AOC AGON Pro Porsche Design PD49

Introduction

For those who want a large format screen for multi-tasking, split screen working and for playing games with a very wide field of view, there’s nothing quite like a 49″ super ultrawide monitor. We have with us now the new AOC AGON Pro PD49, a 49″ super-ultrawide from their ‘Porsche Design’ series, offering an impressive spec and a unique design which won both iF Design and Red Dot design awards. As the name suggests the screen is “inspired by the exclusive Porsche 911 Edition, whose design elements are reminiscent of the legendary Porsche 911 S 2.4 Targa from its founding year in 1972. This historic masterpiece, faithfully restored by Porsche Classic, serves as timeless inspiration for the monitor’s elegant and high-quality design.” If you have an interest in system aesthetics as well as performance, this could be an interesting option to consider.

The PG49 is built around a Samsung Display QD-OLED panel, offering a fairly subtle and comfortable 1800R curvature, 5120 x 1440 resolution and 240Hz refresh rate. That puts it at the top end of this 49″ OLED segment in terms of refresh rate, with some competing models using a lower 144Hz refresh rate panel. There’s a range of modern features on offer including HDMI 2.1 and USB type-C connectivity, as well as a KVM switch function, PiP/PbP support, an RJ45 Ethernet connection and some pretty decent 2x 8W DTS sound integrated speakers. Let’s see if the performance can match its high-end design and spec.

Where to Buy

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Key Specs

• 49″ super ultrawide format with 32:9 aspect ratio, curved 1800R
• Second gen Samsung Display QD-OLED technology panel
• Standard QD-OLED semi-glossy screen coating
• 5120 x 1440 resolution
• 240Hz refresh rate, 0.03ms G2G response time spec
• Adaptive-sync for VRR, including AMD ‘FreeSync Premium Pro’ certification
• VESA DisplayHDR 400 True Black certified, with 1000 nits peak brightness (HDR)
• 1x DisplayPort 1.4 (with DSC), 2x HDMI 2.1 and 1x USB type-C (with DP Alt mode and 90W power delivery)
• 4x USB data ports, PiP / PbP support, KVM switch, RJ45 Ethernet, headphone jack
• 2 x 8W + DTS sound integrated speakers
• Tilt, height and swivel stand adjustments
• Porsche design range, design elements from Porsche 911 S 2.4 Targa

Design and Features

The PG49 comes in a black and silver design with a thin edge around the sides and top of the panel, and a thicker black plastic bezel along the bottom edge. There is a ‘Porsche Design’ label on the front but overall the appearance feels professional rather than gamer.

The back of the screen is encased in a matte black plastic as shown above, with a large, chunky central area, and a thinner edge to the screen thanks to the OLED panel. The stand attaches in the centre and needs to be screwed in to place, or can be removed in favour of VESA 100 x 100 mm mounting if you prefer. There’s a cable tidy clip on the back of the stand with the connections on the screen tucked under the bottom edge of the central section. The screen has an integrated power supply so no need for any external power brick here.

There’s a subtle ‘PD’ and ‘AGON’ logo on the back of the screen as shown above.

We should make a point here that this is the heaviest screen we’ve used (bar large TV’s), it really is a beast! The screen alone without the stand weighs 11.15 Kg, so keep that in mind if you were going to wall- or arm-mount the panel. The stand is an additional 4.63 Kg, taking the total weight up to 15.78Kg! It’s big and heavy to move around and lift on to your desk. Make sure the desk is sturdy and stable too.

The stand itself is a very strong metal design, finished in a light silver colour. There’s a cable tidy on the back of the stand and two pronged feet to the stand at the front. These do stick out a fair way in order to support the large screen size, so make sure you have a deep desk to accommodate it.

The screen offers a good range of modern connections with 1x DisplayPort 1.4 (with DSC), 2x HDMI 2.1, 1x USB type-C (with DP Alt mode and 90W power delivery), 4x USB data ports, a headphone jack and even an RJ45 2.5G Ethernet port.

The stand provides tilt, height and swivel adjustments which are all smooth to use and pretty easy. The stand does a good job of supporting the very wide panel, although there is still a bit of wobble if you knock the screen or when moving it around since the panel is so wide.

The OSD is controlled through a joystick toggle on the bottom edge of the screen and provides quick and snappy access around the menu. This OSD joystick is a bit difficult to use sometimes, mainly because pressing the button in can be a bit tricky and sometimes you end up pressing a direction instead.

OSD Menu
Joystick toggle controller
Quick and snappy
Intuitive to use	Mostly, sometimes a bit fiddly
User updatable firmware	via G-menu software

The joystick provides quick access to the Game mode presets (left), input selection (up), RGB lighting (right) and crosshair (down) by default.

The menu itself provides a good range of options although can be a bit fiddly to use on occasion. For instance, sometimes you have to press button to exit a section, but when you get back to main menu you have to press left to exit. The software fills up a large area of the screen from top to bottom on the right hand edge and that takes a little getting used to, instead of it being a small menu in the centre of the screen above where the joystick controller is.

It’s split in to stacked sections as shown above, with the options appearing in each area when you go in to a section. For example the ‘Color Setup’ section is shown here.

Brightness and Contrast

For this testing we disabled the ‘LEA’ (Logo Extraction Algorithm) OLED care feature to avoid impacts to measurements and brightness. There is a uniform brightness setting in the OSD menu so we tested the screen with that turned on and off.

