ViewSonic XG2431

Key Specs and Features

• 23.8″ size with flat format
• ‘Fast IPS’ technology panel
• 1920 x 1080 resolution (1080p)
• 1ms G2G quoted response time
• 240Hz native refresh rate
• Adaptive-sync VRR, including ‘FreeSync Premium’ certification
• PureXP+ strobing blur reduction mode
• World’s first ‘Blur Busters Approved 2.0’ certified display
• Standard colour gamut backlight (sRGB)
• 1x DisplayPort and 2x HDMI 2.0 connections
• Fully adjustable stand with tilt, height, swivel and rotate adjustments
• Integrated 2x 3W speakers and audio output

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Introduction

The ViewSonic XG2431 is a 24″ class (actually 23.8″) monitor designed specifically for gaming. It has a modern ‘Fast IPS’ panel with a high 240Hz refresh rate and a 1920 x 1080 Full HD (1080p) resolution. The high refresh rate is supported by adaptive sync for variable refresh rates (VRR) from both AMD and NVIDIA systems, and it carries the AMD ‘FreeSync Premium’ certification to give some assurances around the VRR performance as well. The screen has a standard colour gamut with ~sRGB coverage and a decent enough range of connectivity and ergonomic options.

What is particularly interesting about this gaming screen is that it is the first in the World to be certified under the ‘Blur Busters Approved 2.0‘ scheme, and is the first monitor to pass the rigorous testing thresholds of our friends over at BlurBusters.com. This includes pre-tuned strobing blur reduction modes and support for an additional tuning utility which can help you optimise and tweak the motion clarity and performance of this mode. We will talk about that a lot more later on.

We should make a point here that this screen is released in the USA and Canada, but has not been released in the UK or Europe. This review is therefore more for our audience in North America.

Design and Features

The screen has a 3-side borderless design with a thin ~1.5mm black plastic edge, and a thin ~4.5mm black panel border before the image starts (total of 6mm black edge) along the sides and top. There is a thicker black plastic bezel along the bottom edge measuring ~19mm. This has a fairly subtle grey “ViewSonic” logo in the middle, and some subtle logos for the OSD controls in the right hand area. The OSD control buttons are located on the bottom edge of the screen with 5 pressable buttons and a power button. A blue LED glows brightly in the bottom right hand corner when the screen is powered on.

The back of the screen is encased in a matte black plastic as shown above. The stand connects in the centre and is also finished in a black plastic. There is a useful carry handle at the top of the stand arm, and a cable tidy clip on the back.

Connectivity wise there are 1x DisplayPort (1.2a we believe although not listed in the spec), and 2x HDMI 2.0 provided for video. There is unfortunately no USB type-C or HDMI 2.1 provided on this screen. There are 2x USB 3.2 ports and an audio out provided too, and the screen features basic 2x 3W stereo speakers which are ok for the odd mp3, “office sound” or YouTube clip, but obviously not up to much else given their limited power.

The foot of the stand is mainly rectangular and finished in a matte black plastic with a brushed appearance finish to it. This provides a wide and stable base for the screen.

The stand provides a full range of ergonomic adjustments with tilt, height, swivel and rotate available. Tilt and height are both smooth and pretty easy to use. Side to side swivel and the rotation adjustment are a bit stiffer but again pretty smooth. The screen remains stable with very little wobble as you re-position it or when you use the OSD controls.

Speaking of the OSD menu, this is a particularly tricky and cumbersome menu to navigate around we thought, with the buttons not really being that easy to access and not easy to figure out which button you have to press to enter a section or change a setting. Perhaps we’ve been spoilt by the common joystick controllers on modern displays which are intuitive and easy to use, but it just felt difficult here on the XG2431. There’s a good range of settings to play with, but you won’t want to have to mess around with changing them too often.

