RGB is the next big thing in OLED gaming monitors
New OLED gaming monitors from the biggest companies coming out this year are expected to look clearer and sharper. LG Display and Samsung Display, which typically supply the panels used in gaming monitors, are finally aligning the colors of their subpixels in vertical RGB strips – remember when we worried about Pentile OLED displays? – which means, among other improvements, that signs should have easier-to-read text.
You can see for yourself how Asus and MSI are touting changes to their upcoming monitors with Stripe RGB technology – for Asus, with the ROG Swift OLED PG27UCWM, ROG Swift OLED PG34WCDN and ROG Strix OLED XG34WCDMS, and for MSI, with the MEG X and MPG 341CQR QD-OLED X36:
Both LG Display and Samsung Display aim to improve text clarity issues that particularly plague ultra-wide OLED panels. Samsung Display announced earlier this month that it has begun mass production of the “world’s first 34-inch 360Hz QD-OLED panel” with what it calls a “V-Stripe” RGB pixel structure. The V is a bit of a misnomer for how the structure is shaped; this indicates that the subpixels are in a vertical orientation and not a V. The structure “enhances the clarity of text edges, making it ideal for users engaged in text-intensive tasks such as document editing, coding, or content creation,” says Samsung Display.
Samsung Display “already supplies the panels to seven global monitor manufacturers, including ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte since December 2025”.
As for LG Display, it announced last month that it would launch “the world’s first 27-inch 4K OLED panel for monitors with an RGB strip structure and a 240Hz refresh rate” at CES in Las Vegas. While LG Display was previously known for “WOLED”, where its TVs and gaming monitors typically have an extra white sub-pixel or orient the RGB pixels in a triangular pattern, the company claims that the RGB striped panels are “optimized for operating systems such as Windows and for font rendering engines, ensuring excellent text readability and high color accuracy” as well as providing “optimal performance” in FPS games.
What’s perhaps confusing is that “RGB strip” isn’t the only new RGB screen technology from LG Display at CES. It also touts “Primary RGB Tandem 2.0,” which it calls “an advanced version of LG Display’s proprietary Primary RGB Tandem technology, which generates light by stacking the three primary colors of light (red, green and blue) in independent layers.”
As we discussed last year, Tandem OLED (and Primary RGB Tandem OLED in particular) aims to significantly increase the brightness of OLED panels, which has been one of their few weaknesses compared to competing screen technologies. Samsung Display’s QD-OLED panels use quantum dots to increase the brightness of their panels, while LG Display is now betting on these batteries. Asus claims its PG27UCWM is both an RGB stripe panel and a Tandem OLED panel, although it’s unclear whether it uses version 2.0.
For gaming monitors, LG Display promises that Primary RGB Tandem 2.0 will enable “displays that reach peak brightness of up to 1,500 nits” and up to 4,500 nits for OLED TVs using this technology. We were impressed with version 1.0 of Primary RGB Tandem in the LG G5 TV, and we’ll be seeing version 2.0 at CES.
