While the ViewSonic ELITE XG240R has several obvious strengths, the main attraction of this monitor is its gaming performance. With sharp-moving visuals and low, eSports-grade input lag, completely unperceivable even to hardcore gamers, it does a good job at what it is primarily made for. It supports AMD FreeSync, but pairs perfectly well with NVIDIA cards, too, as long as they're from the GTX 1000 or RTX 2000 series. As you surely know, NVIDIA recently added FreeSync monitor support for those cards, which means they'll detect the ViewSonic ELITE XG240R as a regular G-Sync monitor. It doesn't carry the official "G-SYNC Compatible" badge, which shouldn't worry you—after testing it with a GTX 1080/1080 Ti and a Radeon RX 580 for over two weeks, I can confirm that there's no noticeable difference in terms of adaptive sync behavior and performance.

Even though picture quality isn't spectacular, which is the case with any TN panel on the market, a bit of fiddling with the OSD settings goes a long way towards making the colors, white balance, tonal transitions, and other aspects of the picture look decent. The out-of-the-box picture quality is completely underwhelming for even a TN panel, so a proper adjustment of the OSD settings is something you absolutely should do after purchasing this monitor. Please refer to the picture quality section of this review for more details and exact numbers.

Like its predecessor, the XG240R sports a fully adjustable stand, which allows us to swivel it and adjust the screen in height and tilt, and even pivot it to portrait mode should we want to use it as a secondary screen. This is a feature the lowest-tier (cheapest) gaming monitors on the market don't offer. Why such freedom of movement is necessary may not be obvious at first. However, as soon as you're faced with the narrow viewing angles on a TN panel, you'll be very happy you invested in a monitor with an adjustable stand as it will allow you to position the monitor in a way that has you directly looking at the center of the screen regardless of your preferred sitting position. This will in turn greatly diminish most if not all issues caused by such narrow viewing angles.

The built-in RGB lighting system didn't strike me as very useful because the brightness of the two V-shaped LED strips is too low for them to properly light up the wall behind the monitor. Even though it seems gimmicky, it doesn't feel like it was an afterthought because ViewSonic went out of their way to integrate their LED strips with other popular RGB ecosystems on the market, such as the Thermaltake's TT RGB PLUS and Razer's Chroma. Meaning, if you own their respective RGB peripherals, you'll be able to adjust and synchronize their colors and effects with the LED strips on this monitor. For RGB enthusiasts, this could be an interesting feature to play around with.

There are two noteworthy issues with the ViewSonic XG240R—the OSD controls are frustrating and extremely unpleasant to use, and my sample had noticeable backlight bleed. The latter bothered me when I used it for darker content, be in movies with black bars or gloomier games. With that said, the ViewSonic XG240R is an interesting addition to the constantly growing sub-$300 gaming monitor market. It will be even more interesting when it stops being "new" and starts showing up with various discounts or promos that will push its price closer to the $200 mark.