Default Setup

The XG2431 is a standard gamut monitor only, with an approximate sRGB colour gamut. This means it should be easier for people to use for normal office and SDR content, with hopefully decent levels of accuracy if ViewSonic have spent some time calibrating the screen in the factory. It does mean you lack the vividness of a wide colour gamut screen which some people like for gaming and multimedia especially. That also means it won’t be able to support any wider colour spaces such as Adobe RGB for professional and photo work.

First of all the screen is set at its maximum 100% brightness level out of the box, producing a very bright image that you will want to turn down (~356 cd/m²). We were pleased though with the gamma (2.16 average), especially as there is no control over the gamma setting in the OSD menu. Thankfully this is well set up and is close to 2.2 gamma. The colour temp across the greyscale is a little too cool by 5% (6802k average) and the white point was also slightly cool by 3% (6716k) but nothing major, and this didn’t really cause any visual problems. The greyscale was nice and accurate overall with an average dE of only 1.8 which was good news. The only real issue with the default setup in these areas is that the contrast ratio was fairly mediocre at 900:1, being a bit under the 1000:1 spec although fairly typical for many IPS-type panels.

Colour-wise you can see from the CIE diagram on the left that the colour space of the backlight very closely matches the sRGB reference space. We had an absolute coverage of 98.6%, missing out slightly in the blue shades but not by anything that would cause any concern. There was some very minor over-coverage in red shades resulting in the 104.2% relative coverage measurement (which is something ViewSonic state in their spec too). The screen has been nicely factory calibrated as well, with very good sRGB colour accuracy overall and an average dE of only 1.1. The only shade that was of any issue was red (5.1 dE max) because of that small over-coverage of the sRGB reference space. All in all we were impressed by the colour accuracy and default setup of the screen. Just turn brightness down to something sensible and comfortable and you will be good to go!

Note that we also tested the ‘sRGB’ colour temp mode in the OSD menu but this was set up the same as the default ‘Native’ mode, just with a preset brightness point of 22 for a more sensible luminance. No real need to use that mode, just tweak the native mode a bit instead.

Calibration

Calibration and profiling can produce excellent results if you have a suitable calibration device and software. This was profiled to 2.2 gamma, 6500k colour temp and to the sRGB colour space. You can see the recommended OSD settings above, and then further corrections and mapping of that slight over-coverage in red shades from the native gamut back to strict sRGB are taken care of at the profile level. If you want you can also try our calibrated ICC profile out. The highest error (dE 1.2 max) was now in 100% blue shade, and that’s because the screen can’t quite cover the full sRGB blue region – but it’s very close and absolutely nothing to worry about.

General Usage

ViewSonic are clearly positioning the XG2431 as a gaming screen but what about if you want to use it for more general day to day office-type work? Firstly it’s quite a decent option if you want a multi-screen setup thanks to the thin borders on the sides. The IPS-type panel offers solid all round performance including wide viewing angles and a stable image quality. This has made IPS very popular in the general-use space for a long time. The contrast ratio of this technology is not as good as VA panels, and only moderate on this model even for an IPS panel at ~900:1. On dark content you get a familiar pale glow from an angle, especially noticeable in darker room conditions as well so it’s not great for working with darker content. There’s a reasonable brightness adjustment range from the flicker free backlight, offering between 356 and 82 cd/m² range.

The text size of 1920 x 1080 resolution on a 23.8″ sized screen is pretty well established although leaves you with larger text size than 27″ 1440p or other common screen sizes like 34″UW 1440p for instance. Many people will be fine with it and the picture quality is still very good. The font size is perfectly adequate for a smaller screen size like this, but you lose a bit of the sharpness and pixel density if you’re used to those other options. Anything higher on a screen this small would be impractical without introducing the need for software scaling, so 1080p is fine.

There’s good ergonomic adjustments from the stand, with a full range of tilt, height, swivel and rotate offered. There’s a couple of USB 3.2 data ports and a headphone output, along with the basic 2x 3W speakers built in to the screen. For more general usage it might have been useful to include modern features like USB-C for single cable connectivity and charging and maybe a KVM switch function which are common now on many new gaming screens which are trying to appeal to a wider audience.

