LG 34UM67 Introduction and Overview

LG as a company has many products and certainly offers some strong competition. Their product line includes HDTVs and computer displays, smartphones and smart watches, fitness bands, home appliances, audio accessories, commercial AC and lighting, and numerous other offerings; in short, LG is a brand we’ve all encountered. Given their strong presence in the HDTV market over the years, computer displays should be a strong category for LG, and with one of the first shipping FreeSync displays, LG is at the front of the pack as far as new technologies are concerned. But being first doesn’t necessarily mean being best.

As the first FreeSync display to cross our desks, the LG 34UM67 has some good and bad elements. In many ways it feels like the larger version of the LG 29EA93 we reviewed a while back, albeit in an improved design and with most of the early 21:9 issues having been ironed out. The price is also lower now, so for less money you can get a more capable 34” display instead of 29”. But with FreeSync being the marquee feature, the supported refresh rates of 48-75 Hz can be something of a problem.

But let’s not jump too far ahead. Fundamentally this is a computer display, so let’s talk about the design, features, and other elements before we continue. After testing the two previous TN-based G-SYNC displays, the Acer XB280HK and the ASUS ROG Swift PG278Q, the change back to an IPS panel is immediately noticeable. From an ideal viewing location it may not matter as much, but get off axis at all and IPS is definitely superior. The color quality also looks quite good out of the box – not sufficient for professional use, perhaps, but definitely better than most lesser panels.

In terms of connectivity, LG includes multiple input options: DisplayPort, HDMI, and dual-link DVI-D are present. There are also two 7W downward facing speakers in the screen, with audio in/out ports on the back. One thing you won’t find however are any USB ports. The built-in stand likewise offers no height adjustment, rotate, or swivel – the only thing you can do is tilt it forward/backward. There is a 100x100mm VESA mount, however, so the stand at least can be replaced. From an ergonomics perspective, the built-in stand isn’t very good, but it does at least provide a good level of support (which is often an issue on budget displays).

Power is provided via a power brick, which is unfortunate and likely unnecessary – the bulk of the display should have easily allowed for placing the power circuit inside the chassis. There are also no cable routing features, so all the wires simply connect directly into the back of the display above the stand hinge.

Moving to the OSD (On Screen Display), LG offers plenty of options. The controls consist of a 4-way nub located at the bottom-center of the panel, and while it might not seem ideal I didn’t find it to be particularly problematic either. The nub also serves as the power button if you press it when outside of the OSD menus. All of the usual settings are present, including various color modes, brightness/contrast, the ability to tune the RGB output (and even a more advanced option that allows adjustment of six colors (Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow – both hue and saturation can be altered), and input selection.

Areas where LG adds extras to the OSD include the PBP (Picture Beside Picture) mode, where you can do a split screen view while using two connections, gaming modes designed to improve (in theory) pixel response times and reduce input lag (DAS aka Dynamic Action Sync), and of course the option to enable/disable FreeSync. I don’t know why it’s necessary to inherently provide the option to disable FreeSync, though – if your GPU doesn’t support the standard, the display should simply function as normal with a static refresh rate.

I want to note that the DAS mode and FreeSync actually caused problems on at least one occasion, as the first time I booted with the display connected FreeSync was disabled and when I turned it on the screen went black and never came back on – I had to restart the PC but then things worked properly. DAS did the same thing when I turned it off at one point, though this time power cycling the display fixed the issue. After that, DAS mode was grayed out, and it’s not clear why that’s the case. Disabling FreeSync didn’t allow me to change DAS mode, but switching to one of the preset picture modes other that Custom brought back the option to change the DAS mode.

It looks like there’s are a few minor bugs in the display firmware, but personally I tend to set up a display and then rarely change things, so it’s not a huge concern. If you happen to regularly tweak the OSD settings on your display, however, you might find the current 34UM67 OSD to be a bit irritating. I also missed the option to adjust the OSD timeout; it's about 20 seconds with no way to make it any longer. As it stands, it’s neither the best nor the worst OSD menu that I’ve encountered, and in general it does what it needs to do.