Uniform Brightness = ON

Uniform Brightness mode behaves accurately with basically the same luminance being retained regardless of the APL window size being tested and the content being displayed. This means nice consistent brightness regardless of your desktop content, window sizes etc.

There was a small increase for the smallest 1% APL test areas, but you’re unlikely to see any impact of this in real desktop usage. The screen can reach up to around 252 nits (ignoring the slightly higher 1% figure) at maximum brightness setting in this UB mode which is reasonable, although slightly lower than some modern OLED monitors we’ve tested which reach up to around 270 – 280 nits typically. At the lowest setting the screen could reach down to a pretty low 50 nits when using the UB mode, affording you reasonable flexibility for darker room conditions. We expect this Uniform Brightness mode to be the one most people will want to use for SDR content, with a pretty decent range of brightness available, and the avoidance of any noticeable ABL dimming.

Uniform Brightness = OFF

With this setting turned off you can see that the screens brightness varies depending on the APL and so you get fluctuations in brightness as you resize and move windows around or change your content. This is distracting for office and desktop uses we find, although may not be as problematic for dynamic content like games and multimedia.

With UB turned off the screen reaches up to a maximum 457 nits in SDR, although this drops down to 266 nits when you view a full white screen (100% APL). The Automatic Brightness Limiter (ABL) kicks in to dim the screen as the content changes. This applies even at lower brightness settings as you can see from the graph above. The minimum luminance the screen can reach was between 102 nits (1% APL) and 54 nits (100% APL) at the lowest OSD setting.

• Useful reading – OLED Dimming Confusion – APL, ABL, ASBL, TPC and GSR Explained

Black Depth, Shadow Detail and Contrast

Black depth and contrast
Contrast ratio	~Infinite:1 (OLED)
Black depth (nits)	0.00
Shadow detail rating (SDR)	Very good First visible RGB = 2
Shadow detail adjustment control
Ambient light handling	Poor

One of the key benefits of an OLED panel is the fact it is capable of generating true blacks and a basically infinite contrast ratio. Each pixel can be fully turned off individually, and there’s no need for backlight local dimming here like there is on LCD’s. As a result, the black depth and contrast ratio can surpass all LCD panel technologies including VA panels by a long way. Blacks look inky and deep, and you get local contrast between different areas of an image.

Your ambient lighting may have some impact on perceived contrast ratio as it does with all screens, with this being more of a challenge on QD-OLED panels like that used here, than on competing WOLED alternatives. On QD-OLED panels in brighter rooms there is a fairly noticeable issue with raised blacks due to the panel structure and the fact that a polarizer is not used. The ambient lighting can cause inadvertent activation of the Quantum Dot layer on those panels, and blacks can start to look more grey or have a purple hue. We studied the impact of this in detail recently, which is linked below if you want to know more. In darker rooms or where you can more carefully control your light sources, it is not a major problem, but competing WOLED panels do fare better in a wide range of viewing conditions.

• Related content: The OLED Black Depth Lie – When Panel Type and Coating Matters

The near black shadow detail was very good out of the box and using this test image we could just make out box 2 as the first we could distinguish before calibration. This is something that can often be an issue on OLED panels but is seems to be very good here on the PD49 in SDR mode, even at default settings. You can make some tweaks yourself using the ‘Shadow Boost’ setting in the menu (not the ‘Shadow Control’ which we will talk about later) which can help you adjust darker grey shades further if you need to.

Backlight or Panel Flicker

Flicker
Flicker free verified
PWM / flicker frequency	n/a

Like other OLED screens there is a minor fluctuation of the backlight, and in this case it operates in sync with the refresh rate, whatever you have that set at. Above it’s operating at 240Hz so there’s a small fluctuation every ~4.17ms. You can see on the graph above that the 0V would be an “off” state, so the amplitude of this fluctuation is minor, and does not produce any visible flickering or anything like that in practice. It’s not the same as PWM on an LCD monitor where the backlight is rapidly switched fully off and on when trying to dim the brightness level. Obviously being an OLED panel there is no backlight here anyway, and this minor fluctuation didn’t cause us any problems in real use and would be considered flicker free.

Default Setup

The screen comes out of the box with ‘Game mode’ turned off. That menu offers some preset configurations for different game genres like FPS, RTS and Racing. ECO mode was also set to ‘standard’, and the options in that menu basically just provide preset locked configurations for brightness and contrast for uses like text, internet, reading and so on. These may be useful to some users who want to switch to a different mode at different times of the day, but we prefer to configure the screen ourselves which we will look at in a moment in the calibration section. Note that ‘Uniform Brightness’ was also turned on by default.

The default setup was good overall with a pretty accurate gamma, being close to the 2.2 target and measured at 2.17 average. It dipped a little lower in darker shades but this didn’t seem to cause any major visual issues and shadow detail remained very good for an OLED panel out of the box. The RGB balance was good overall, although the green channel was a little low. We did have a nice white point of 6493K which was basically spot on to the target of 6500K. Greyscale accuracy was only moderate though with dE 3.3 average, mainly because of that slight imbalance in the red, green, and blue channels.

The screen has a wide colour gamut which extends a large way beyond the sRGB colour space in red and green shades, and results in a ~147% relative coverage calculation. This is a fair bit higher than competing WOLED panels (although none are available in this 49″ screen size at the moment) which have a smaller colour space of ~125% sRGB. It’s wider here on the PD49 thanks to their use of Quantum Dot coating on the QD-OLED panel.

