Acer has revealed what might be the perfect gaming monitor – as long as you don’t like ultrawides, that is. The Predator X27 is Acer’s take on Nvidia’s prototype HDR monitor design first unveiled at CES 2017, featuring a 27-inch 16:9 panel, 4K UHD resolution, HDR, wide color gamut, local dimming backlighting and a super-fast 144Hz refresh rate. And yes, it supports G-Sync for super-smooth gaming with variable refresh rate.
Digging further into the specs reveals some serious high-end tech. The X27 is based on an AU Optronics M270QAN02.2 AHVA panel with “quantum dot” technology. That’s the same quantum dot technology Samsung uses in its best 4K televisions, promising deeper blacks and better colors. Indeed, the X27 supports both HDR10 and 96 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut. It also features a brightness of 1,000 nits and a response time of 4 ms in addition to the refresh rate of 144 Hz.
The direct LED backlighting system – used with great success in Sony’s 4K TVs – contains 384 zones, allowing parts of the screen to be completely turned off for better black levels. Meanwhile, viewing angles are touted as an impressive 178 degrees by 178 degrees, and there’s built-in Tobii eye-tracking hardware.
Like the prototype monitor Asus unveiled at CES 2017, the X27 needs some serious bandwidth and graphics to power it. It requires at least a 10-series Nvidia graphics card with a DisplayPort 1.4 connector.
However, that alone still isn’t enough bandwidth for 144Hz 4K and HDR, as the X27 uses 4:2:2 chroma subsampling to compress the image when using the full 144Hz refresh rate. The X27 also features an HDMI 2.0 port, but it’s limited to 4K at 60Hz.
There’s no price or release date for the X27 at the moment (they’re coming “soon” apparently, but I’m guessing this is one of those “if you have to ask…” situations.