J’ai été une technologie à bas prix presque toute ma vie. J’ai rarement acheté un moniteur tout neuf; Je suis heureux de dire que j’ai reconstitué mon actuel configuration de bras oscillant articulé à trois écrans principalement de Craigslist et de hand-me-downs. Mais cet automne, j’ai eu l’occasion de remplacer temporairement mes trois écrans vieillissants par le moniteur de jeu le plus ridicule et le plus avancé jamais conçu: le Samsung Odyssey G9 ultra-ultra-large, ultra-incurvé et ultra-haute résolution de 49 pouces.

Le Samsung Odyssey G9 est un moniteur si grand, si large, si incurvé qu’il peut remplir un bureau de taille moyenne et envelopper tout votre champ de vision. C’est aussi tout simplement un écran phénoménal: rapide (240 Hz, 1 ms, G-Sync et FreeSync 2), haute résolution (5120 x 1440 pixels) et débordant de couleurs brillantes grâce à un panneau QLED qui culmine en un clin d’œil. 1000 lentes de luminosité. Je ne plaisante pas quand je dis que je dois détourner les yeux quand je lance Destin 2 en HDR, et je pourrais jurer que j’ai senti les flammes les premières fois Star Wars: EscadronsLe bombardier TIE a fait sauter un X-Wing dans l’oubli.

Comme ils disent sur Reddit, Je suis monté – et les dernières semaines ont été une expérience de jeu et de productivité comme je n’en ai jamais eu auparavant.

Mais petit à petit, je suis redescendu sur Terre.

Design

The Odyssey G9 is a showstopper, and I don’t just mean that figuratively: last January, attendees of the world’s biggest technology show were dazzled by its unprecedented curvature and sci-fi inspired frame.

When I put that same monitor on my humble IKEA sit-stand desk, the effect is otherworldly. Compared to my old hodgepodge of screens and rat’s nest of cabling, this G9 looks like a terminal aboard a Star Trek spaceship… even if my physical keyboard and its long braided cable ruin the illusion a bit.

The sheer size of the Odyssey G9 and its broad-shouldered stand do limit your options. I’m lucky that my small-form-factor Ncase M1 can fit behind the screen, and there’s just enough clearance (a little over six inches) for my Audioengine A2+ speakers to fit underneath the monitor at the stand’s highest position. But if I had a bigger PC or bigger speakers, I might have also needed a bigger desk — or else had to use the included 100mm x 100mm VESA adapter to mount the nearly four-feet wide, one-foot deep, 31-pound screen to the wall. My current monitor arms can’t carry nearly that much weight, though you can buy some TV arms that do.

As it is, I’m a fan of the way this monitor brings my whole desk together. Two DisplayPorts and an HDMI 2.0 port let me switch between three video sources easily, including a side-by-side mode which lets me display two at once, effectively giving my PC and game console (or a second computer) each their own 27-inch, 2560 x 1440 displays.

There’s also a two-port USB-A 3.0 hub and a 3.5mm audio output, which worked perfectly with my keyboard’s USB and 3.5mm audio passthrough. As you can see from my photos, I can do a lot with only a single visible cable thanks to those ports. And while the narrow V-shaped stand might seem a little minimal for a monitor this hefty, it takes a decent shove to get it to tip forward even at its highest position.

You can adjust the monitor’s settings using a tiny five-way control nub underneath the power LED, and it’s remarkable how much you can tweak — including the ability to crop the entire panel to 4:3, 16:9, or 21:9 aspect ratios instead of stretching out the image. You can effectively have a 27-inch HDR panel for your game console or TV whenever you need. It’s just a shame that the monitor’s biggest benefits don’t necessarily translate to its side-by-side mode, where your 240Hz HDR screen generally becomes a pair of 60Hz SDR ones.

Productivity

My first big test for Samsung’s Odyssey G9 wasn’t a console or even PC gaming — last month, I co-hosted The Verge’s industry-famous Apple event live blog, capturing every screenshot you saw. I normally run three monitors because I switch tasks like mad, and if there’s a better multitasking test than an Apple event, I haven’t met it yet.

At first, I wasn’t sure this epic screen would work. Most apps and websites aren’t designed to display across the vast expanse of a single 32:9 monitor, so you have to live in windows. I couldn’t simply toss one or two apps onto each monitor like I usually do. But while Samsung doesn’t ship the G9 with any good windowing software and Windows 10’s default Snap is woefully insufficient, Microsoft’s free downloadable FancyZones windowing manager worked wonders.

l built my own set of dedicated snappable spots for the Apple live stream; The Verge’s live-blogging tool; Slack; a browser window to keep track of any Apple press releases that might pop during the show; and even a narrow strip of Windows Explorer so I could see which images I’d already captured and weed them out as necessary. The only other wrinkle was the additional Chrome extension I had to download to ensure YouTube could launch “full screen” in a browser window, instead of taking over my entire ultrawide monitor.

