Budget Monitor and GPU upgrade: Best bang for the buck improvement over 1080p60Hz? Are RTX HDR (for games) and RTX Remix worth it?

wintercat · March 9

Budget: ~$500 USD, flexible

Country: USA

Games: Hunt:Showdown, singleplayer Capcom games, a lot of old games and indies

Other details: Currently running an Intel i5-7600K w/ 16GB RAM, GTX 1070 8GB VRAM, Acer G6 G276HL Gbd 27" VA 1080p60Hz (trash $150 monitor from 10 years ago)

I've been using the same 2 cheap 27" VA panels for a decade, and I've been feeling the need for an upgrade for a couple years now. I'm looking for best bang for the buck budget upgrade to start with while I save for an OLED that can do it all.

The monitors that have stood out to me while watching/reading reviews have been the:

AOC Q27G3XMN : Great value 27" VA (like what I'm used to!), 1440p, 120Hz+, HDR and really good mini-LED local dimming. Will still have some ghosting and blur in most scenarios, though probably better than what I use now.

LG 27GP850-B/27GP83B-B : 27" nanoIPS that's been going on sale lately. 1440p, 120Hz+, really good response times and motion clarity. Supports HDR but will look terrible for dark games in a dark room. The more expensive model o/c's up to 180Hz and has a passable backlight strobing/BFI feature that I could use while playing some old games, maybe.

Koorui 24E3 165Hz : Crazy cheap 24" IPS, denser PPI even with 1080p and able to play at 120Hz+ with minimal ghosting.

My question to y'all is which was a more impactful upgrade for you: better color and contrast with HDR or decent motion clarity? Jumping from 1080p to 1440p or, again, decent motion clarity?

The biggest factors pushing me from my current display is the lack of VRR and being capped at 60Hz. Beyond that I'm interested in anything that will improve image quality, both for immersive single player gaming and for target acquisition in Hunt: Showdown. If I had to pick I would say the motion blur when tracking or flicking my mouse quickly probably bugs me more than the low PPI, but it's pretty close. The motion blur is painful in every game, but the low PPI is especially noticeable in Hunt (lots of foliage and long-distance shots).

I could save a lot of money and just get the Koorui for VRR and high refresh rate, but I know the denser PPI won't matter much since I'll just sit closer. If I splurge a little bit for 1440p and HDR I have a choice between consistently good HDR or consistently good motion clarity.

HDR isn't something I'm missing at all right now, except that it would let me edit photos on my PC as well as my phone. However I'm very, very interested in the recent mod that lets you run older games with automatic HDR on an Nvidia RTX GPU. Also, I play plenty of dark games and even if they don't support HDR, such as Hunt, I know the IPS panels without local dimming are going to have worse image quality in that regard.

To run the higher refresh rates I'll need to finally replace my beloved 1070 with something that can tide me over until I save up for my 4K120Hz goals. The obvious choice would be Team Red, but then I saw this video on modding Nvidia's RTX HDR Video feature to work for games: https://youtu.be/BditFs3VR9c?si=Dgb9bL7_dLjhrMga. This is pretty compelling, and so is the potential of RTX Remix.

I'm mostly targeting singleplayer Capcom games and Hunt: Showdown with my build goals, but I enjoy a lot of older games and lo-fi indie games as well. I especially enjoy playing older games that have had plenty of modding love so it can look and play exactly how I want it to. There's a lot of immediate value there with how many games I could enjoy in HDR. Remix has very little immediate value outside of Morrowind and Quake but it's exciting if it were to become popular in modding and remasters.

Has anyone else tried out this HDR mod? Anyone have any thoughts on whether RTX Remix modding will take off or fade away? Is the Nvidia tax worth it, especially when you factor in games that support DLSS or path-tracing and the GeForce Experience ecosystem I've been used to for years? Any specific GPUs from either side you think I should look out for on the used market? It seemed to me a mid-range last-gen GPU is about what I'm looking for.