Thoughts on 21:9 Ultra-Wide monitors?

I've been giving a lot of thought to getting a new monitor lately. It's not really that my old one is bad or anything but I have been considering getting something "bigger" and not necessarily "better." By that I mean that 1440p monitors aren't really a must for me, nor does the inherent limitation of 60hz on Ultra-wide models really irk me that much either.

As such I've been looking into these Ultra-wide monitors for various reasons. They seem overkill at first, but at the same time kind of intriguing. I do a lot of graphic design work and the idea of having a lot more real estate on the sides is certainly something I wouldn't mind. LG monitors offer a ton of virtual desktop options including picture in picture which is also really interesting for times when I want to do some work but still want Unprofessional Fridays playing to the side. I'm a little concerned about the gaming situation as I'm not exactly running a top-end graphical powerhouse, and I've read that logically since you're rendering more pixels the system demands are likewise increased. My Radeon 390x is fine for 1080 gaming (for most games anyway) but I'm already having to scale down some options in order to maintain a good framerate as it is.

Ultimately if I had to choose between looks or performance I think for gaming purposes I would probably drop down to a 16:9 resolution with black bars instead of running a beautiful 21:9 with worsened framerate. A small boon here is that some LG models also support Free-sync which is ATI's hardware driven V-sync tech that allows these Ultra-wides to run at up to 75hz which is nice.

So what say ye? Do any of you have an Ultra-wide monitor? Do you love it? Do you hate it? Anything I should know that you only learned through time and use?

Well i don't have one so take my comment with a grain of salt, but from what i always read it seems some games do end up with trouble at those resolutions at launch but usually eventually get patched. Now you will take more demand than 1080p, so yes you may have to lower more settings but there may be an option to run at 1080 maybe with the sides cut off? When you get up to 4k i believe that you actually end up using less pixels so you would maybe get a bit more performance if you ever decide to upgrade for that in the future. However I would put your design work ahead of your gaming and just sacrifice a few settings for 60fps as most games look fine even on medium/high settings these days.

I don't have one (yet), but I just want to say I stand with you in aspiring towards one. Dell has an ultra-wide Ultrasharp at 1440, and I covet it more than most things.

One thing I know can be an issue is games stretching if they don't have support for that aspect ratio, but I believe third-party utilities can at least force those to pillarbox instead.

[Edit:] I just happened to have this open in another tab, if you haven't already visited there.

16:9 seems to be the ratio supported by pretty much everything, some movies go wider so you end up with black bars but pretty much all internet videos are 16:9, it's the standard ratio for video games and quite a few ports from consoles do not support ultra wide resolutions.
I'd say if you spread your gaming across multiple genres and like to try everything stick with 16:9, especially if you watch a lot of videos because i don't know about you but black bars drive me crazy, if you play only the biggest hardcore PC games like Battlefield, Bethesda RPG's etc... then it could be for you.
As for multi-tasking, my main monitor is diagonal to a brick wall which i recently attached a small 18" monitor to so now i can watch long gb vids or twitch streams while playing games :D, it's a revelation for me, i don't know how easy that would be to do on 1 ultra wide monitor, but modern Windows makes it so easy to handle on 2.

Jeff's got one, hasn't he? I think I remember him saying that it cuts down on the number of monitors he needs to run, such is the real estate offered by one screen.

I've been thinking along the same lines recently. I've got a top-of-the-line (a few years ago) BenQ 1080p/144hz monitor and have been looking at sub 4k, higher than 1080p screens, which has led me down the ultrawide path.

Something like this:

The only reason I've not bought one is the 60hz-ness of it, although I'm now thinking that I can easily keep the 144hz monitor close by if I feel I need the extra frames.

I don't know where you've got this misconception from, but there are several >60Hz UltraWide monitors available. Admittedly they do end up in the "crazy money" price category, but the monitor I'm really tempted by right now is the Acer Predator X34.

It combines UltraWide 1440p with GSync and an overclock of 100Hz to pretty much tick all the boxes of what I could ever want from a monitor... The only problem is it costs £900. Also I'm kind of at a loss as to what I would do with my current monitors if I got it. I don't think I could ever go back to only having 1 monitor, because I'm so used to having 2 at this point. And keeping two 24" 1080p monitors on either side of an UltraWide beast seems completely infeasible too (both in terms of desk space and what my GPU could handle). I think in an ideal world two 34" UltraWide monitors would be pretty much the perfect set up :/

I always assumed the 21:9 ration was more useful in the office environment so that you could have several 81/2x11" documents open at once on your screen.