With the wide colour gamut active here, the accuracy of sRGB colours was poor, with a dE 5.1 average measured. This is normal for a wide gamut screen though and we will look if we can improve sRGB / SDR accuracy in a moment.

The native colour gamut of this panel more closely matches the DCI-P3 reference as you can see from the bottom left CIE diagram, although it still extends a fair way beyond that space in blue and red shades especially. We measured a 99.2% absolute coverage which was excellent, but a 116.9% relative coverage so you can see it extends quite a long way beyond DCI-P3 too. With that closer match (than sRGB), the accuracy of DCI-P3 colours out of the box was better and what we would now call “moderate”, with a dE 3.1 average and 5.9 maximum measured.

With the native colour space of the panel being so wide and not really matching any of these reference spaces closely, it does mean that colour accuracy is only moderate at best. We need to be able to more accurately match those colour spaces to improve the accuracy of the colours being shown. Thankfully AOC provide a range of options on the screen to help.

sRGB Emulation Mode

You can change the ‘colour space’ setting in the menu to a range of different options, one of which is sRGB which might be useful for those who want to work in that colour space or get more accurate performance and colours for SDR content.

Nothing has really changed here with gamma, RGB balance, colour temp or greyscale accuracy as we have only changed the colour space mode in the menu.

With the sRGB clamp active you can see that the colour gamut of the screen is now much closer to the sRGB reference space, offering a 97.2% absolute coverage and 97.6% relative coverage which was excellent. It had maybe gone a couple of percent too far in the clamping, but it was still very close. With this smaller colour space now active, the accuracy of sRGB colours was much better and classified as good now. There was an average dE of 1.9 measured which should offer a decent mode for most normal users. You still have access to the brightness control in this mode thankfully (and the other colour space modes), but unfortunately you do lose access to any colour temp, gamma or RGB adjustments in the colour menu. Thankfully the setup is good in this mode but it’s a shame not to have tbhe flexibility available for those who might want to make adjustments.

DCI-P3 Mode

AOC provide quite a few other modes in the menu including one for DCI-P3. This is actually set to target a 2.6 gamma instead of the 2.2 gamma the default ‘Native’ and sRGB emulation modes target. You can see it achieves this pretty nicely with 2.63 average measured. The screen offers a 6314K white point in this mode, and the menu has another setting if you want for “DCI-P3 (D50)” which has a warmer colour temp. That reaches a 4846K white point so is close to the target.

The colour space clamping was again very good in this mode, now matching the DCI-P3 reference space very nicely. This resulted in good colour accuracy for P3 colours with dE 1.5 measured. The red colour clamping has gone a little too far, resulting in a higher error in the 100% red colour in the graph, but overall the colour accuracy was good here. You have access to brightness adjustment but not the colour or gamma controls again, like in the sRGB mode.

Display P3 Mode

AOC also offer another alternative mode configured to the DCI-P3 colour space, but this time with a different gamma. The target in this mode is actually the sRGB gamma curve, which is follows pretty closely. This could be a good alternative for those who might want to work with a DCI-P3 clamp, but want a more typical sRGB / 2.2 gamma curve, instead of the 2.6 gamma that the other mode is configured to.

Colour space clamping remains very similar to the other DCI-P3 mode, as does the colour accuracy.

Adobe RGB mode

There’s also an Adobe RGB mode available which could be useful for those who want to work with this colour space, commonly used in professional and photography markets. This one is configured to a 2.2 gamma again, and the only significant change is the emulation of the Adobe RGB colour space which is very good. Thanks to the wide colour gamut of the QD-OLED panel, there is good coverage of Adobe RGB and a good clamping active in this mode. That results in good colour accuracy again for Adobe RGB colours. It’s great to see this mode offered on the monitor, as it’s not always included on modern OLED screens. The menu offers an ‘Adobe RGB (D50)’ mode too which has a 4834K white point if you wanted a warmer mode.

Calibration

Calibration and profiling can produce some very good overall results and could be useful though if you wanted to operate the screen within its native wide gamut mode, but then map the colour space back to something else like sRGB or Adobe RGB for instance for colour-aware applications (e.g. Photoshop). You would need a suitable calibration device and software.

In this section the screen was profiled to 2.2 gamma, 6500K colour temp and to the sRGB colour space. The screen was left in its native wide gamut mode, but this profile will be used in colour-aware applications to map back to sRGB in this instance. Overall the calibrated results were very good as you’d hope with excellent results all round. You can find our calibrated settings and ICC profile in our ICC profile database now.

General and Office

In many ways the AGON Pro PD49 is very well suited to office and general uses, although in some ways it isn’t as it has a few limitations due to its QD-OLED panel. First of all the form factor and massive screen size is a pleasure to work with for office content, allowing you to have multiple open windows side by side. In some situations we found the vertical resolution a little restrictive (only 1440 pixels high) as we’ve been using a lot of 4K (3840 x 2160) displays lately, and when you have such a large horizontal area (5120 pixels wide) it sometimes makes apps feel a bit squashed. It does give you a massive horizontal area though which is great for multi-tasking and split screen working, and it’s a more elegant and attractive option we think than dual monitors.

The design of the screen is unique and it looks attractive and high-end we felt for those who are concerned about a more professional and attractive looking monitor and want to avoid some of the more gamer aesthetics in the market. As we said earlier, the screen is very heavy though and you need a large, deep desk to accommodate it. Or a very strong mounting option if you’re going to VESA mount it.