The screen provides some blue light reduction modes via the OSD menu which basically just controls the warmth of the image. The default spectral distribution at a calibrated 6500k is shown above, with the blue peak measured at 449 nm wavelength. This means it is not part of the Eyesafe certified range of products, as it does not have a blue peak that is beyond the supposed harmful range according to Eyesafe which is 415 – 455nm. The blue light reduction setting is a slider from 0 – 100 which actually is a bit cumbersome to use. We are all for granular level of control of settings, but we don’t expect anyone to need this finite level of control over the warmth of the image in this blue light filter setting. We’d have rather seen a small number of modes to flick between. With a slider from 0 – 100 it takes a long time to change settings while you wait for the slider to move. Fine if you’re leaving it on all the time, but if you want to turn it for instance on to full, and then off later, that is annoying.

The blue light peak remains at 449 nm wavelength all the time but the colour temp gets progressively warmer as the setting is increased. We measured this at a few points and recorded the white point temp at each – setting of 50 (5104k), 75 (4710k) and 100 max (4231k).

Response Times and Gaming

The XG2431 is based on a so-called ‘Fast IPS’ panel from panel manufacturer BOE (MV238FHM-NG2) with a quoted 1ms G2G response time. There are 3 levels of overdrive control available in the OSD menu via the ‘Response Time’ setting to help you tweak and optimise performance.

There is a high 240Hz native panel refresh rate and the screen features adaptive-sync for variable refresh rates (VRR) from both AMD and NVIDIA systems with a range of 48 – 240Hz supported with LFC as well. The screen has been certified under the AMD ‘FreeSync Premium’ scheme, but not under NVIDIA’s ‘G-sync Compatible’ scheme at this time. It should be easier to drive this screen than some other modern gaming displays as it has a lower 1080p resolution, meaning you perhaps don’t need as powerful a system, or you can focus on driving frame rates or detail in your games instead of pure resolution. The XG2431 is a standard SDR / SRGB gamut monitor only which means you lack some of the punch, saturation and vividness of wider gamut screens that some people like for multimedia and gaming. That’s down to user taste, but keep it in mind that it’s not an option on this display.

The screen supports ViewSonic’s ‘PureXP+’ strobing blur reduction backlight technology which we will discuss in more detail later as this is a key feature of this model, and the work ViewSonic have done with Blurbusters. Within the OSD menu are a few preset modes for gaming including FPS, RTS and MOBA modes. There is a ‘Black Stabilization’ setting to tweak dark level gamma but no other common gaming options you might see on other screens like crosshairs, FPS counters and the likes.

A summary of the XG2431 gaming features and performance is included here for quick reference, but is discussed in a lot more detail below.

Response Times and Motion Clarity

Important note: Before we get in to the measurements we wanted to highlight that we are in the process of switching all our response time measurements in these sections over to an improved ‘gamma corrected’ method. You may want to read through our article from Feb 2021 about Response Time Testing – Pitfalls, Improvements and Updating Our Methodology which talks about this a lot more. Basically this is an improved method for capturing G2G response times and overshoot, providing figures in these tables that are more reflective of real-world visual results. The measurements take in to account actual RGB changes and are closer to what you would see visually helping to analyse the visual performance more closely. The overshoot measurements are also improved dramatically, again to be more reflective to what you see visually. Our article linked above talks through why this is better and how we arrived at this improved method in much more detail.

We have been using this method for the last year but only really for our main measurement section (optimal refresh rate and overdrive mode) in the gaming part of our reviews, as taking the measurements was extremely time consuming and complicated. The other measurements in these sections where we examine the different overdrive modes and the different refresh rates were instead based on the “traditional response time” method, which is quicker and easier for us to capture considering there are loads of modes to measure. This is fine for quick comparisons and evaluation, and something that had been used for many years in the market, but not as “corrected” as the updated method.