In general, while I did occasionally miss my two vertically oriented monitors for scrolling long webpages, Google Docs, and Tweetdeck, I found the G9’s gigantic horizontal expanse of real estate nearly as effective for most tasks. Where I could only squeeze four narrow columns of Tweetdeck onto my old portrait-orientation screens, the G9 would comfortably fit five, plus a 30-tab web browser, a nice vertical strip of Evernote for note-taking, and our Slack newsroom alongside.

I wouldn’t say it’s better than having three screens for work, but it seems like a sufficient substitute — except maybe that toast notifications now pop up in the corner of my eye where they’re pretty easy to miss. Still, it’s nice not to have to match color, contrast, and brightness across three screens at a time, or adjust how my mouse crosses from one monitor to the next. Having a single, vast, unbroken expanse of real estate that’s always the same distance from my face (as I spin in my chair) is an absolute treat. And while the Odyssey G9’s unprecedented curve does tend to catch ambient light, the matte screen does a great job of diffusing any glare.

The ultrawide aspect ratio didn’t work as well for video as I hoped, though. While you might imagine 32:9 being great for movies, I had a hard time finding anything I could play in ultra high definition that wasn’t 16:9. Most streaming platforms won’t easily let you access their 4K and HDR content on a Windows machine to begin with — YouTube’s the primary exception, though Netflix works if you’ve got a recent Intel processor and use Microsoft Edge or the native app — and you’ll want 4K to take advantage of a screen this high-res and this close to your face. The 4K YouTube videos I played were definitely clearer than 1080p — I could really peep these pixels in Dieter’s iPhone 12 video review. And while standard 16:9, 1080p content does display just fine full-screen with black borders on the sides, it feels like I’m wasting a lot of screen real estate that way. Plus, the blacks are a bit gray, not the deep inky black you’d get from an OLED screen — particularly with HDR on and Samsung’s iffy local dimming enabled.

Gaming

The first thing you should know about gaming on the Odyssey G9 is that you’ll want a serious graphics card to go with it. Technically, 5120 x 1440 resolution isn’t quite as many pixels as a 3840 x 2160 4K UHD screen… but remember we’re also talking about a monitor that goes up to 240Hz. To properly review the Odyssey G9, I borrowed an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 to get enough horsepower, since my GTX 1080 couldn’t even run games like Death Stranding or Destiny 2 at 60fps smoothly at that resolution.

The second thing you should know about gaming on the Odyssey G9 is that it may not be quite as immersive as you’re imagining.

Don’t get me wrong: having an X-Wing cockpit wrapped all around you is an epic experience, and it feels like a true advantage to be able to use my peripheral vision in competitive shooters like PUBG and CS:GO. But it wasn’t long until I noticed something weird going on.

Look carefully at these images: notice how the sides are warped? Imperial deck officers and Novigrad Temple Guards aren’t generally this pudgy.

I tried game after game after game on the Odyssey G9, digging into my Steam, Epic, and Uplay libraries and tweaking a variety of settings, and this is simply the reality: every 3D game gets warped when you’re viewing it in a 32:9 aspect ratio, and there’s not much you can do about it. Changing your field of view in a game doesn’t get rid of the effect; it simply changes how much of the game world appears in the center of your screen (where things look normal) and at the edges (where they look stretched and zoomed). I actually pulled out a tape measure and checked: video game content that measures 4.75 inches at the center of the display can get stretched to a full 12 inches at the edges.

Now, this isn’t Samsung’s fault; it’s just the way games are built. Most games have a single virtual camera that exists at a single point in space, and while Nvidia once proposed changing that (see link above), the company’s Simultaneous Multi-Projection doesn’t seem to have made it into any of the games I tested. And in games with pre-rendered cutscenes, like Final Fantasy XV, you’ll be watching them at their original aspect ratio.

But before you write off 32:9 ultrawides right now, there are three things I’d like you to consider:

• You might get used to it.
• It’s not that distracting in some games!
• 2D games aren’t affected at all.

Let me give you some examples.

CS:GO and PUBG are incredibly competitive, nail-biting games where focus is everything, where you always need to have your gun at the ready and be scanning for any sign of movement. I don’t have time to turn my head left and right to appreciate the scenery or think about whether it’s warped. The G9 simply gives me enhanced peripheral vision, and it helps — not hurts — that things which appear in the corner of my eye are zoomed in by default. I got used to treating it as my peripheral vision and nothing else. (The 240Hz also comes in pretty handy in games like CS:GO where you can actually hit that frame rate.)

Genshin Impact, Abzû, Rocket League, and BioShock Infinite are games with gorgeous, colorful worlds whose proportions aren’t “normal” to begin with, and I love having them wrapped around me.

In Destiny 2 and XCOM 2, I found I could forgive the warping because of the enhanced field of view and the ability to easily zoom whenever you want. It’s nice to see more of the battlefield at once in XCOM while planning out how my soldiers will move each turn, and it’s pretty cool to aim down the sights in Destiny without the typical claustrophobia that comes with zooming in, since you’re still able to see what’s going on around you.

2D / 2.5D games like Worms W.M.D and Disco Elysium do look fantastic on the G9 — when you can find ones that actually support an ultrawide screen. That’s not a given: I managed to launch Soldat at 5120 x 1440 resolution, but it didn’t stretch across my monitor. Games with fixed widths like Streets of Rage 4 and Hyper Light Drifter won’t either. Even Disco Elysium only offers 21:9 support, not 32:9, unless you apply a hack.