Text Clarity and Screen Coating

Because of the somewhat unusual triangular shaped RGB sub-pixel layout, slight text fringing has been a challenge on older QD-OLED monitors. This has been improved with the Second Generation QD-OLED panels including that used here on the PD49. The second gen panels have a slightly improved subpixel size and shape with more pixel fill, although still in the triangular RGB layout, but improving text rendering a bit as a result. You get some issues still, it’s not “fixed”, but it feels better in day to day content we think than older gen 1 panels. We didn’t really experience any major issues with office and general use, although this will vary by user.

The screen coating of the QD-OLED panel is the standard “semi glossy” finish. It retains most of the clear and crisp picture quality of a fully glossy solution, but without having major reflections to worry about thanks to an added AR (Anti Reflection) film. In certain situations and lighting conditions you will certainly see more reflections than a matte coated screen and light isn’t diffused in the same way, but during typical day to day usage, even with a window facing the screen we didn’t find it too bad at all. The coating can make colours and blacks pop a bit more, in the right lighting conditions. We quite like the coating balance here personally and prefer it to the matte AG coating of WOLED panels at the moment.

Screen Brightness

	Brightness
Maximum brightness (SDR)	252 nits
Minimum brightness	50 nits
Uniform brightness behaviour
Flicker free

The screens brightness should be adequate for most users, reaching up to around 252 nits maximum in Uniform Brightness mode, and without the need for ABL to be used at all. This is great news as it ensures a consistent and stable brightness no matter the content you view, or no matter your window sizes. The screen can’t reach as bright as a few other modern OLED panels (270 – 280 nits in some cases), but 252 nits is still decent, and unless you need to use the screen in a very bright room, it should be more than adequate. The lower adjustment is decent enough too.

Useful Office Features

	Features
USB type-C connectivity (DP Alt mode)
USB type-C power delivery	90W
KVM switch
PiP and PbP support
USB data ports
Easy access USB data ports
Integrated speakers
Audio output / headphone out
Mic input
Ambient light sensor
Motion sensor
Stand adjustments	Tilt, height, swivel (no rotate)
Tripod socket
Fan-less design

The screen has a good range of additional features which could be useful in office environments. It’s nice to see USB type-C offered here (with DP Alt mode, data and 90W power delivery) to support single cable connectivity from supporting devices and laptops. The inclusion of a KVM switch function and support for PiP/PbP modes were also great to see, as with such a large screen size it could be a popular choice for handling multiple inputs.

There were also some decent 2x 8W DTS sound speakers and a headphone connection offered, as well as a 4 port USB hub. It would have been useful if some of these were located on the side of the screen for easier access perhaps, especially with the back of the screen having such a large central section where they could have been easily housed. We would have also welcomed an ambient light sensor and motion sensor here ideally.

Warranty and image retention risks

OLED Care and Warranty
Fan-less design / silent
Warranty period	3 years
Burn-in cover
Screen saver
Pixel / screen shift
Logo dimming
Taskbar detection
Motion sensor
Other OLED care features

One challenge with OLED panels in general is the inherent risk of image retention and burn-in. It’s a technology more suited to dynamic and changing content, which is why these are largely positioned as gaming and multimedia screens. There is more of a risk of image retention if you are using these screens for lots of static desktop and office use though. Display manufacturers provide a range of measures to help mitigate that risk, and maintain the panel over time and we will talk about the OLED Care measures in a moment.

AOC include a 3 year warranty with the monitor, including burn-in cover which gives some added peace of mind around usage and image retention risks. The screen has a fan-less design, using a custom heatsink and graphene film for cooling.

To help mitigate the risks of image retention, AOC provide a few options in the OSD menu. There’s an ‘LEA’ function which stands for “Logo Extraction Algorithm” (i.e. logo dimming), as well as ‘Pixel Orbiting’ (aka Pixel shift) and a ‘Pixel Refresh’ cycle. We would have preferred simpler naming conventions here so people could more easily understand what these options do, given the market has widely used “Logo dimming” and “Pixel shift” elsewhere.

Blue Light and Eye Care Modes

The native panel spectral distribution is shown above at a calibrated 6500K white point, where the blue peak is at 453 nm. This means it is not part of the Eyesafe certified range of products where there is a supposed harmful range between 415 – 455nm. There is a ‘LowBlue Mode’ setting in the menu with 4 levels available, making the image slightly warmer and more yellow each time. The modes are Multimedia (5935K white point), Internet (5510K), Office (5172K) and Reading (4867K).

Gaming

The AOC AGON Pro PD49 uses a QD-OLED panel which is well-known for its near-instant response times. As a result it does not need to use overdrive technology in the same way as a desktop LCD panel would, and there aren’t any controls for the response time or overdrive in the OSD menu as they’re not needed. AOC, like other OLED display manufacturers quote a very low 0.03ms G2G response time in their spec, and while true <1ms G2G should be expected from this technology this is a little unrealistic.

(at native resolution)	Refresh Rate
Maximum Refresh Rate DisplayPort	240Hz
Maximum Refresh Rate USB type-C	240Hz
Maximum Refresh Rate HDMI	240Hz
VRR range	48 – 240Hz
ClearMR certification tier	ClearMR 13000

The OLED panel provides super-deep blacks and a basically infinite contrast ratio which is of course excellent for gaming too. The per-pixel level dimming and high contrast ratio also make it well suited to HDR gaming, and we will measure HDR performance a bit later. The very wide viewing angles of this technology are also excellent and make the screen suitable for viewing from many different positions if you need. These wide viewing angles importantly include the freedom from things like the pale/white “IPS glow” that you get on darker content on that common LCD technology. There’s none of that here on the OLED panel.

