The Best Gaming Monitors for Sim Racing

My original Samsung Odyssey G9 replaced a set of 27-inch triples on my sim racing cockpit at the end of 2020. Lucky for me, the G9 is now my main workstation monitor, and I have three LG 32-inch panels set up on the rig instead. I felt it important to have experience with both, and they both come with their different pros and cons. If you just want the easiest setup without fiddling around with a triple setup, it’s ultrawide all day long. If you’re the more serious sim racer and you’ve gone big on those full immersion setups then it’s down to the monitor choice for a high-end triples config. In today’s guide, we’re looking at the panel types and why each one does or doesn’t suit a sim, the monitors built on them, size, distance and setup, and what advice I’d give a friend with a low budget.

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The best panel for each setup | What matters for racing | Which panel type is best for sim racing? | Will an OLED burn in on a sim rig? | Refresh rate and response time | Size, distance and pixels per degree | Curved or flat, and FOV | Ultrawide or triples? | Best ultrawides | Best triple-screen monitors | What PC do you need? | Bezels and mounting | Best budget monitor

The short answer: the best panel for each setup

For one screen that does everything, a 32-inch 4K OLED like the ASUS ROG Swift PG32UCDM is the pick. OLED gives you the clearest motion and a true black, which you’ll notice most on a night race.

A 27-inch 1440p OLED does the same job for less money. The Gigabyte MO27Q28G is a tandem WOLED, and the Alienware AW2726DM is the cheapest 1440p OLED you can buy. If you’d rather have one wide screen, it’s the Samsung Odyssey OLED G9, which gets you the width without a bezel in the way.

For triples I’d go with three fast IPS 1440p panels at 27 or 32 inches, because you’re paying for everything three times, IPS runs brighter, and three static cockpit views can’t burn into an IPS. If your room is bright, or you’d rather not think about burn-in at all, go mini-LED. They’re all in the table below.

Monitor	Format	Panel	Refresh	Best for	Buy
ASUS ROG Swift PG32UCDM	32-inch 4K	QD-OLED	240Hz	One screen for racing and everything else	Check price on Amazon
Gigabyte MO27Q28G	27-inch 1440p	Tandem WOLED	280Hz	The best 1440p OLED	Check price on Amazon
Alienware AW2726DM	26.5-inch 1440p	QD-OLED	240Hz	The cheapest 1440p OLED	Check price on Amazon
KTC M27T6S	27-inch 1440p	Mini-LED IPS	200Hz (210Hz OC)	A bright room, no burn-in	Check price on Amazon
Samsung Odyssey OLED G9	49-inch 32:9, 1800R	QD-OLED	240Hz	One wide screen	Check price on Amazon
LG UltraGear 45GX950A	45-inch 5K2K, 800R	WOLED	165Hz	Racing and desk work on one screen	Check price on Amazon
AOC Q27G41ZE (x3)	27-inch 1440p	IPS	240Hz (260Hz OC)	Triples on a budget	Check price on Amazon
Trak Racer TR-M32A (x3)	32-inch 1440p	IPS	180Hz	32-inch triples	Check price at Trak Racer

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For most people, I think one ultrawide beats triples. It’s easy – just mount, power cable and display cable and set your FOV correctly. If you’re thin on time then, really, ultrawides, if you’ve got the budget, are definitely the best way forward. The hours you can end up spending trying to get triples just right might gobble up that few hours you have this week to go sim racing.

What matters in a sim racing monitor

A monitor sold for gaming is usually tuned for those first-person shooting games where you’re just staring at a crosshair in the middle of the screen. Racing is completely the opposite. Your eyes are tracking things that move fast across the entire width of the panel. You could be looking at an apex kerb, the braking board ahead, looking in your mirrors for a car diving down your inside, so these subtle differences do make quite a big difference to the specifications that will be most important for you.

I’d put motion clarity first, which means a fast refresh rate paired with a fast pixel response. After that it’s resolution for the distance you sit at, and HDR brightness comes last. You’ll want good contrast in the dark as well, for night stints, wet races and tunnels, and a wide viewing angle, because the side screens and the ends of a wide screen are seen at a slant.

A sim also runs at a steady frame target that’s often well below the panel’s peak, and on my triples that’s about 90fps at most on a 4090. An LCD performs worse in that lower range, while an OLED’s speed stays the same at any refresh rate.

Which panel type is best for sim racing?