We are in the process of switching over to using a new measurement device and software which helps massively to automate these measurements and calculations for us and makes it possible to now use this improved gamma corrected method for all the measurements. We will write a separate article about the new device and software in the future, but we have been testing and validating it against our existing equipment for the last 6 months and are happy with the accuracy and results it is producing. We will of course continue to provide pursuit camera photos which will help give you a view of real-world perceived motion clarity, to be compared alongside the device measurements.

Anyway, on to the measurements…

First of all we wanted to test the 3 overdrive modes at the maximum 240Hz refresh rate. Visually in motion tests there was not a major difference between the 3 modes to be honest. There was very little difference as you moved up from ‘standard’ to ‘advanced’ in real usage, but a bit of an improvement in clarity and sharpness as you moved up to the ‘ultra fast’ mode, but it was fairly hard to see really in normal usage. We were surprised, but pleased, that overshoot never appeared in any of these modes at 240Hz as normally the maximum overdrive modes of gaming screens can be overly aggressive and leave you with lots of nasty overshoot trails and halos.

After seeing reports of overshoot in the Ultra Fast mode from other reviewers such as rtings.com, we re-tested this mode again in a range of different scenarios – an NVIDIA system vs an AMD system, FreeSync on/off in the OSD, G-sync/FreeSync on/off in the graphics card menu. Nothing seemed to impact the response time performance measured here, we saw no overshoot at 240Hz using the Ultra Fast mode in any of these scenarios.

At 240Hz refresh rate the ‘Ultra Fast’ mode seemed optimal and was a little clearer and sharper than the other modes in real use. However, as we tested the screen at different refresh rates and as refresh rate lowered during VRR situations, the overshoot does creep up as the refresh rate lowers. Response times remain basically static, but overshoot increases. By the time you reach about 100Hz the overshoot becomes distracting and produces noticeable pale halos in practice. This gets even worse as you get to lower refresh rates like 60Hz. The ‘Ultra fast’ mode is perfectly usable and optimal for 100 – 240Hz refresh rates and VRR gaming if you are staying within that range, but if your frame rate is going to drop much below 100Hz then the overshoot becomes an issue.

With this in mind we -visited the middle ‘advanced’ mode in various visual tests. While the response time measurements were not quite as quick in ‘advanced’ mode at 240Hz (5.2ms vs. 4.3ms G2G), as we said, visually in motion tests it was pretty hard to notice any major difference between the two modes. As we used this mode with lowering refresh rates the overshoot never became an issue and remained at very low levels, even at 60Hz. You could in theory stick with ‘ultra fast’ for the upper refresh rates if you want, then drop to ‘advanced’ for anything <100Hz, but that might be an unnecessary annoyance. Especially when in real use there’s only small benefits in those higher refresh rates. Using the ‘advanced’ mode for all refresh rates is a better option, giving you a viable “single overdrive setting” experience and avoiding the need to mess around with this setting, particularly relevant when the OSD isn’t the easiest to navigate around. It’s not the absolute optimal experience, as the ‘ultra fast’ mode is still better at the higher refresh rates >100Hz but it’s certainly usable.

We measured the response times at a range of different refresh rates in the ‘advanced’ mode as well. You can see that the G2G figure basically remains the same across all refresh rates, something common with adaptive-sync screens and signifying that the screen does not use “variable overdrive”, which is a feature normally reserved for G-sync hardware module screens. This screen supports NVIDIA G-sync VRR but does not feature their hardware module. As a result of the response times remaining pretty flat, the overshoot does start to creep up a little by the time you reach 60Hz but never to any level that’s visible or causes any issues in real use. This is the reason by the way why the ‘Ultra fast’ mode became a problem at about 100Hz and lower as the G2G figures remained flat, but overshoot crept up, and reached problematic levels much sooner.