And for every one of the 3D games that worked, I also found a Borderlands 3 or The Witness or Goat of Duty or The Witcher 3 where the warped geometry really bugged me, either because I wanted to sit back and look at the beautiful vista or because the edges of my screen were moving faster than the center.

That’s not easy to show you in still images, so here’s a video clip to show you what I mean:

Dans des jeux comme le hack-and-slash Mordhau ou le road-trip Final Fantasy XV, la distraction peut également se produire lorsqu’un élément de géométrie essentiel au jeu semble constamment faux. (Votre Mordhau l’épée ou la hache s’étend souvent dans la zone déformée de l’écran; la route elle-même FFXV semble incurvé au lieu d’être plat!)

Franchement, le jeu le plus ennuyeux auquel j’ai joué sur l’Odyssey G9 était de déterminer quels jeux fonctionneraient en premier lieu. Ici, je dois crier Fusil à pompe en papier de rochele château de Katharine, dont le brillant guide rempli d’exemples présente près de trois douzaines de titres qui fonctionnent, avec des GIF pour que vous puissiez voir par vous-même. Mais si vous êtes prêt à y travailler (et à comprendre les risques), une communauté au Forum de jeu grand écran (WSGF) et PCGamingWiki peut vous aider à pirater et à corriger de nombreux titres existants pour qu’ils fonctionnent également en 32: 9.

Par exemple, j’ai installé un entraîneur qui m’a permis de courir Death Stranding en pleine résolution 32: 9, avec un champ de vision infiniment réglable, au lieu du 21: 9 que le designer Hideo Kojima et sa société ont expédié.

En utilisant un tutoriel commun, J’ai modifié mon Persona 4 Doré .exe et a remarquablement fini de jouer à ce qui était à l’origine un jeu PlayStation 2 480p – et plus tard un jeu PlayStation Vita 720p, 16: 9 – à un magnifique 3840 x 1080 à 32: 9. (J’ai encore besoin de trouver comment dé-étirer l’interface utilisateur.) Et il y a un ancien programme non maintenu appelé Fixateur pour écran large qui m’a aidé à revoir un vieux favori:

Je ne dirais pas que la communauté est suffisamment robuste pour que vous puissiez nécessairement trouver une solution pour n’importe quel jeu de votre bibliothèque. Mais le WSGF a maintenant un Discord vous voudrez peut-être vérifier.

L’ultra-large ultime, mais le meilleur moniteur?

Le Samsung Odyssey G9 coûte 1479,99 $ – un prix premium pour un moniteur haut de gamme comme rien d’autre sur le marché. Vous pouvez trouver d’autres panneaux 32: 9 de 49 pouces moins chers, mais aucun avec cette combinaison de résolution, de luminosité, de courbure et de taux de rafraîchissement. Le Samsung CRG9 de 1200 $ de l’année dernière, qui maintient la résolution et la luminosité, mais avec la moitié du taux de rafraîchissement à 120 Hz et une courbure 1800R nettement moins prononcée – ce qui, j’imagine, ne serait pas aussi bon pour vous donner une vision périphérique convaincante dans les jeux.

Si vous recherchez l’ultra-large ultime, c’est pour le moment. Je ne suis tout simplement pas convaincu que je le suis personnellement, même si j’avais autant d’argent pour un nouvel écran. Pour 1500 $ et l’énorme espace que consomme l’Odyssey G9, je pourrais acheter un téléviseur LG OLED de 48 pouces à la place. J’obtiendrais un écran tout aussi gigantesque pour mon multitâche, mais plus grand, avec la prise en charge de 120 Hz G-Sync et FreeSync, des noirs incroyablement profonds, HDMI 2.1 pour un taux de rafraîchissement variable pour la PS5 et la Xbox Series X, et pas besoin de dépanner les ratios d’aspect pour mes vidéos et mes jeux. Linus Tech Tips a une vidéo qui plonge profondément dans les avantages et les inconvénients de cet écran LG, et j’en suis assez convaincu.

Ce ne serait pas la même expérience que celle offerte par le G9, bien sûr, et je pourrais le regretter si Nvidia et AMD époussetaient jamais la multi-projection simultanée pour de vrai. Le téléviseur peut également couper l’accès à une grande partie de mon bureau et je ne pourrai peut-être pas placer mon ordinateur et mes haut-parleurs à portée de main sans bloquer un peu l’écran. Mais j’aurais une configuration plus visiblement à l’épreuve du temps; une image également, sinon plus magnifique; et beaucoup moins de gêne ambiante quand je veux jouer. À tout le moins, j’espère que Samsung ajoutera HDMI 2.1 à ce moniteur épique l’année prochaine.

Photographie et captures d’écran par Sean Hollister / The Verge

Correction: Une version antérieure de cette revue indiquait que la division de l’écran en deux écrans 16: 9 équivalait à deux moniteurs de 24,5 pouces. Cela ressemble plus à deux moniteurs de 27 pouces. Nous regrettons l’erreur.