is expressed in milliseconds and includes overshoot. In other words, if the panel exceeded the target value, the perceived response time also includes the time it took for the transition to recover from overshoot and stabilize on the target value. I'm running my tests with recommended settings, so with a fixed RGB 5 tolerance level and with gamma-corrected RGB values.

RGB Overshoot tells us how much a specific transition missed the target value. For example, if the panel was transitioning from RGB 51 to RGB 204, and it initially landed on RGB 212, the overshoot RGB value is 8. Overshoot can be both positive and negative, and it commonly occurs at extreme overdrive settings when pixels are driven by high voltage. In practice, an overshoot manifests as an afterimage or a halo around a moving object. It can be easily spotted even when doing something as basic as scrolling through a webpage.

Visual Response Rating is the most abstract heatmap generated by the OSRTT Launcher; in essence, it's an ever-evolving scoring system. To quote OSRTT's technical documentation, it is a finite score rather than a direct measurement. The calculation is pretty simple; it's: "100 – (Initial Response Time + Perceived Response Time)." Since both metrics use the same tolerance level, if a display doesn't overshoot, both times will be identical. This essentially rewards displays that are fast with a small amount of overshoot over displays that aren't as fast even if they don't overshoot at all – while still overall preferring ultra-fast, accurate monitors.

Here's how the Gigabyte GS34WQC fares in the pixel response time test.




The average perceived pixel response time with overdrive off is 11.16 milliseconds, and when overdrive is activated, it drops to 9.38 milliseconds, but with the appearance of overshoot. Fortunately, the overshoot seems to be visible only to the OSRTT Tool Pro; I wasn't able to spot it with the naked eye even in fast-paced games. Overall, the pixel response time of the Gigabyte GS34WQC certainly isn't spectacular, and slight ghosting can be observed in certain situations (when scrolling black text on a white background, for example), but not so much that it constantly distracts from the action and spoils the gaming experience. Moreover, if I didn't have exact numbers to go by, but judged by what I see, I'd assume that the response time is about half of what was measured.

Moving Picture Response Time (MPRT)

In the OSD is the MPRT toggle, hidden under the Aim Stabilizer name. If you turn it on, the backlight will start strobing to achieve a "1 millisecond-like" response time at the expense of picture brightness and other strobing-related issues, such as flickering and strobe crosstalk. The "1 ms MPRT" response time is not to be confused with 0.5 ms GtG response time, as the commonly used GtG value tells us how much time it takes for a pixel to change between two colors, while MPRT, also known as display persistence, represents how long a pixel is continuously visible. It's important to know that MPRT isn't a blur reduction technology, but a measurement that can be lowered by backlight strobing.

The MPRT on the Gigabyte GS34WQC is implemented well, in the sense that it does manage to increase the sharpness of moving objects, without the appearance of artifacts, such as a double image. However, it limits the brightness of the display to a meager 127 cd/m². That makes it truly usable only during nighttime, when such brightness can be sufficient. The activation and deactivation of the MPRT can be assigned to the four-way joystick, which greatly increases its usability.

Input Lag

To measure the input lag of a monitor, I switched from using the LDAT V2 (Latency Display Analysis Tool), which I've covered extensively in my NVIDIA Reflex review, to the OSRTT Pro Tool. The OSRTT Pro Tool and the accompanying software include a DirectX code developed by Andrew McDonald of TechTeamGB, which allows the OSRTT Launcher to track the events and capture the frame time, making it possible to isolate the monitor latency from other factors that come into play when using the click-to-photon testing methodology, namely the USB polling rate and game render time. For a deeper insight, I suggest you watch an excellent overview video made by Andy himself.

While I used a consistent methodology in all my previous LDAT-based monitor reviews and kept everything the same, switching to the OSRTT-based approach isolates me from potential issues, such as game engine updates (I based my tests on Overwatch, which transformed into Overwatch 2), and allows me to move on to a different testing system at will. I have to admit it was becoming increasingly annoying having to keep my old Core i9-9900K/RTX 2080 SUPER test system around for nothing but monitor input lag testing. Thanks to Andy for his tireless work on the OSRTT Tool and the OSRTT Launcher software!

Here's how the Gigabyte GS34WQC holds up in terms of input lag after doing 100 iterations of the input lag test.



The Gigabyte GS34WQC shows an average input lag of around 3.6 milliseconds, which is an excellent result for a gaming monitor. Such low input lag can't be picked up even by the most hardcore gamers.