If you want spend money on a wider field of view save your money for the next generation of VR. JMO

I have just got one after my old regular 24" one broke for silly reasons.

And I must say that indeed running witcher 3 at the full res does take quite the bigger hit than 1080, had to bring a lot of stuff down to stay at 60 with a 980... So that made me regret it a lil bit.. You end up seeying a whole lot more of the game than you would otherwise though, which is cool, and of course you can always drop back to 1080 and deal with the ugly black bars.

But the extra screen space is great for working purposes, no arguing that, I think I'll just send my old one for repairs and eventually end up going back at using that for gaming purposes though.

@bollard: I mean I wouldn't really call it a misconception when those above 60hz Ultrawides are more of an exception rather than the rule. I indeed have seen a few that offer crazy tech specs but they are, as you mentioned, incredibly expensive.

Lots of good points in this thread that have me kind of wavering more than ever. I suppose at the end of the day it looks like a cool "gimmick" and I am susceptible to cool tech gimmicks. @onarum I could always do what you pointed out and keep my current 21.5" for gaming while I use the nice 34" Ultrawide for when I'm making graphics or simply watching movies etc.

You can't spell "a fucking fantastic idea" without "completely infeasible."

Well, you can, but that's no fun. Slapping two more 24" monitors alongside an Ultrawide sounds exactly like a completely infeasible idea that I'd work to solve. Who cares if it's entirely unnecessary and impractical when you are starting to talk about "huge tracts of land" levels of screen real estate.

I have one. Very good for home office work. Replaces two monitors. Some games with a wider field of view are nice too.

Hahaha, you raise a good point. I'd need a desk the length of a truck and I reckon you'd get whiplash swinging around on your chair to see everything but it's probably worth it.

Why not stack them above the Ultrawide?

Plausible but I would need some fancy bracket. And I don't think the stands come off my current monitors nicely anyway, so it probably can't be wall/bracket mounted.

Just do it.

Also Acer didn't sue that YouTube channel for using "evar" along with the name of their company and product so I dunno... Can you really trust Acer anymore?

21:9 aspect ratio is good for working as well as playing games offline or online. Most of the Ultrawide monitors support 21:9 aspect ratio. So, Ultrawide monitors are better option for playing games and office work.

21:9 is great for racing games as well. A friend of mine has one and it's pretty awesome. The free sync stuff is nice too. I would say go for it.

I've kind of eased off on the idea of getting one of these. I was in the moment at the time and kind of regret not pulling the trigger then when I was riding a euphoric wave of "you only live once!" Now I dunno, I would still probably get one but I'm no longer that gung-ho about it and it seems that most people don't own them either judging by the responses to this thread.

They are awesome, but hard to justify. A 144hz 1440p ultrawide is nearly $1500 with take an all, pretty much double what a non-ultrawide option would cost despite only being about 30-40% more screen space. There aren't a lot of options that are that much better than 16:9 without being FAR more expensive. I'm hoping they become more popular and prices become more reasonable, especially for 144hz. I moved to triple monitor a while back and I'm finding that I rarely use the screens to their full extent, and would much rather game at 21:9 than whatever the hell this is now, even though it is awesome. Even with my 980ti framerates can struggle. By the time the monitor of my dreams is more accessible or I just have enough money saved up, I'll have a 1080ti to push it to boot.

How else would you play Darius? In regular widescreen?

I mean come on...

As someone who still has a hard time justifying an upgrade to 1440p monitors (not willing to pay the premium for the monitors AND have to push more power to get the max resolution), they seem absolutely insane for anything gaming-related. Might be kinda neat for movies and such.

I'm not sure how it is with games supporting ultra widescreen. I would imagine that many don't. 1920x1080 is a nice resolution because it is so standard that everything works on it.

For desktop extension and productivity work, I much prefer two 16:10 monitors over a single 21:9.

For gaming the ultrawide makes more sense. Maybe when the prices come down a bit aspect ratio support has solidified a bit I'll consider it, but right now I don't at all mind running two monitors.

I feel like getting your PC beefed up first in order to power games at a higher resolution for those kinds of monitors before getting said monitors would be a better idea. That money could go to a whole new PC CPU/GPU wise which will speed up your work and gaming.