You are of course going to need a powerful system and graphics card to run 5120 x 1440 (dual 27″ 1440p) at 240Hz though, so keep that in mind. It will also need to be a modern card that supports either DSC via DisplayPort, or supports HDMI 2.1. This might be one of those things where you’re future proofing yourself for later on as graphics cards and systems become more powerful, or perhaps you just play older games or at lower graphic settings and can prioritise frame rates.

The super ultrawide resolution isn’t supported by all games either but where it is supported, the 32:9 aspect ratio and massive screen size provide a really impressive and immersive experience. If your games are more typical 16:9 aspect ratio then keep in mind you’re going to need to play with black borders down the sides, but you’ve got the option to do both here. 16:9 aspect ratio at 2560 x 1440 is also handled nicely with 1:1 pixel mapping so it works very well.

	VRR capabilities and Certification
AMD FreeSync certification	FreeSync Premium Pro
Native NVIDIA G-sync module / G-sync scaler
NVIDIA ‘G-sync Compatible’ certified
VESA ‘AdaptiveSync’ certification
HDMI-VRR (consoles via HDMI 2.1)
OLED VRR Anti-flicker modes

To help support the 5120 x 1440 @ 240Hz the screen features adaptive-sync, giving Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support for both NVIDIA and AMD systems which is great news. The screen has also been certified under the AMD ‘FreeSync Premium Pro’ scheme and also NVIDIA’s ‘G-sync Compatible’ scheme. This should give some added reassurance around VRR performance.

VRR flicker can be a challenge on OLED screens and we experienced some familiar flickering in darker content, triggered especially in situations with large frame rate swings. It’s hard to quantify the level of flicker and whether you might experience it on any OLED screen, as there’s so many variable at play (your system, graphics card, frame rates, game title, scene type etc). There are no anti-flicker modes offered on this screen unfortunately, like we have seen on a few modern gaming OLED monitors.

Gaming Features and Settings

	Other Features
NVIDIA DSR / DLDSR support
Black Frame Insertion (BFI)
Gaming extras	Shadow control, Shadow boost, Game Color, Sniper Scope, Frame Counter
Emulated gaming sizes / Aspect Ratio modes	(Need to disable adaptive-sync VRR to use)

We tested support for NVIDIA DSR / DLDSR which can sometimes work on monitors with DSC (Display Stream Compression), but not always. We found that these technologies were not available on this screen, even if you drop down to a lower refresh rate like 60Hz or a lower resolution. There is unfortunately no option to disable DSC in the menu either on this model. Sadly there is no BFI (Black Frame Insertion) blur reduction mode on this screen either, something only offered so far on Asus’ gaming OLED screens.

There are a range of gaming extras in the menu including various preset modes via ‘Game Mode’ menu. There is also Shadow control, Shadow boost, Game Color, Sniper Scope, Frame Counter. Shadow control makes significant changes to the image and greyscale, but raises blacks at the same time so it is not advisable to use this setting we don’t think. Shadow Boost is better with levels of 1 – 3 available, and that doesn’t raise blacks in the same way. Game Color has a default setting of 10, with options to go from 0 – 20 to boost or reduce vividness of colours if you want. Keep in mind that this setting would impact accuracy.

There are also a very wide range of aspect ratio modes available which is very useful given the 32:9 aspect ratio is not supported by all games, and certainly not by external devices and consoles. You have to disable adaptive-sync VRR in the menu to be able to use these modes, that’s the only restriction. There are then options for Wide, 4:3 and 1:1 pixel mapping. Then options to simulate various specific screen sizes like 17″(4:3), 19″(4:3), 19″(5:4), 19″W(16:10), 21.5″W(16:9), 22″W(16:10), 23″W(16:9), 23.6″W(16:9), 24″W(16:9) and 27”W(16:9). It’s a shame you have to sacrifice VRR to use these, especially for modern games consoles where you need to use a 16:9 mode.

Response Times

As discussed in our detailed article about Response Time Testing – Pitfalls, Improvements and Updating Our Methodology we are using an improved and more accurate method for capturing G2G response times and overshoot, based on figures that are more reflective to what you see visually on the screen in real-World usage. Our article linked above talks through why this is better and how we arrived at this improved method in much more detail.

The above G2G response times are consistent at all refresh rates, including 240Hz, 120Hz and 60Hz and during VRR situations with changing frame rates. Thanks to the OLED panel the response times are super-fast and near-instant, with an average of only 0.48ms G2G measured. The best case was an incredibly impressive 0.37ms and the overall response times were as expected from an OLED panel. All transitions can keep up easily with the frame rate demands of 240Hz.

There was some minor overshoot measured with changes from black to grey along the top row of the bottom left table above, but this didn’t seem to produce any visible artefacts in practice at all and it’s something we’ve seen on some other OLED panels in the past too. We mention it for completeness.

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Our thanks to the following manufacturers for support in the build of our new test system:

	AMD Ryzen 9 7950X | Buy AMD Ryzen 9 CPUs here on Amazon
	Asus ProArt B650-Creator | Buy Asus B650 motherboards here on Amazon
	Corsair DDR5 RAM | Buy here on Amazon
	Corsair H100i Elite Capellix AIO cooler | Buy Corsair coolers here on Amazon
	Corsair iCUE RGB Elite Fans | Buy here on Amazon
	NVIDIA RTX 3090 | Buy NVIDIA RTX graphics cards here on Amazon

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Motion Clarity

We captured some pursuit camera photos of the screen at a variety of refresh rates, designed to capture real-world perceived motion clarity. This gives you a good indication of how the screen looks in real use, beyond G2G response time measurements.

