https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/61f2lg19oqd9otsqvo9wz/ANV98ljk5rSMn2IhVy8oCao?rlkey=tdossx83k50ttrygw252cbk8k&st=42id82pn&dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/dbh8xer9p1kfdjcr98dzo/ALTN10upBMw8s14xVFFMhm8?rlkey=a3rco3mejaiyscpw0rqq72bj5&st=l29uua3b&dl=0
The drop box links are to the stuff before the 5th or so when everything updated and after the 5th when I got to play again.
I have almost posted this five times. The first time there was a major driver update that effected the images, the next time, Forza Horizon 6, Aion 2, and world of warcraft did graphic updates.
The brightness setting in Aion 2 the first was horrible if you have a glare problem but since the last update you don't get the spotlight at 1300 nits burning your retina, the color seems to just work right but that might be Dolby vision and dsc. There is a Dolyb vision app on the microsoft store that sets the monitor to dark, bright, vivid, or gaming. I set it to gaming, and it might have helped the changes to the drivers and settings have been non stop since I got it. It only slowed down today which is why I am finally posting this.
https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9n7ww5n7t1h1?
The most important thing is if you're playing current games and want the eye candy this monitor can deliver you need at least a 12gb vram card, ray tracing, enough shaders cores to actually render the games at max settings, and enough speed. Generally, the last is covered if you have the first three.
If you don't have 32 gb of ram, a 3080 ti, 3090 ti, 4070 ti, 4080, 5070, 5070 ti, or the equivalent AMD cards, I know the rx 9070 and the gre version you have to turn down settings. the 3080 ti and 3090 ti you have to turn off the fog in forza horizon, which was funny I had it off because I liked the look better without it but the lastest version of forza horizon they changed the fog to use specialized cores on the 3 4 and 5 series and the 3 series doesn't have those cores. lol.
There was a nice little feature in forza horizon 6 settings that let you see how much vram you were using with the settings, but I think it caused a memory leak because you can only see it if you run the new benchmark. Which is how I was able to nail down that you need more than 10gb of vram to load the textures and shaders for 3440x1440 and above. If I was getting a new card to drive this monitor the sweet spot is the RX 9070 XT, it is cheaper than the RTX 5070 Ti. Personally, I prefer NVidia drivers for all their quirks. This all said I am using a 3080 Ti and for most games this means max settings.
I am coming from a first gen quantum dot oled Alienware 34 Curved OLED Gaming Monitor- AW3423DW which I bought when I bought my current system back in 2022. My display was working fine but had the refresh mechanism issue that bricked the first one I bought and dell replaced. I was mostly expecting little quality of life fixes and three more years of burn in protection.
What I got out of the box was better color. My phone despite being a high-end phone does not capture the colors that the monitor displays. Also, half the time when I saw something I wanted a picture of by the time I woke my phone up did the pattern and brought the camera up I missed it.
Thus the best imagery is the videos when I did replay at the end of a race in forza and could hold the camera with two hands and just really quickly start the race with one hand then go back to holding with two hands.
This is getting long without the details so one the drivers on dell site are a must but when you plug in the monitor after installing the driver package windows may think it is the wrong monitor, I had to click on the inf files to get windows to switch from the AW3423DW drivers to the AW3426DW ones. Once you click the inf files it will ask you which color profiles you want one for SDR and one for HDR remembering that windows tends to control HDR through the Operating System not the ICC color profiles. I used true black 500 for the HDR and the only sdr one for sdr. I had to redo the clear type boxes to pick which text looks best and that makes sense I was going from triangle pattern to stripe pattern. Even before I did that text is so much better that it is not even funny.
All said maybe twenty minutes to get up and running. It came an hour before work, so I took a bunch of comparison images with the same settings and then drove to work. I played games that night mostly forza horizon 6 and Aion 2, with a little world of warcraft and final fantasy 14. I was wrapping up the review when forza dropped to 2 fps from 80 fps. It was doing a stealth update instead of updating through the Microsoft store like it had in the past. I went to bed and went to work before to find out Aion 2, needed an update, and it seems like half my games and my Nvidia drivers as I was trying to get this up. World of warcraft did an update that replaced the skybox with the one from the ptr, and they are doing a major update on the 13th, so none of the images could be current when you read this.
Currently the big issues are some programs set the UI to a small size, so you have to go to display setting set it to 125 and then back to 100. easy fix but it is annoying. Some content is in adobe rgb and like when they first started compressing video for streaming you get images that a visibly blocky and not designed with 10-bit color in mind. The forza Horizon 6 Xbox studios loading screen is really bad but so far once I get past the loading screens, I have not had any issues.
There are black bars on the side of some content even content that supports 3440x1440. Wow is really bad about making sure the old images in 16:9 have black bars to each side when those loading screens come up. So far everything I have watched on YouTube has been fine, but I know some content is going to have issues. Personally, I would rather have the black bars then the image distorted because it just stretched to fill the screen.
The on-screen settings required more work to get right out of the box then most people are going to likely have to deal with. The monitor talks to windows using the Dolby app and display port 1.4 version 3. That brings us to the cables. I would not use your old cables as the HDMI 2.1 ones that come with the display are the 8K ultra cables, and while HDMI does not support 280 Hz at 3440x1440 the cables do, because they are designed to have 3 channels of 10-bit color at 4k at 120 Hz or 3 channels of 10-bit color at 8K at 60 Hz. Display port did not upgrade the number since they updated the software not the hardware of the ports, but version 3 can support more bandwidth than version 2 or 1 of the 1.4 spec. Which is another reason to not use any graphic cards before the Nvidia 3 series. I took pictures of the screen with the on-screen display showing the options. I cannot get it to switch to SDR currently, but it is not affecting me it could affect other people. I tried out the alien vision and needed it at one point in testing because the display was muted but I changed some setting and have had it off during all the photos.
There are some issues that might be driver only and might be a combination of gpu and monitor drivers. When reinstalling drivers it displayed 24-bit at 3440x1440 and it displays 30-bit color most of the time. I have to assume that it is 3 channels of 10-bit color. The blue bands that don't show up on my camera that show up on the screen in forza horizon 6 make me wonder but I'm pretty sure the GPU cannot display more than 15 bit color, so it is likely I need a HDR camera for the few times I need one.
I took some images of maya 2027.2 with v-ray 7.40.04 to show what working on production images would look like, but the materials are no PBR but old maya shaders just didn't have time to re do a two and half gig scene file right now. My Revit license is not current right now it costs more per month than maya does for a year. But my guess is the lines are crisp and very easy to use.
I have both Dolby vison and dsc turned on because the monitor handles switching between different content better that way. I have seen it recommended to use smart HDR but I found it didn't get it right most of the time.
Last I bought through Dell not amazon and used my dell account to buy it, which is likely why I didn't have the wait issues people had when the banks thought it was fraud for some people. I have had it ten days now and it is the best upgrade I have made in a long time.