There are two families of panel. An LCD puts a layer of liquid crystal in front of a backlight, and IPS, VA and mini-LED are all LCDs. An OLED has no backlight at all, because each pixel makes its own light. I’d go OLED for one screen if the budget allows and the static cockpit doesn’t worry you, fast IPS for triples, VA only if it’s one of Samsung’s best-tuned panels, and mini-LED for a bright room.

OLED, and QD-OLED against WOLED

On an OLED, black is a pixel that’s switched off, and a lit pixel next to it doesn’t bleed into it. At night at Le Mans or in a tunnel, the dark around the headlights and the dash stays properly dark.

Response time is how long a pixel takes to change from one shade of grey to another, which is why it’s also called grey-to-grey. Monitors Unboxed, a YouTube channel that measures monitors, put the average OLED at 0.3ms, against 6.9ms for IPS and 10.8ms for a typical VA. Their rule of thumb is that an OLED’s motion looks like an LCD’s at about one and a half times the refresh rate, so a 240Hz OLED is closer to a 360Hz LCD than a 240Hz one.

OLED itself comes in two kinds, and they make their colour differently. QD-OLED makes blue light and turns some of it red and green through a layer of quantum dots, while WOLED makes white light and passes it through colour filters. QD-OLED has the wider colour, but its blacks look greyish in a bright room. A glossy WOLED keeps its black in daylight, and the newer WOLEDs run a little brighter. Every tandem WOLED has some dark grey banding, though, and Monitors Unboxed say it’s a lottery how bad any one unit is.

OLED is dimmer than LCD overall, at 231 nits against 402 on Monitors Unboxed’s SDR averages. The Alienware AW2726DM is dimmer still at 190 nits and not much of an HDR monitor, but its motion is clearer than any LCD at a similar refresh rate. Corsair’s OLEDs are in the table below, and the Monitors Unboxed video under it explains the panel technology in more depth.

Will an OLED burn in on a sim rig?

Burn-in doesn’t concern me. Look after your screens.

Burn-in is an image left permanently on an OLED by static content shown on it for too long, and an LCD doesn’t get it. In a sim’s cockpit view, the dashboard, the wheel, the A-pillars and the mirror housings sit in the same place for the whole stint, and so do HUD overlays like the delta bar and the relative. That’s exactly the kind of static content that burns in.

Monitors Unboxed deliberately ran a QD-OLED for about 6,500 hours of static desktop work at 200 nits, with no dark mode and no screensaver. After two years the burn-in was visible, and they still think the panel will be usable after another year. Their view is that if you mostly game on an OLED, plus a couple of hours of desktop apps a day, you shouldn’t be worried about it. RTINGS.com‘s accelerated test runs TVs and monitors on a live news channel full of static logos, and 6,000 hours of it works out at about four years of normal use.

To look after an OLED, let it sleep so its care cycle can run, leave pixel shift and the panel care features switched on, and trim or vary the HUD. PitLanePete‘s advice is not to cut the power at the wall straight after a session, or the cleaning cycle can’t run. If you’re putting three static cockpits on OLED triples, or your rig stays on all day, IPS or mini-LED is the safer choice, because neither can burn in.

Fast IPS, the triples panel

IPS is the LCD type with the widest viewing angles. Its backlight never switches off, so its blacks are very dark grey rather than black, with a faint glow in the corners of a dark scene. Monitors Unboxed measured an average contrast of 1,088:1.

In return you get an LCD’s brightness, no burn-in, and colour that holds when you look at the screen at a slant, which is what a side screen needs. Newer fast IPS panels are down to 4-6.5ms, and three 27-inch 1440p IPS panels still cost a good deal less than one 32-inch 4K OLED. My own triples are IPS too, three LG UltraGear 32GP850-B panels.

Panel	Average response	Average contrast	Burn-in	For sim racing
OLED (QD-OLED and WOLED)	0.3ms	Effectively infinite	Yes, with static content	The best single screen
IPS	6.9ms (4-6.5ms on newer panels)	1,088:1	No	The triples panel
VA (typical)	10.8ms, slowest on dark greys	3,238:1	No	Avoid for racing
VA (the best Samsung-tuned)	3-4ms	VA-level	No	The exception
TN	4.4ms	982:1	No	Poor viewing angles for side screens

Averages from Monitors Unboxed’s panel testing. Mini-LED is an IPS or VA LCD with a zoned backlight, so its speed is the LCD’s underneath.