4k monitors have been quickly pushing down the price of 1440p monitors over the past year. You'll still pay a premium for wide monitors and/or higher refresh rate screens at that resolution but the 16:9, 60 hz ones are becoming more reasonable.

Great products, I bought two, one for the office at home and one for work. If you doing graphic design any one of these are perfect, just make sure your surrounding area and seating is right, otherwise you could suffer RSI to your neck.

I really wish the industry would add a bit more verticality to PC monitors again. The 21:9s are cool but their great width just accentuates how little vertical space these monitors have.

If only 16:10 or some other, more vertical aspect ratio had come out on top in the aspect ratio war of the late 2000s...

I have one, it's awesome when games support it. The only reason I got it was because it was on sale though, the regular prices are too high. I also have a 16:10 monitor that is taller so for 16:9 stuff I use that. WSGF.org will usually tell you if a game supports ultrawide.

I think I'd go for a 1440p monitor instead of a 21:9, honestly.

Having access to a lot of monitors through my job, I've gamed on a 21:9 (1080 vertical) and while it was really nice and immersive (especially in in Elite: Dangerous) there are a few reason's I switched to a 144hz gsync monitor:

• a lot of games don't support 21:9, and a lot more support it poorly. stuff like stretched UI elements, radar, etc. really bugs me
• while 21:9 is more immersive, i dont really notice a huge difference going back to 16:9. i dont feel "constrained"
• I have been WAY happier with gsync and a higher refresh than I ever was with 21:9. with gsync i have kind of forgotten about tweaking settings to maintain 60fps. just crank everything and even if a game wavers in the 50-70 range, you just cant tell

I mean, if you have the budget, yeah, buy the 21:9 curved with gsync, get the best of all possible worlds. But if you can only afford either, higher refresh and gsync was the better option for me

That said, I DO use the 21:9 monitor at work where I don't play any games. I dont really like multi monitor setups, and its badass for productivity.

I'm happy with my 16:9 monitor, you would literally have to upgrade to a GTX 1070 or 1080 if you want smooth framerate on a 21:9 monitor, plus the majority of content, be it TV, Movies, or Video Games are in 16:9.

It'll take a couple of years until everything is 21:9, and not just video games, but videos as well.

@ajamafalous a 3440 x 1440 monitor would be both.

I use a 21:9 at work, so I don't use it for gaming (except for l4d2 one time). But I love it. I think this is the one I have.

I've had a 21:9 monitor for over a year or so now and considering moving back to traditional 16:9. There are three major differences once you make the transition, if any appeal to you then I would say go for it.

Productivity

Pros: If you produce/edit multimedia, having a ultra-wide monitor is great. It's perfect for leveraging the wide screen because most multimedia editors work horizontally. Sure you can go for a 2 (or more) monitor setup but you'll have the monitor bezels in the way that will be annoying to deal with.

Cons: I'm a programmer and I mainly code on my computer. Unfortunately coding works more vertically instead of horizontally so I never really get to use the whole screen effectively. I usually split the windows so I can have Chrome or something else on the side, but I find it a weaker option as compared to a duo monitor layout which I use at work.

Movies

Pros: Do you hate it when you watch a movie on your computer and see those black bars on the top and bottom? If so an ultra-wide monitor is perfect for you. There are no visible black bars, the movie takes up the entire screen, you get to watch the movie in all its' intended 21:9 resolution glory.

Cons: Note that I specified movie. Almost all other non-movie videos are recorded in 16:9 including videos on GB. The only non-movie content that I watched in 21:9 are movie trailers and videos that demo ultra-wide use.

Gaming

Pros: Course I'm saving the best for last, after all it has never been a better time to be playing video games. The 21:9 resolution is supported in mostly every AAA game published in the last ~3 years (a notable exception is Life is Strange). If there isn't an ultra-wide setting, there is most likely a registry hack to make a AAA game in ultra-wide like Skyrim. The most obvious pro is you see more with a 21:9 resolution vs a 16:9 resolution. Racing games, space games, any non-competitive game with a first person view or a top down RTS view is great.

Cons: If you like playing more indie games or older games (< 2013) you'll be in for a rude awakening. Very few of these games support the 21:9 resolution and there are no viable registry hacks for the thousands of titles out there. Most games will shrink down to 16:9 resolution and fill in black bars on the left and right of the screen effectively making the ultra-wide monitor into a regular widescreen monitor. I've had some games like Steins;Gate stretch itself to 21:9, completely ruining the beautiful artwork in the game. I manually had to change the monitor resolution back to regular widescreen to play the game full screen which absolutely sucks.