LG 34UM67 Specifications
Video Inputs	1x DisplayPort 1.2a 1x HDMI 1.3 1x DL-DVI
Panel Type	IPS
Pixel Pitch	0.312mm x 0.310mm
Colors	16.7 Million
Brightness	300 cd/m2
Contrast Ratio	Not Specified (>600:1 measured)
Response Time	14ms
Viewable Size	34"
Resolution	2560x1080
Viewing Angle (H/V)	176 / 176
Backlight	White LED
Power Consumption (operation)	53W Typical
Power Consumption (standby)	<0.5W
Screen Treatment	Anti-Glare
Height-Adjustable	No
Tilt	Yes, -5 to 15 degrees
Pivot	Yes
Swivel	Yes
VESA Wall Mounting	Yes, 100mm x 100mm
Dimensions w/ Base (WxHxD)	830mm x 469mm x 173mm
Weight	7.3kg
Additional Features	2 x 7W speakers Audio in/out
Limited Warranty	2 Years
Accessories	AC Power Brick DisplayPort Cable HDMI Cable
Price	$649 MSRP

FreeSync Gaming on the LG 34UM67

The LG34UM67 is a great example of what LG does right as well as where it falls short. FreeSync is a technology largely geared towards gaming, but LG strikes new ground in ways that can be both good and bad. The UltraWide 21:9 resolution can be a blessing or a curse, depending on the game – even in 2015, there are sadly numerous games where the aspect ratio causes problems. When it works, it can provide a cinematic experience that draws you into the game; when it doesn’t, you get stretched models and a skewed aspect ratio. Sometimes registry or configuration file hacks can fix the problem, but 21:9 is still new enough that it doesn’t see direct support in most games.

My, Lara, you’ve let yourself go….

Tomb Raider with registry hack to fix the aspect ratio (using 2560/1080*10000 = 23703/0x5c97).

Similarly, the use of an IPS panel can be good and bad. The good news is that you get the wide viewing angles associated with IPS – and really, for a 34” display you’re going to want them! – but at the same time there’s a question of pixel response times, with most IPS panels rated at 5ms+ compared to TN panels rated at 1-2ms. LG specifies a response time of 14ms for the 34UM67, though they don’t mention whether that’s GtG or Tr/Tf. There’s also a setting in the OSD to improve response times, which we used to capture the following images with a 1/400s shutter speed. In the gallery below, we also compare the LG 34UM67 with the ASUS ROG Swift to show how the two panels handle the same content (from AMD’s FreeSync Demo).

LG 34UM67

ASUS ROG Swift PG278Q

My personal opinion is that LG's 14ms response time value may be incorrect, at least depending on the setting. The ASUS ROG Swift clearly has a faster response time in the above images and gallery, and if we compare best-case ghosting results, the “Normal” setting on the ASUS is very good while even the “High” setting on the LG still shows about two-thirds of the blades ghosting – I had some other images where the ghosting indicates the transition between frames occurs by the time around half of the display has been updated (~8ms). But the windmill in AMD's FreeSync demo is actually something of a best-case scenario if you happen to enable overdrive features. Let's look at what may be less ideal: F1 2014.

LG 34UM67 with Image Response on High

ASUS ROG Swift PG278Q with "Normal" Overdrive

Here the tables turn, with Normal Overdrive on the ASUS display causing some rather obvious artifacts, and if you enable Extreme Overdrive it can be very distracting. The LG display by comparison doesn't show any artifacting from increasing the Response Time setting, and at High it shows much less ghosting than in the windmill demo. I still like the higher refresh rates of the ASUS display, but I also very much prefer the IPS panel in the LG. The long and short of the response time question is that it's going to depend at least in part on the content you're viewing. Personally, I was never been bothered by ghosting on the 34UM67; your mileage may vary.

Perhaps the biggest flaw with the LG 34UM67 however comes down to the implementation of FreeSync. While FreeSync is in theory capable of supporting refresh rates as low as 9Hz and as high as 240Hz, in practice the display manufacturers need to choose a range where their display will function optimally. All crystal matrices will experience some decay over time, so if you refresh the display too infrequently you can get an undesirable flicker/fade effect in between updates. The maximum refresh rate is less of a concern, but if the pixel response time is too slow then refreshing faster won’t do any good. In the case of the 34UM67 and 29UM67, LG has selected a variable refresh rate range of 48 to 75 Hz. That can be both too high (on the minimum) and too low (on the maximum).

What that means is that as long as you’re running at 48 FPS to 75 FPS in a game, everything looks nice and smooth. Try to go above that value and you’ll either get some moderately noticeable tearing (VSYNC Off) or else you’ll max out at 75 FPS (VSYNC On), which is also fine. The real issue is when you drop below 48 FPS. You’re basically falling back to standard LCD behavior at that point, so either you have very noticeable tearing with a 75Hz refresh rate (AMD tells us that they drive a display at its max refresh rate when the frame rate drops below the cutoff) or you get stutter/judder from subdividing a sub-48 FPS frame rate into a 75Hz refresh rate. This is definitely an issue you can encounter, and the limited 48-75 Hz FreeSync range is a real concern.