We have provided a more detailed table of the best case response times at 240Hz and in the maximum ‘ultra fast’ mode below as well:

We should note that the screens response time do struggle a little to keep up with the 240fps frame rate at the upper end. In the ‘ultra fast’ mode about 2/3 of the measured transitions were within the refresh rate window which was pretty good. If you’re using the ‘advanced’ mode then this falls to about half. This results in a little added smearing in motion but nothing that is really very obvious in normal uses, it’s just not quite as crisp as it could have been had it fully kept up with the frame rate. The high 240Hz refresh rate still offers decent improvements in motion clarity and performance compared with lower 120 – 144Hz refresh rates and is an attractive option for PC gaming. Having that extra high refresh rate is a welcome feature.

We also captured some pursuit camera photos at 240Hz in both the ‘advanced’ and ‘ultra fast’ modes to give a visual representation of the real-world perceived motion clarity of this screen. This will help support the measurements and commentary above.

Lag

We should note here as well that we measured a super low input lag on the XG2431. There was a total display lag of only 2.0ms and with ~2.15ms of that accounted for by pixel response times, that leaves a signal processing lag of only ~0.05ms which is excellent. As a result the screen is perfectly fine for fast paced competitive games if you need. The PureXP+ blur reduction mode seems to add a small amount of lag, around 0.5ms overall, but it’s still very low.

HDR Gaming

We will reference “HDR” here briefly and ViewSonic talk about the supposed HDR capabilities and list the VESA DisplayHDR 400 certification the screen has earned on their product page. The extent of the HDR capability here is pretty limited here as with most HDR400 screens. The screen can accept an HDR10 input signal and can tone map the content to the appropriate gamma curve, and can also provide quite a boost to the brightness on this model. We measured a peak luminance of 573 nits, including for full screen white patterns. That’s a decent way beyond the max SDR brightness of around 356 nits.

Unfortunately there is no backlight local dimming which would be necessary to actually improve the dynamic range / contrast ratio, so the screen cannot actually offer any contrast beyond the fairly mediocre ~900:1 native IPS panel contrast sadly. The screen accepts a 10-bit input signal, but the panel itself is limited to 8-bit only with an additional FRC stage seemingly added by the scaler. So there’s minimal benefit there in terms of colour gradation. The display is also a standard gamut only model, so lacks the colour enhancements associated with HDR which require a wider colour space. The increased peak brightness and ability to handle an HDR signal might be useful, but don’t expect any miracles here in regards to improving the contrast or colours. Calling it an “HDR gaming” screen is a stretch.

Console Gaming

The screen features the older generation HDMI 2.0 connectivity and capabilities with 2x ports provided. There is a native 1080p panel resolution which is supported by both the PS5 and Xbox Series X, and this will make it easier than 4K to prioritise refresh rate and frame rate, so you should be able to push the 120Hz nicely where the games support it. The screen will actually accept a ‘Virtual 4K’ input signal, which would then be limited to 4K @ 60Hz but it’s a viable option if you need to. Had the screen offered any real HDR capabilities (it doesn’t) then this could have been useful for Xbox which only supports HDR output at 4K. We can’t really think of a good reason why you’d want to use 4K input on this screen, just stick with 1080p and push refresh rate instead.

We confirmed also that the screen supports FreeSync over HDMI, giving VRR support for Xbox that supports that mode. We know that Sony plan to add HDMI-VRR via HDMI 2.1 “in the coming months”, but it is unlikely Sony will ever add FreeSync over HDMI for the PS5 sadly. Because it’s the older generation HDMI 2.0 capabilities, there is no HDMI-VRR, which might have made VRR for PS5 in the future more likely, but doesn’t matter for Xbox at all. It will not support ALLM although that isn’t needed here anyway, and cannot support Dolby Vision HDR sources or 4K 24Hz. We confirmed it will accept 50Hz and 60Hz signals as well as HDR10 content though.

For lots more information about the latest consoles and finding a suitable monitor for them, see our in depth article here.

Blur Busters Approved 2.0 – ‘PureXP+’ Blur Reduction Mode

There’s a big focus on the motion blur reduction mode for this screen and one of the highlights of the spec. ViewSonic call this strobing blur reduction mode “PureXP+” and on the XG2431 this includes a range of easy to use settings pre-tuned by Blur Busters that are pre-installed at the factory. In addition, an optional Custom PureXP+ mode can be tuned by end users via a simple to use download utility. This is the first display to pass the Blurbusters Approved 2.0 certification scheme as well.