If you want to get a competitive edge on your opponents, ultra-wide is not the way to go. Games like CS:GO and Overwatch don't have the ultra-wide option and/or limit your fov. It makes sense, since it would be literally unfair if you can see that Reaper in the corner that other people couldn't. You will never be able to "see more" than what everyone else is seeing. I would suggest investing in a 16:9 144hz panel instead. Don't waste your money buying a crazy expensive ultra-wide 144hz monitor if you're going to play competitive games competitively.

Also even if you don't play games competitively, expect to face the quirks of adopting a new resolution. The GUI rarely optimize for screen space, expect to have the GUI elements spread too far out or too far in (it's rare to find a game where you can change these elements, props to the developer of Dust: An Elysian Tail). Visual glitches because QA never bothered to test in ultra-wide. FMV/cut scenes rendered in 16:9 but not in 21:9. Basically the same problems people had when they adopted 16:9 very early when 4:3 was still popular.

Anyway the best advice I can say is that if you want to buy an ultra-wide monitor for gaming, do the research first! Find out what games you like playing and if they support ultra-wide with all the features you want. For productivity, consider whether having two (or more) monitors is better for work. For movies, you're golden if you have a Netflix/Hulu/Amazon Prime, etc account and you watch a ton of movies.

I've had my AOC 34" for almost 2 years now and love it. Sometimes it does take a bit of playing around to get a game or movie to look how you want it, which can be annoying. The support for 21:9 is a lot better now that what is was back then, most AAA games it's fine.

My brother has a 27" G-Sync monitor and I would easily choose the 21:9 over it any day (maybe if I played more competitive games...). It's definitely very smooth and there's no screen tearing, but it just feels small and constrained, it's hard to use after the immersiveness of the 21:9.

The only other thing I'd note is that you have to pay for it, now and down the road. To run the latest AAA games you'll need to upgrade your graphics card regularly. My 980 is great, but I doubt I'll skip the 1080 TI.

Every Blu-ray video I've ever watched was in 16:9, with letterboxes for films with wider or narrower aspect ratios. I'm wondering how this is normally remedied on ultra wide displays. Do you have to go into the software and zoom in manually every time you watch a film wider than 16:9, and then reset it when you're done? I think it's a shame they didn't just make Blu-rays completely anamorphic, meaning in the films' original aspect ratios, with no letterboxes at all. They could have used all 2 million pixels with whatever aspect ratio they wanted.

It's handled the same way it is when viewing 4:3 on a 16:9 monitor - black bars on either side. You don't need to do anything with software.

If you go anamorphic you end up with really terrible image distortion. I have no idea why you'd want that.

Maybe I didn't explain it well enough. If the film has black bars on the top and bottom, it can't use the width of your monitor. I made a quick example. Non-anamorphic widescreen/panoramic DVDs look terrible on widescreens because of this. They sometimes use only about 240 vertical lines of pixels. Blu-rays are also wasting a ton of pixels.

Distortion? I haven't noticed anything like that viewing lower res videos on my QHD monitor, or properly cropped movies on my previous monitors.

They don't look terrible, they just don't use the full area of the monitor. In order to (for example) force a 4:3 image to use the entirety of a 16:9 monitor, you have to either zoom in on the image (and thus lose parts of it) or stretch it out horizontally. In my opinion, a stretched image looks awful and unnatural. I'd much rather have the bars.

You can find it better explained (with pictures) here and here.

Oh, that's what you mean by image distortion. Stretching is terrible. Anamorphic DVDs weren't stretched, though. At least none that I've watched. Instead of 640x480, you might have had 720x480. I have no problem with black bars when they're my monitor. I think movies should be completely cropped of the black bars. The only reason I can think of that they're not is because maybe some Blu-ray players and displays have terrible scalers.

I get that you would rather have the black bars, but my point is that without those black bars the picture would fill your ultra wide screen up more without distorting it or cutting off part of it.

How? There's no way to completely fill a 16:9 screen with a 4:3 image without zooming, stretching, or pan & scan trickery. The same can be said for fitting a modern movie widescreen image (2.39:1) on a 16:9 monitor/TV.

Cropping is definitely a no-no for me. I want to see the full original image, even if that means it won't use my entire screen.