Tearing is visible in the center of the windmill.

Some will point at this and lay the blame on AMD’s FreeSync and/or DisplayPort Active-Sync, but really that’s just a standard that allows the GPU and display to refresh at variable rates. The real problem here is the minimum refresh rate chosen by the manufacturer. AMD can still potentially improve the situation with driver tweaks (e.g. sending a frame exactly twice when the GPU falls below the minimum supported refresh rate), but while that should work fine on something like the Acer or BenQ FreeSync displays that support 40-144Hz, the two LG displays (34UM67 and 29UM67) have both the highest minimum and the lowest maximum refresh rate and so it won’t work quite as well. Of course all that is a moot point with the current AMD drivers, which leave you with a choice between tearing or judder at <48 FPS.

Ultimately, the gaming experience on the LG 34UM67 ends up being both better and worse than what I’ve seen with G-SYNC. It’s better in the sense that IPS is better – I’ve had a real dislike of TN panels for a decade now, for all the usual reasons. I’m not bothered by the response times either, and armed with an AMD Radeon R9 290X there are really not too many occasions where falling below 48 FPS is a problem. We typically look at 2560x1440 Ultra quality settings when comparing high-end GPUs, and the R9 290X usually is able to hit 48+ FPS or higher in most recent games. Where it falls short, a drop to Very High or High settings (or disabling 4xMSAA or similar) is usually all you need to do. Now couple that with 25% fewer pixels to render (2560x1080 vs. 2560x1440) and you will typically see frame rates improve by 20% or more compared to WQHD. So if you have an R9 290X (which can be had for as little as $310 these days), I don’t see falling below 48 FPS as a real problem… but going above 75 FPS will certainly happen.

On lesser hardware the story isn’t quite so rosy, unfortunately. The $240 Radeon R9 285 will mostly require High settings at 2560x1080 in demanding games, and if you have anything slower than that you will frequently not hit the 48-75 FPS sweet spot. Since the primary reason to buy a FreeSync capable display is presumably to avoid tearing and judder (as much as possible), what we’d really need to see is panels that support variable refresh rates from 30-100+ Hz at a minimum. The Acer and BenQ FreeSync displays are closer (40-144 Hz), but the 30-40 FPS range is still going to be a better experience on G-SYNC right now. If AMD can tweak their drivers to understand the minimum refresh rates of FreeSync monitors they might be able to work around some of the issues (e.g. by sending two frames at 78 Hz instead of one frame at 39 Hz), but until/unless that happens there are cases where G-SYNC simply works better.

Of course, G-SYNC displays also carry a price premium, but some of the price difference appears to go towards providing better panels or at least a "better" scaler. Again, this isn’t a flaw with FreeSync so much as an issue with the current generation of hardware scalers and displays. Long-term I expect the situation will improve, but waiting for driver updates is never a fun game to play. Perhaps more importantly however, the FreeSync displays are at worst a better experience on AMD GPUs than the normal fixed refresh rate monitors that have been around for decades. AMD can’t support G-SYNC, so the real choice is going to be whether you want to buy a FreeSync display now or use a “normal” display. The price premium doesn’t appear to be any more than $50, and it might be even lower once the newness fades a bit. Everything else being equal, for AMD GPUs I’d rather have FreeSync than not, which seems like the goal AMD set out to achieve.

LG 34UM67 Brightness and Contrast

Moving on from the FreeSync discussion, we still need to see how the LG 34UM67 fares as a display. We’ve run our usual assessments to look at brightness, contrast, color accuracy, and uniformity. We’ll start with the brightness results. The LG FreeSync 34UM67 is in orange/red while we've highlighted the ASUS PG278Q in cyan/blue.

Set to maximum brightness with the default (50/50/50) RGB values, the 34UM67 can output 306 nits, which is just above the rated 300 nits. However, you can increase the output a bit more by maxing out the RGB values at 100, which gives us the above result of 321 cd/m2. This is plenty bright for most people, and more than I would normally need (outside of situations where the display needs to overcome reflections and lights during the day.) Setting the brightness to the minimum level with 50% RGB drops the display to 52 cd/m2, which is perhaps a bit too bright, but if you tweak RGB settings you can get as low as 19 cd/m2. That can work even in very dark rooms, so LG has covered all the necessary output range.