Despite the amazing pixel response times you still get large amount of blur at 60Hz due to the sample-and-hold nature of the OLED screen, you can’t expect miracles just because it’s got fast response times. There are major and obvious benefits in motion clarity as you increase to 120Hz high refresh rate mode, and this brings it on par with 120Hz OLED screens such as the popular 42″ sized displays like the LG 42C2 and LG 42C3 TV’s, and the Asus ROG Swift PG42UQ.

Like with other 240Hz OLED screens we’ve tested, moving up to 240Hz offers another significant and noticeable improvement in motion clarity, and the moving image is now sharper and cleaner. Tracking of moving content is now much easier and clearer. This really was excellent motion clarity and very impressive. If you can push the screen up to 240fps in your games, which will be a challenge of course in many situations at this high 5120 x 1440 resolution, you will benefit from excellent clarity and smoothness as well as improved system latency due to the higher frame rate supported. There is no visible overshoot or any associated artefacts or trails at any refresh rate like you might get on LCD screens which was excellent.

The motion clarity will be the same as the other 240Hz OLED monitors in the market including one other 49″ super ultrawide OLED model we’ve tested to date which has this refresh rate, the Samsung Odyssey G95SC. This is unsurprising given they are all using 240Hz OLED panels.

The motion clarity of the PD49 is better than the lower refresh rate 144Hz 49″ OLED screens you can also find in the market like the Asus ROG Swift PG49WCD and MSI MPG 491CQP that we have also reviewed. So this AOC screen offers that capability to offer better gaming performance and motion clarity if you can reach the higher frame rates. This motion clarity is very similar to a good 360Hz LCD panel so is very impressive.

Here’s some further comparisons of the motion clarity with other common OLED refresh rates, including the latest 360Hz QD-OLED panels which are currently available in 27″ screen size at the moment (e.g. MSI MPG 271QRX and Dell Alienware AW2725DF) and the new 480Hz-capable dual mode 32″ models (LG 32GS95UE and Asus ROG Swift PG32UCDP) or native 1440p 480Hz Asus ROG Swift PG27AQDP.

The motion clarity is improved further as you move from 240Hz up to 480Hz on those models, although to benefit from this you’re going to have to be able to power very high frame rates from your system of course, but the capability is there as graphics cards and other components improve further over time and you upgrade your system. Keep in mind that the 32″ models which support the 480Hz refresh rate achieve this using their “dual-mode” feature, which necessitates dropping the resolution to 1080p as well.

Lag

Read our detailed article about input lag and the various measurement techniques which are used to evaluate this aspect of a display. The screens tested are split into two measurements which are based on our overall display lag tests and half the average G2G response time, as measured by our oscilloscope. The response time element, part of the lag you can see, is split from the overall display lag and shown on the graph as the green bar. From there, the signal processing (red bar) can be provided as a good estimation of the lag you would feel from the display. We also classify each display as follows:

Lag Classification (updated)

• Class 1) Less than 4.17ms – the equivalent to 1 frame lag of a display at 240Hz refresh rate – should be fine for gamers, even at high levels
• Class 2) A lag of 4.17 – 8.33ms – the equivalent of one to two frames at a 240Hz refresh rate – moderate lag but should be fine for many gamers. Caution advised for serious gaming
• Class 3) A lag of more than 8.33ms – the equivalent of more than 2 frames at a refresh rate of 240Hz, or 1 frame at 120Hz – Some noticeable lag in daily usage, not suitable for high end gaming

There is a very low lag on the PD49 measured at 0.83 ms total display lag, and leaving us with ~0.71 ms of estimated signal processing lag. This is perfectly fine for competitive gaming. This is a bit higher at 60Hz refresh rate, measured at 2.33ms total display lag but actually remains very good and better than most screen we’ve tested at this lower, non-native refresh rate. Remember that it is the lower number (0.83ms) that will be relevant for VRR gaming as well, even where frame rates drop. The 60Hz figure is only applicable for fixed 60Hz input sources.

Console Gaming

The screen features offers a 5120 x 1440 resolution but includes support for ‘Virtual 4K’ input and therefore 4K @ 120Hz, making it very well suited to modern games consoles like the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. AOC have included two full-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 ports, delivering 48 Gbps speed.

The support for Virtual 4K means you can make use of HDR from the Xbox where that mode is only available at 4K, which is of course one of the key capabilities of this screen. The OLED panel with its amazing contrast and blacks comes in to its own here for HDR gaming, providing an excellent image quality and HDR experience. More on HDR in a moment.

	Console Gaming
Native panel resolution	5120 x 1440
Maximum resolution and refresh rate supported	3840 x 2160 “4K”
Virtual 4K support
4K at 24Hz support
4K at 50Hz support
HDMI connection version	2.1
HDMI connection bandwidth	48Gbps
HDMI-CEC auto switch
HDMI-VRR (over HDMI 2.1)
Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM)
HDR10 support
Dolby Vision HDR support
Display aspect ratio controls for 16:9
Integrated speakers
Headphone connection
Ultra high speed HDMI 2.1 cable provided

We confirmed via an Xbox Series X that 4K 120Hz works fine along with HDR10 support. There is support for 4K 50Hz but not 4K 24Hz though. The screen can technically support VRR from a console, but unfortunately this has to be disabled on the screen for you to be able to use the aspect ratio modes – which you need to do otherwise the 16:9 image of the console gets stretched horizontally to fill the whole 32:9 screen which obviously looks really bad. So you can’t actually use VRR from a console on this screen. That’s a bit of a shame.