I'm not talking about a 16:9 monitor, I'm talking about a 21:9 monitor; and I'm not advocating cropping movies, I'm advocating cropping pointless black bars. I hate the kind of cropping you're thinking about. Films should never be cropped. Look at the image again. The white boxes on the sides (the monitor) would be filled up more without the pointless black bars inside the video. The wasted black pixels in the video could be used to enhance the picture.

I'm saying that you will have black bars on all sides. Below is a panoramic film (2.39:1) with a 16:9 video source in a 2560x1080 (ultra wide) box. It's garbage. The Blu-ray companies only care about 16:9 displays.

Well, yes. There was no incentive to crank out 21:9-aware Blu-rays in a world where no one had anything but 16:9 TVs. Once we start seeing a decent percentage of 21:9 4K TVs on the market, that will change.

But what incentive was there to crank out movies with black bars? How come my computer can properly scale videos with any aspect ratio and resolution but Blu-rays need to be 16:9? They should have left it to the player. Can you imagine how detailed 1.33:1 films would be on higher res displays if they had filled the picture between the two black bars with all 2 million pixels that Blu-ray is capable of? It was a waste.

Edit: I don't know why I'm speaking in the past tense. They're still doing it, and it's unfortunate.

Here's where I'm getting hung on on what you're saying... resolution scaling is a thing. Aspect ratio scaling is not. The only way to "scale" aspect ratio is to distort or crop the image as we've discussed. Let's use 16:10 as an example. I know, I know... we're talking about 21:9, but the principle is the same.

Say I have a standard 1920x1080 16:9 Blu-ray of a 16:9 source. If I play that on a 16:9 monitor, I see no black bars. However, if I play it on a 16:10 monitor at the proper 1920x1080 16:9, I see bars. The bars are not on the Blu-ray, they result from the proper ratio simply not being able to fill my screen. Now, I could force it to "scale" to 16:10, but that would result in a vertical stretch of the image.

So, what about 1.33:1 films? 1.33:1 = 4:3. You simply cannot make that image fill a 16:9 (or 21:9) display at the source aspect ratio. You might be able to do a digital transfer at well above 1920x1080 (the resolution equivalent of 35mm film is pretty high), but that has nothing to do with aspect ratio. Where is the stuff you're replacing the black bars with coming from? It's simply not in the source image. One day they'll probably do a 4K transfer of old 1.33:1 movies, but they'll still be 4:3 and they'll still have big bars on wide and ultra-wide displays.
I think you're saying that they should have been producing Blu-ray transfers at the maximum possible resolution all along? Considering Blu-rays were always intended for TVs and no one had TVs capable of anything more than 1080p until quite recently, I don't get why you think that makes any sense. And, again... resolution is not aspect ratio.

I'm not talking about stretching. What I mean to say is that my setup doesn't need any worthless black bars to figure out that the picture should be in the center of the screen and that it should touch the top and bottom or left and right (depending on the aspect ratio of the video) edges of the screen. I don't get the point of black bars. Like I said, I have no problem with my properly cropped video not being able to fill my whole screen if that's how the film was shot. I don't think it's the Blu-ray distributors' place to assume what kind of a screen the user has, since all aspect ratios are arbitrary and standards change. All they should be doing is making a faithful transfer. They've now repeated the same problem that non-anamorphic widescreen DVDs have on widescreen monitors. For what?

What is stopping them from releasing regular Blu-rays with more vertical lines to compensate for the wasted horizontal lines or more horizontal lines to compensate for the wasted vertical lines or both, now that higher res TVs are a thing? Why do higher resolutions have to be exclusive to 4K discs if the movies aren't even using the full resolutions of regular Blu-rays?

I'm more bothered about the first point, though. Higher resolutions could have been a nice bonus, but it's not the potentially big problem that my screenshot illustrates.

@yyninja: Thanks for the in-depth answer that was very helpful! I think I'll continue holding off. I would love the extra space for work, but these days I do so much graphic design at work that I kind of avoid even thinking about firing up Photoshop at home. My PC is definitely not up to snuff to make use of those higher resolutions and news about indie games running all weird is also disheartening as I enjoy a good Gunpoint of Hotline Miami once in a while. Maybe when they significantly drop in price I'll get one as an additional monitor to have on the side and probably get a high end 16:9 as my "main chicken" for gaming. I hear those Asus predators are pretty good from our very own Matt Rorie! (They're also hecka expensive)

Why is that guy even getting slide tackled if the red guy is going for a header?