Black levels are okay but nothing amazing. At the maximum backlight (with the OSD Black Stabilizer set to 0 – increasing it will increase black levels somewhat, ostensibly to help you see dark areas in games better), we measured 0.3077 cd/m2. Going to the minimum backlight level this falls down to 0.0255 cd/m2. Interestingly, LG doesn’t appear to be using any form of dynamic contrast, so whether we test with a full screen color or 50% APL patterns makes no difference. That’s a good thing if you’re wondering, as dynamic contrast often ends up being more of a distraction than a benefit (IMO).

The resulting contrast ratios range from just over 1000:1 to closer to 750:1, but the contrast ratio stays pretty consistent until the very lowest brightness settings. Also note that our i1 Pro meter isn’t the most accurate sensor for black levels, so that might contribute to some of the difference. Overall, the contrast ratio is good but not exceptional.

LG 34UM67 sRGB Data and Bench Tests

For color accuracy, we test before and after calibration. For calibration, we use SpectraCal CalMAN with our own custom workflow. We target 200 cd/m2 of light output with a gamma of 2.2 and the sRGB color gamut, which corresponds to a general real-world use case. We use an i1 Pro provided by X-Rite. All measurements use APL 50% patterns except for uniformity testing, which uses full field.

LG 34UM67 Pre/Post Calibration
	Pre-Calibration, 200 cd/m2	Post-Calibration, 200 cd/m2	Post-Calibration, 80 cd/m2
White Level ( cd/m2)	201	198.7	79.3
Black Level ( cd/m2)	0.2056	.2153	.0977
Contrast Ratio	978:1	923:1	811:1
Gamma (Average)	2.18	2.21	2.21
Color Temperature	6558K	6548K	6482K
Grayscale dE2000	2.94	0.38	0.99
Color Checker dE2000	2.49	1.24	1.39
Saturations dE2000	2.14	1.07	1.17

Before calibration, the LG 34UM67 has a slight blue tint to the grayscale but nothing too noticeable – especially for gaming purposes. Tweaking the OSD settings to 53/50/47 RGB gives a result reasonably close to the ideal 6504K color target. The grayscale errors are all under 4.0 dE2000, which is potentially visible but not overly so, with an average error level of 2.9 dE2000. The gamma curve isn’t great, starting high and ending low but with an average of 2.18 that’s close to our 2.2 target, so things can definitely be improved. Moving to colors, there are a few larger errors of nearly 5.0, mostly in the yellows and oranges. Some of these are due to the gamut falling slightly higher than sRGB, leading to some oversaturation of green and red.

Post-calibration the gamma and RGB balance are almost perfect. The average grayscale dE2000 falls to well below 1.0, which is invisible to the naked eye. Colorchecker and saturation accuracy improves as well, though there are still colors in the 4.0 range. Again, it’s mostly shades of yellows, oranges, and some greens that cause problems, which unfortunately tend to be the worst colors to have wrong for imaging professionals. Overall it’s a good monitor, and the target audience clearly isn’t going to be imaging professionals, so with or without calibration it will do well for gaming, movie watching, and other general tasks.

Changing to 80 cd/m2, the calibration results remain pretty consistent. The dE2000 numbers are slightly higher, but if the small change in accuracy is a concern then potential buyers would have already passed on this display. Only the most finicky of regular consumers might find something to complain about.

It’s also worth quickly discussing some of the other color modes, just because certain ones can be so far off that it’s a wonder anyone would even consider using them. LG offers four picture modes (Photo, Cinema, Reader 1, and Reader 2). Photos has a strong blue tint with average grayscale dE of 6.4 and many values nearing 10.0, though colors aren’t quite so bad averaging closer to 5.0. The Cinema mode is pretty close to the Custom setting, so while it’s tinted blue the grayscale dE is 2.3 while the colors average close to 4.0, with skin tones often falling into the 6.0+ range. Reader 1 and 2 are supposed to be more like print, with the results being heavily red biased with limited blue, and minimum black levels are much higher (2.5 cd/m2). The resulting grayscale dE2000 of 10.8/8.7 and average colors of 7.5/6.0 however are not particularly useful.