As Mark at Blurbusters explains, “we factory-tuned ViewSonic XG2431 monitors to achieve among the world’s best motion blur reduction for an LCD, even better than the previous gold standard, NVIDIA ULMB. Blur Busters Approved 2.0 monitors are among the most CRT-motion-clarity desktop LCDs ever invented. In addition to pre-installed high quality strobe modes built into the monitor (strobing now even supports cable TV boxes and non-PC video sources), the ViewSonic monitor supports the optional ViewSonic Strobe Utility to allows advanced end users to get better-than-factory strobe tuning. It can do any CRT-motion-clarity refresh rate in 0.001Hz increments from ~59 Hz through ~241 Hz, and even supports Quick Frame Transport (QFT) tweaks. This allows some refresh rates to gain perfect zero-crosstalk operation with lower-lag-than-factory strobing completely free of double image effects. With a truly multisync strobe, you are not stuck to presets like only 120Hz.”

The PureXP+ mode cannot be used at the same time as VRR on this display sadly, unlike some modern Asus and Gigabyte screens for instance that allow simultaneous strobing backlight blur reduction and VRR. One annoying thing about this PureXP+ mode is that you cannot enable it until you’ve first disabled FreeSync from within the OSD menu. With the menu being a bit cumbersome and slow to navigate, this is an annoyance and it takes several steps to turn that off, then enable PureXP+, and then set it how you want. The downloadable utility makes enabling and setting PureXP+ quicker and easier, but you still need to disable FreeSync in the OSD menu manually first. Not to mention then having to re-enable it if you want to use VRR instead of blur reduction.

It would have been much better if you could just enabled PureXP+, and that would auto-disable FreeSync for you, and then ideally once you disable PureXP+ it would re-enable FreeSync for you. It would also have been useful to be able to get quick access to this mode from the OSD control buttons, as while you might want to enable it for gaming, you’d want to turn it off for normal desktop use to avoid unnecessary screen strobing and flickering for static usage. Using the software utility makes turning it off and on much quicker thankfully so is recommended for that part of things.

The OSD menu provides 4 preset modes called light, normal, extreme and ultra. Each one has a progressively shorter strobe length (the amount of time for which the backlight is strobed on) and this is designed to help improve motion clarity with each step. The shorter that strobe length, the clearer and cleaner the resulting motion should be. The main drawback of the shorter strobe length though is the brightness of the screen, and it gets darker the higher you push this setting. We measured a luminance in each mode of – light (214 cd/m²), normal (161 cd/m²), extreme (108 cd/m²) and ultra (54 cd/m²). Which mode you use will largely be down to how bright you want the screen to be for your given ambient light conditions and gaming title. Note that there is no control over the screens normal brightness control while PureXP+ is enabled. There are small benefits in motion clarity between each mode, but we would expect the brightness to be the more relevant deciding factor here when choosing a setting.

We have provided oscilloscope graphs at 240Hz in the ‘light’ and ‘ultra’ modes to demonstrate how the strobe on time (the width of each peak in the graph) shortens as you change between the modes. The strobing is always in sync with the refresh rate by the way, so here there’s a new strobe every 4.17ms for 240Hz, it just varies how long the backlight is on within that 4.17ms window, and how long it’s turned off.

Important to some people is the ability to use the strobing blur reduction mode at a range of different refresh rates including a single strobe 60Hz option. This might be desirable to some 60Hz gamers or when using external devices, although be warned that at 60Hz the flickering of the backlight is very noticeable due to the low frequency.

ViewSonic provide a useful and easy-to-use software utility for the screen as well, co-created with Blurbusters. When you open this you get a full screen UFO blur reduction test in the background (like this one if you run it at full screen) so you can see the difference in motion clarity across all areas of the screen while you make changes from the options listed. In the PureXP+ drop down menu you can switch between the preset modes quickly and easily, and also turn it off if you want. This is a far easier and quicker way to turn blur reduction on and off, and change between each mode than trying to use the OSD menu.

