With so many people looking for new gaming monitors for their PC upgrades this year, I’ve got some good news. If you’re an esports player, the 360Hz screens are coming. And, naturally, new 240Hz and 4K screens are coming too.
We’ll start with the new 360Hz panel first. Acer announced the 2020 refresh of the Acer Predator X25 overnight, becoming the second 360Hz monitor after Nvidia’s reveal of a 360Hz ASUS ROG Swift screen at CES earlier this year. We don’t know if Acer’s Predator X25 will be commercially available here first, since it doesn’t have a price or release date just yet. But last night’s conference did offer some more concrete details.
Apart from having G-SYNC hardware built in, Acer’s gaming monitor is a 1080p screen with -5 to -25 degree tilt, swivel of 30 degrees, height adjustability and the ability to pivot 90 degrees. (I can’t imagine anyone would buy a 360Hz screen to use it in portrait mode, but if that’s what you really want, hey, power to you.)
It’s basically a gaming monitor almost exclusively designed for games like Counter-Strike, Valorant, Apex Legends, and so on. I can’t imagine many of those games will actually run at a full 360 frames per second in most battles — you can get 400 fps on most decent gaming rigs in CS:GO if you’re in spawn, but in the middle of a firefight with molotovs, smoke grenades and gunfire, the frame rate drops a bit further below that.
Interestingly, the X25 will be an IPS screen with HDR 400 support — although at a maximum brightness of 400 nits, you might as well not bother with HDR at all. Still, there aren’t any other monitors on the market sporting a 0.5ms response time. But don’t expect the monitor to be cheap. The international price for the X25 is $US1100, so expect RTX 2080/2080 Ti-levels of investment when the X25 lands in Australia.
If you want something more well rounded, Acer also announced the XB3 series of gaming monitors: a 24.5-inch XB253Q GZ, two 27-inch screens in the XB273U GS and GX, and a 31.5-inch XB323QK NV. All the screens are G-SYNC compatible with support for 240Hz refresh rates and up to 4K resolution. That’s the sweet spot of resolution and refresh rate that a ton of gamers have been asking for, particularly those who are planning on a big PC upgrade before Cyberpunk 2077 launches. It’s not clear whether some of the new XB3 screens will support 4K and 240Hz resolution, and Acer’s presser from Taipei didn’t focus on the XB3 screens specifically. I’ve asked Acer Australia for more details, though.
There’s no word on when these screens will land, although Acer’s local PR team have told Kotaku Australia that the products are “expected” to be available in Australia and New Zealand. Going off previous years, that means we can usually expect to see them in late Q3/sometime in Q4 this year, which would be nice. Just saying: a 240Hz/4K screen would be a great combo with one of those new Ampere/Big Navi GPUs, if those ever come out.
Update 10:30am: Acer’s just provided a slide revealing details of the X25 and XB3 line, revealing two new 1440p/240Hz screens, a 1440p/165Hz model and the 32-inch 4K/144Hz screen:
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