And that sums up why NVIDIA didn’t bother with supporting specialized color modes on their G-SYNC module: doing one color mode properly is generally more useful than supporting multiple incorrect color modes. While some people might appreciate the ability to quickly switch between various color modes, most just set up a display for everyday use and leave it be. Most named presets other than “standard” or “custom” end up being bullet points more than anything useful.

LG 34UM67 Display Uniformity

Given the size of the display, creating good uniformity can be difficult. Most of the display does reasonably well, with the corners tending to vary a bit more the center. The left side of our sample in particular looks a bit dim, but it’s only something you really notice when you look for it.

Starting with white uniformity, the center ends up being close to the brightest area, when most other sectors dropping off slightly. The center portion along with the bottom are all within 10%, which is a good result, but the top left and right corners fall off by up to 15%. Professionals would appreciate better uniformity overall, but for gaming the LG 34UM67 works well.

Black uniformity interestingly is a bit of a reverse from the white, with many areas showing slightly higher black levels than the center. However, our i1 Pro is not the best device for measuring black levels and the actual difference between 0.315 cd/m2 and 0.387 cd/m2 isn’t all the great when looking with your physical eyes, even though it’s a 23% difference. There’s a lot of variability in the charts, but mostly the corners seem to be the biggest outliers.

Compared to our earlier calibrated results, or uniformity contrast measurements have all fallen off quite a bit. Our measured contrast this time ranges from 465:1 on the bottom-right corner to as high as 662:1 just above the center, but I think most of the black levels were measured too high so the contrast results are only moderately useful.

Delta E shows similar uniformity again. The top-left edge and top-right seem to have the greatest variance, but for a non-professional display most of this discussion is academic.

The short summary is that uniformity on the LG 34UM67 is good but not exceptional. There will obviously be differences between panels, so where we had problems primarily on the corners and left/right edges, other displays may show more or less issues. Perhaps the most telling aspect is that prior to testing uniformity, I looked carefully over the display with a variety of solid background images to see if I could detect any problems. There are some very minor discolorations that show up primarily when viewing pure white, but the size of the display makes the corners more of an acute viewing angle so it often feels like that’s as big of a problem as display uniformity.

LG 34UM67 Power Use, Gamut, and Input Lag

With a full white screen and the brightness set to maximum, the LG 34UM67 uses 48 watts of power at the outlet. Setting the backlight to the minimum setting reduces this down to 18 watts. Targeting 200 cd/m2 meanwhile gives us a power draw of 35W. These results are really quite good for this size display.

The 34UM67 reproduces 75.4% of the AdobeRGB color space and 110% of sRGB (though some colors fall short while others are well above the sRGB spec). This is exactly what it sets out to do and is acceptable for a consumer-focused gaming display.

Input Lag?

As we lack the hardware to properly test for input lag, the only thing I can comment on is the experience. I’m not the best person for sensing input lag, though anything above 30ms or so definitely makes me notice. Having used several G-SYNC displays as well as many laptop displays over the years, I didn’t notice any issues with the LG display – if anything I’d say it was perhaps slightly more responsive than other (non-G-SYNC) displays I’ve used, perhaps thanks to the DAS feature. At least as far as input lag goes, there were no problems in my experience, and I’ve seen reports of ~10ms online which would agree with my subjective assessment. Other displays may show less input lag, but below 20ms it gets very difficult to notice.

LG 34UM67 Conclusions

There are a couple aspects to this review that we want to address in the conclusion. First is how the 34UM67 fares as a monitor in general. Here things are generally similar to what we said about one of its precursors, the LG 29EA93. The 21:9 aspect ratio is at the very least an interesting alternative to other display options. If you watch a lot of anamorphic widescreen movies, it can be awesome; for playing games, the wider field of view is again very interesting, at least when the game properly supports the aspect ratio. In some ways it’s like having a couple of 1280x1080 displays sitting next to each other, except with zero bezel gap between them. While there are plenty of people that prefer taller aspect ratios (e.g. 16:10 vs. 16:9), there is also a market for even wider aspect ratios like 21:9. This may be more of a niche market than other options, but it’s definitely a viable niche.

Getting into the monitor characteristics, the 34UM67 is a very large display compared to what most people use. Being a 34” UltraWide display, it’s actually much wider than my old 30” WQXGA display that I used for most of the past ten years. My 30” display measures just over 27” wide and is 19-23” tall (with height adjustment); in contrast the 34UM67 is just under 33” wide, but it’s only 18.5” tall. If you’re height constrained but have the ability to support multiple displays, something like this 34” UltraWide format might be an interesting alternative; on the other hand, on a typical office desk the horizontal footprint can be absolutely massive.