The best aspect ratio option is the 27″ 16:9 mode which basically operates at 2560 x 1440, with a 1:1 pixel mapping and black borders down the sides of the screen. You are probably best to select 1440p resolution from a PS5, which then allows you to push frame rates. From an Xbox Series X you would probably want to input a 4K resolution instead of 1440p so that HDR can be supported.

There are some pretty decent integrated speakers and a headphone jack on this model which could be useful to support sound from consoles. We would have liked to have seen HDMI-CEC available in the menu and the ability to use VRR even when using the aspect ratio modes for a more complete console support, but overall it should be fine if you need to use it for these kind of games.

HDR

Being a QD-OLED panel, the PG49 is well equipped to handle HDR content with its per-pixel level dimming allowing for true blacks, a basically infinite contrast ratio and the avoidance of all blooming and halos. In these regards it can easily surpass any Mini LED backlit LCD monitor. However, it cannot reach the same luminance levels as Mini LED screens, and carries a “peak brightness” spec of 1300 nits, which will then also lower as the content on your screen changes and the APL increases which is normal on this technology. This is one key area where Mini LED screens can look brighter and deliver a more impactful HDR experience.

As it uses a QD-OLED panel it can suffer from the reduced perceived black depth and contrast that are a challenge for this technology. You need to be mindful of your ambient light levels and the position of those light sources. Ideally the light sources would be behind the panel, or you’d be viewing HDR content in a very dark room. That will also help minimise glare and reflections on the screen’s semi-glossy coating.

HDR modes and Settings

The PD49 has various HDR modes available to select in the menu. You can choose between HDR True Black, HDR Picture, HDR Movie, HDR Game and HDR Native. The ‘Luminance’ and ‘Color Setup’ menus are unavailable in all of the HDR modes so there is no other configuration possible really.

There are two main modes which we will test, the HDR True Black mode which should be fairly familiar to anyone who’s read a review of any recent OLED monitor. This mode is certified under the VESA ‘DisplayHDR 400 True Black’ scheme, offers the more accurate EOTF tracking, but is limited in its peak brightness capability. The other mode we will test is the ‘HDR Native’ mode which is akin to a “peak 1000” mode you might see on other screens.

• Further reading: Testing ‘HDR400 True Black’ and ‘Peak 1000’ Mode Brightness on New OLED Monitors

We found that the other three modes (Picture, Movie and Game) all have the same EOTF tracking as HDR Native but each one seems to just alter the colour saturation and vividness.This makes the image progressively less accurate, but more vivid looking for colours if you like that. HDR Native is standard and most accurate without any colour “enhancement”. HDR Picture is the next step up, still looking pretty neutral and being close to the Native mode in accuracy. Movie is a bit more saturated and colourful looking. Game is a lot more saturated, where some colours now look very neon and unrealistic and the image doesn’t look right. That’s quite similar to a typical “FPS” preset mode you might see on a gaming monitor in SDR mode.

We will compare and measure the True Black 400 mode and the HDR Native mode.

HDR Testing

PQ EOTF Tracking and Greyscale

Click between each tab to see results and analysis for each of the HDR modes

The True Black mode shows the most accurate tracking of the PQ EOTF on the right hand side, although the screen is a little brighter than intended in dark grey shades up to about RGB 20 on the graph. The HDR Native mode on the other hand is much less accurate, being brighter than intended for the greyscale in dark and in light shades. It looks from these initial measurements that in the HDR Native mode the screen follows the “brighter than intended” approach of some QD-OLED panels like the Gigabyte AORUS FO32U2P, instead of the “darker than intended” setup that many other QD-OLED panels operate in. We will examine this more in a moment.

Colour temp and greyscale accuracy is marginally better in the True Black mode, although the greyscale temp and white point was only a few % out from the target in either HDR mode which was good.

Colour Accuracy

Click between each tab to see results and analysis for each of the HDR modes

There was no real difference between the two modes when it comes to colour accuracy of HDR colours, with good accuracy overall with both modes. If you choose to experiment with the other HDR Picture, Movie and Game modes then the colour saturation is increased as you move up each mode, which then has a knock-on impact to the colour accuracy. The dE goes from 2.0 average (Native mode) to dE 2.2 (Picture), dE 3.0 (Movie) or dE 3.6 (Game).

HDR Brightness

Peak White Luminance

The common peak white luminance measurements are included here. As is usual for these OLED monitors the True Black 400 mode is capped at a low brightness, reaching only 442 nits maximum in our measurements. The HDR Native (and Picture, Movie, Game) modes showed some significant increases, now reaching 1012 nits maximum and achieving the advertised spec for smaller APL scenes.

Remember that this is only measuring peak white luminance which is limited for HDR brightness evaluation, and we need to consider the HDR brightness in real-scenes, for greyscale performance and for colours to get a fuller picture. We can at least see that it’s the brightness setting in the OSD which influences how bright the screen can reach.

Luminance Accuracy

To consider the “luminance accuracy” further of the HDR modes we need to consider the EOTF and luminance performance at a range of different APL’s. Our recent investigation of OLED HDR brightness has revealed that we can’t just rely on a single 10% APL measurement any more. If you’re unfamiliar with the testing and data in this section, you can expand the section below for more information.