In this tool you can also make adjustments to the ‘custom’ mode using the 3 sliders beneath. These allow you to change the pulse width which dictates how bright the screen is by adjusting the length of the ‘on’ period of the strobe – the same thing we’ve just described above with the 4 preset modes. You can also change the strobe phase, which will control which regions of the screen are the clearest. By default the modes are set to make the central region of the screen the cleanest, but this can focus more on the top of bottom area if you’d rather. The overdrive setting gives you great control over the response times and overdrive at a granular level and you can tweak this to your liking to optimise the motion clarity, while trying to avoid overshoot – this might depend on your selected refresh rate as well.

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We tested the various modes in a range of refresh rates and settings and were impressed by the results. As normal with these blur reduction modes the image became sharper and crisper, and tracking moving objects across the screen was easier. There were minimal ghosting images behind the moving objects caused by strobe cross talk. The central area looked the best and clearest by default but this can be tweaked using the strobe utility if you want. It’s not perfectly clear, and you won’t get the same level of clarity as a high refresh rate OLED TV for instance where BFI (Black Frame Insertion) is used, but it’s certainly one of the better blur reduction modes we have used in the LCD monitor market.

Conclusion

The XG2431 is a very good gaming screen in many areas which is really its target usage. It doesn’t offer everything, but what it does offer, it makes a good job of it. The 1080p resolution would be considered pretty low nowadays in the monitor market, but if you’re looking for a smaller sized screen in this kind of range it’s really the only sensible option anyway, you don’t need higher. 1080p is still a popular choice for more competitive gamers as well, allowing you to focus more on driving frame rates and refresh rate. The 240Hz native refresh rate for PC gaming is great and offers improvements in motion clarity and performance over lower refresh rate screens.

Response times are good, offering a viable single overdrive mode mode option and some very good motion clarity. They could have been slightly better at the upper refresh rate end, although if you’re playing in that range you can also switch to the ‘ultra fast’ mode which is also very usable for a decent refresh rate range. The inclusion of adaptive sync for VRR from NVIDIA and AMD systems is welcome as always, and there is also a super low lag which is great news. The screen also handles consoles pretty well with 1080p 120Hz support, along with VRR for Xbox at least. Including HDMI 2.1 could have allowed VRR for PS5 potentially in the future when Sony add that feature, but that’s about the only important thing missing for console gamers. Obviously it’s not a 4K screen, which would be a bit pointless on something this size, so you can instead focus on pushing refresh rate in games.

The PureXP+ blur reduction mode is a nice feature as well, and it’s re-assuring to know that the screen has been through the stringent testing and optimisation processes of Blurbusters. There’s a good range of preset modes and settings to use, and the software utility is great for quickly and easily tweaking the custom mode. The performance was about as good as you can expect from an IPS LCD panel and good overall. The OSD makes it a bit annoying to switch between FreeSync VRR mode and blur reduction mode, and overall the menu is a bit tricky and slow to use and navigate.

Away from gaming the default factory setup was nice and accurate, and the IPS panel offers good all round performance you’d expect from this technology. The contrast ratio was a bit mediocre though, and the screen is standard gamut only. Fine (and easier) for SDR and normal office and general work, but lacking the colour boost you might want for gaming and multimedia. HDR support is very limited as well, lacking any backlight local dimming and even the wide colour gamut enhancements you would expect for this content, but at least offering a decent peak brightness improvement.

Overall it’s a solid gaming screen if you’re looking for something in the smaller range. The ViewSonic XG2431 is not available in the UK or Europe at this time, but is available in the US and Canada, including from Amazon (affiliate link). You can check the latest pricing and availability using our links below.

	Check pricing and availability in your region

Further reading – if you’re after a different gaming screen you should also check out our TFTCentral Recommendations List for Gaming Monitors

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