Out of the box, the general image quality is good if not exceptional. Colors are reasonably accurate, contrast is a decent ~1000:1, and at least subjectively the pixel response times are acceptable for any purpose including intense gaming. Calibrating the display further improves the color accuracy, though there are some colors that still aren’t “perfect”. Uniformity overall is also merely acceptable – I never really noticed the problems in daily use, but there are areas that are off compared to the center. The use of an IPS panel is still a plus compared with the numerous TN displays, but for professional imaging use there are definitely better options out there, and the price of $649 MSRP means it’s not a great bargain either.

The second aspect to consider is how the display works as a gaming monitor, and in particular how well FreeSync functions. Here’s where things get a bit dicey, depending on your hardware. Running within the supported variable refresh rate range of 48-75 Hz, the 34UM67 is very smooth and it delivers all of the benefits previously enjoyed by NVIDIA G-SYNC users, just with an AMD GPU. The problem is what happens when you fall out of that range. Go above it and at the maximum 75Hz tearing is still visible, though you can also opt for a VSYNC on experience and 75 FPS is a bit better than the usual 60 FPS cap of VSYNC. Falling below the minimum supported refresh rate on the other hand is a much worse experience.

With VSYNC off behavior, tearing is extremely visible. It’s perhaps no worse than a normal 60Hz fixed refresh rate (well, it’s slightly worse as updating 48 times per second means each frame with tearing is visible longer than the usual 1/60s) but it’s definitely not better. Turn VSYNC on and you eliminate tearing but introduce judder. While it’s tempting to make comparisons between G-SYNC and FreeSync, it’s also important to remember that no G-SYNC display uses an IPS 21:9 aspect ratio panel, possibly because the limited 48Hz-75Hz dynamic refresh rate range is just too limited.

That’s ultimately the Achilles’ Heel of the LG 34UM67: as one of the very first FreeSync displays, and coming out around the same time as we’re seeing 40-144Hz G-SYNC and FreeSync displays, it can feel limited. Paired with a Radeon R9 290X, the vast majority of games can easily run at 48+ FPS and if that’s what you have it’s still a good experience. But for a lower price you can find 27” 2560x1440 AHVA displays that can be overclocked to 120Hz, and 30” 2560x1600 IPS displays that can support overclocked refresh rates of up to 120Hz only cost a bit more. Given the choice between an IPS/AHVA display running at 120Hz and a FreeSync display running at 48-75Hz, I’d generally go for the former.

This isn’t an indictment of FreeSync in general, however. The option to support lower minimum refresh rates exists, and I’d say 30Hz is really all you need – if you fall below 35-40 FPS, the smoothness already starts to go away, and dropping to 20FPS for a few frames will create a hiccup with or without dynamic refresh rates. But limiting the range refresh rates to just 28 steps, from 48-75Hz, negates much of the purpose of using FreeSync in the first place. We’ll have to see how other FreeSync/DisplayPort Adaptive-Sync displays compare before we can come to any real conclusions, and there’s definitely potential; the LG display simply isn’t the best showcase of the technology.

Finally, looking at the entire display and graphics ecosystems, as far as pricing goes AMD currently offers a clear advantage. An R9 290X is generally competitive with the GTX 970 at worst, and 15-20% faster at best, which means it can often go up against NVIDIA’s GTX 980 while saving the consumer over $200. FreeSync displays likewise look to have a pricing advantage of $100 or more compared with G-SYNC displays, but the comparisons are a lot less direct in that case. While paper specs can look similar (e.g. TN panel with 40-144Hz dynamic refresh rates), things like color quality, features, and gaming performance (i.e. ghosting) are all important. Just as a GTX 980 costs more than R9 290X but generally delivers a superior experience, we may see a similar situation in the display arena.

If you’re after dynamic refresh rates, you’re inherently locked into one GPU vendor or the other right now. NVIDIA could potentially offer support for DisplayPort Adaptive-Sync displays in the future, but so far they’re not committing to the standard. AMD on the other hand can’t ever support G-SYNC displays (at least not the dynamic refresh rate aspect), so FreeSync is the only option. High static refresh rate displays on the other hand work with both vendors equally well and cost less as a bonus, so if you need a display right now they’re the safest bet. Otherwise, given the long working lives of monitors, continuing to wait and see how the market develops isn’t a bad idea.