VA and dark smearing

VA is the LCD type built for contrast. Monitors Unboxed’s average is 3,238:1, three times a typical IPS, so on paper it’s the night-race panel. In practice a typical VA is also the slowest panel they measure, at 10.8ms on average, and it’s slowest of all on changes between dark greys. That’s dark-level smearing, a trail behind anything moving through a dark scene, and a night or wet stint is full of them. VA also shifts in gamma and contrast when you look at it off-centre, which makes it a poor choice for side screens.

The best Samsung-tuned VAs are the exception, measuring 3-4ms, a class above the rest. My original Samsung Odyssey G9 was a Samsung VA, and when I reviewed it in 2020 the image was stunning and in HDR mode it really did look incredible. PitLanePete had the opposite experience, and the colours and slight motion blur of his original G9 put him off. Five years on, mine occasionally flickers then returns to normal, and it has been my office PC screen for years!

Mini-LED for a bright room

Mini-LED is still an LCD, but its backlight is split into hundreds or thousands of zones that dim on their own. That gives it much deeper blacks than a normal IPS while running far brighter than an OLED, with no burn-in. The cost is blooming, a halo around a bright object on a black background, because each zone covers thousands of pixels. The KTC M27T6S is a 27-inch 1440p panel with 1,152 zones.

UK readers can get the MSI MPG 274URDFW, a 27-inch 4K mini-LED, from the table below.

Refresh rate, response time and adaptive sync

Refresh rate is how often the screen can draw a new image, and frame rate is how many images your PC makes. A 240Hz panel fed 90fps still shows 90 new frames a second. The jump you really feel is from 60Hz to 120 or 144Hz. I set my refresh rate to 120Hz. Going from 144 to 240Hz is a smaller step, and more of a luxury.

A fast refresh on a slow pixel gives you ghosting, a trail behind the kerb as it goes past. Overdrive pushes an LCD’s pixels harder so they change faster, but overdo it and you get overshoot, a bright inverse ghost trailing behind moving edges. That’s why an LCD’s clarity depends on its overdrive setting and an OLED’s doesn’t.

Adaptive sync (G-Sync or FreeSync) makes the monitor wait for each frame, so when your frame rate dips below the panel’s maximum the image doesn’t tear. Nearly every FreeSync panel is G-Sync Compatible now. Some of the fastest LCDs offer backlight strobing, which can beat an OLED for clarity, but it won’t run with adaptive sync or HDR.

Screen size, distance and pixels per degree

On a rig, sharpness comes down to pixels per degree, which is how many pixels land in each degree of your view. That depends on how far away you sit as much as on the resolution. Someone with 20/20 vision resolves about 60 pixels per degree (the Snellen standard), though a 2025 study by Ashraf, Chapiro and Mantiuk measured up to 94 for fine black-and-white detail.

So, 27 or 32 inches? At 1440p the 32-inch has bigger pixels, but it fills more of your view, and sitting a little further back brings the pixels per degree back up. From about 90cm, my LG 32-inch triples land on 60, which is the 20/20 line. The table below runs the numbers for the common sizes.

Screen	Eye distance	Horizontal view	Pixels per degree
27-inch 1080p	70cm	46°	42
27-inch 1440p	70cm	46°	55
32-inch 1440p	80cm	48°	54
32-inch 1440p	90cm	43°	60
32-inch 4K	80cm	48°	80
34-inch 3440×1440, 1800R	70cm	62°	55
45-inch 5K2K, 800R	80cm	76°	68
49-inch 5120×1440, 1000R	80cm	84°	61
49-inch 5120×1440, 1800R	80cm	80°	64
Three 27-inch 1440p	70cm	about 139°	55
Three 32-inch 1440p	90cm	about 129°	60

4K is a lovely upgrade if the GPU can run it and has the power you’ll need. For triples I’d stay at 1440p, because three 1440p screens are 11 million pixels and three 4K screens are nearly 25 million. In the video below, Race Beyond Matter compare 27 and 32-inch screens.

Curved or flat, and setting the FOV

FOV (field of view) is how much of the world the sim draws across your screen. The temptation is to crank the slider up so you can see more, which gives you a fisheye view and throws out your sense of speed and distance. The correct FOV comes from your screen’s width and how far your eyes are from it, which is what our FOV calculator works out, and the settings for each sim are in the FOV guide. Set correctly, one 16:9 screen only shows you a narrow slice of the track, so if you want to see more of it, you need more screen. On my original G9 the FOV set at around 90 degrees was perfect. When you’re in a racing helmet you don’t have anything like the FOV of a simulator, so I never felt like I was losing much there.