Measuring the luminance accuracy reaffirms the observations we’d made earlier when looking only at the standard 10% APL measurements. The HDR True Black mode provides the most accurate EOTF tracking at all APL window sizes, with the grey measurement line very closely tracking the yellow target line. It’s a little brighter than intended for dark grey shades but this is only slight, and arguably helpful to those who want to use the screen in a non-dark environment and have better shadow detail. As the APL increases, the roll-off point shifts a little to help preserve tonal values, as overall the screen can’t reach as bright now. That’s normal and acceptable behaviour and it’s not too drastic here. The issue of course with this mode is that peak brightness is very limited at only 442 nits max.

The ‘HDR Native’ mode has a higher brightness than intended for most grey shades, including darker grey and light grey. This is more apparent for the smaller APL areas less than 50% area before the light grey shades start to become more accurate for the larger APL areas.

Greyscale Luminance

Above you can see the average greyscale luminance of the 2 modes compared. The HDR Native mode is brighter then True Black mode overall in actual greyscale luminance for lower APL below about 25%, where the full capability of the panel is realised. For larger APL the greyscale luminance is basically the same between the two modes. This difference is not as drastic as you will see on most QD-OLED panels when comparing their Peak 100 mode and the TB400 mode, something that we explored in detail in our article here. On those other screens there is often a 50 – 60 nits average difference between the two modes, in favour of the TB400 mode. Here’s the ‘HDR Native’ mode remains on par, or brighter than the True Black mode in all situations.

Conclusion

The AOC AGON Pro PD49 is a large, heavy, but impressive monitor. We can appreciate the added value that the 240Hz refresh rate offers here compared with some other 49″ OLED’s which offer only a lower 144Hz, and we were pleased AOC opted to use the higher-spec panel. It might have undermined their “premium” approach for this Porsche Design had they selected the lower spec panel to start with. The design is unique and it looks attractive, professional and has a premium feel to it. It’s a welcome break from the more gamer-focused monitors we tend to see released. Just be mindful of the very heavy screen and deep stand; you will need a big desk to accommodate it properly.

The feature set is also very good on this monitor and it’s great to see modern connectivity options like HDMI 2.1 and USB type-C provided, the latter with a high 90W power delivery. A KVM switch, PiP/PbP modes, decent integrated speakers and even a very rare RJ45 Ethernet connection are all very welcome. These contribute towards the premium feel of this monitor. Having some of those features is also great considering the very large screen size, if you want to input (and control) two systems at once.

Performance wise the QD-OLED panel offers the usual benefits you’d expect, including a nice semi-glossy screen coating for a clean and crisp image, and the updated pixel structure from Samsung’s gen 2/3 panels for improved text clarity. The huge screen size and high resolution make it well-suited to office and productivity applications, although you need to be mindful it’s still an OLED panel so isn’t ideal for lots of static uses. Default setup was good, and there were a very large number of modes to emulate different colour spaces and setups if you need. We’d have liked a bit more user flexibility to change screen settings in each mode, but there were at least lots of different preset configurations available – including sRGB, DCI-P3, Display P3, Adobe RGB and others. Uniform brightness support for SDR was also very welcome.

HDR provided several modes to choose from, although we think most people will prefer the HDR Native mode for the brightest performance. The EOTF tracking isn’t that accurate, and it seems that it’s either very hard, or maybe impossible for manufacturers to improve this in the brighter “peak 1000”-type HDR modes. We’ve seen manufacturers like Asus release firmware updates for their PG32UCDM QD-OLED panel for instance that don’t “fix” it, they just add a brighter mode as well as the darker mode. This suggests it might be an inherent issue and manufacturers have to choose one approach or the other.

On the AOC screen here, in the HDR Native mode they’ve opted to go with the “brighter than intended” approach instead of “darker than intended” which seems to be the alternative approach for QD-OLED panels. We think that there’s little point having a mode which reaches a higher peak white luminance, but then ends up looking darker in many real world situations. Thankfully this screen doesn’t suffer from that and we think it’s the better approach.

From a gaming point of view the response times were near-instant and the motion clarity was as you’d expect from a 240Hz panel. This is one area where it can out-perform the lower 144Hz refresh rate 49″ OLED models on the market. For anyone who plays games that support the massive 32:9 aspect ratio it can look amazing, with a very wide field of view and the awesome picture quality of OLED. Games console support was very good despite the non-standard aspect ratio of the screen, although it was a shame to have to sacrifice VRR support to use the aspect ratio modes in the menu that you need to enable for consoles. Lag was also very low which was great news. For those DSC-haters out there, it’s a shame you can’t disable this in the menu, and that means there’s no support for NVIDIA DSR.

Where to Buy

The AOC AGON Pro PD49 is available in some regions now from Amazon, and retails for ~£1,200 GBP in the UK at the time of writing. This is a little cheaper than the Samsung Odyssey G95SC (240Hz, currently ~£1246) and Asus ROG Swift PG49WCD (144Hz, ~£1230). It is however a fair bit more than the MSI MPG 491CQP (144Hz) which retails for ~£1,100 usually but at the time of writing is on sale for ~£900. Other regions should follow and we have asked AOC for more retailer information so will update this section as soon as we have further details.

If you’re after something that has a premium panel and feature set, looks really good, and performs really well it’s definitely worth checking out.

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