1000R is an expression of curvature, and the smaller the number, the more curved the monitor is. The R stands for radius and the number is in millimetres, so if you drew a circle based on the G9’s curvature, that circle would have a 1000mm radius. Sat at the centre of that circle, every part of the screen is the same distance from your eye. On a rig you’re usually sat 70-90cm from the screen, which is much nearer the centre of an 800R-1000R curve than an 1800R one. PitLanePete found 1800R more comfortable to drive on anyway. He also says iRacing’s setting to render the scene using three projections is absolutely necessary on anything curvier than 1800R. On an NVIDIA card it costs no frame rate, thanks to NVIDIA’s SMP feature.

Triples use flat panels angled in, and the sim’s triple-screen setting draws each side screen at its own angle. So it’s curved for one wide screen, and flat for triples.

Ultrawide or triples?

I’ve written about VR against triples before, but I’ve never really written about ultrawides against triples. It boils down to simplicity versus immersion.

I swapped my 27-inch triples for the original Samsung Odyssey G9 in 2020 because I’d always found the extra cables and messing around with bezel alignment frustrating. NVIDIA Surround also kept giving me a black screen on my 2080 Ti that I could only recover by rebooting into safe mode and uninstalling the driver. Not cool! The G9 is a really great monitor if you just want to get set up and race, and it’s so much easier than configuring triples. I really appreciated it while it was on the simulator, and it’s now my main work PC monitor. If you race and work on the same PC, or you’ve got a desk setup for your wheel like the one we did with the Moza R3, an ultrawide that suits you is a really good shout.

I moved to three LG 32-inch 1440p panels mostly because I was genuinely curious to see if I could get that extra bit of immersion from triples, and it’s extremely satisfying to have that extra screen real estate. Three 32-inch 1440p panels is about as far as you can go with a GPU like a 4090, in my opinion, and even with the 4090 the FPS is usually around 90 at the very most. My one caution with the LGs is the separate power supplies, so you’ve got three mains cables, three power bricks and three little 19V leads that run the monitors, which is a lot of extra cable to keep tidy. Triples are more complicated to set up and they’re fiddly, and when you’re testing kit like I do you can lose your best config settings for iRacing, which is frustrating.

A 49-inch 5120×1440 ultrawide is 7.4 million pixels against 11.1 million for 1440p triples, so triples ask a good deal more of your graphics card. Triples give you the widest view, about 130 degrees from my 90cm against about 80 on a 49-inch from 80cm. Kireth‘s video below puts the two side by side.

The best ultrawide monitors for sim racing

Ultrawides come as 21:9 screens, usually 34 or 45 inches, or as 49-inch 32:9 super-ultrawides. A super-ultrawide is as wide as two 16:9 screens side by side.

The Samsung Odyssey OLED G9 is a 49-inch 5120×1440 QD-OLED at 240Hz and 1800R, and the G93SC is the version I’ve linked below. It shares its name with the original G9 I ran, but it’s OLED where mine was VA, so it isn’t one I’ve had on my rig. PitLanePete has used one for over two years and is happy with it, though he warns that the OLED surface scratches easily.

The Trak Racer 49-inch in the table below is the same size and format for less money, but it’s a VA panel, and a typical VA is prone to dark smearing on a night race.

The LG UltraGear 45GX950A is a 45-inch 5K2K WOLED at 800R, and the extra vertical resolution makes it a proper desk screen as well as a racing one. At 5120×2160 it has as many pixels as 1440p triples, and from 80cm it lands on about 68 pixels per degree. PitLanePete’s video below goes through the 49-inch options, the OLED G9 included.

The best monitors for triple screens

With triples you’re buying three matched panels, so the price per screen and a wide viewing angle come before a headline refresh rate. Look for 1440p, so the GPU can feed all three, and IPS (or OLED) so the side screens hold their colour at an angle.

With £400 to spend I’d want the best 27-inch panels I could get three of, and at the moment that’s the AOC Q27G41ZE.

A step up is the ASUS TUF Gaming VG27AQL5A, a 27-inch 1440p fast IPS with VESA mounts, which are essentially critical when you’re trying to line three of them up (the never-ending commitment you make to triples – alignment!).

I run 32-inch triples myself, and Boundless Racing reckon anything under 32 inches per screen feels too small for triples. The Trak Racer TR-M32A in the table below is a 32-inch 1440p 180Hz IPS. If money’s no object you could go OLED triples, but you’d be putting a static cockpit view on three OLEDs every time you race. Triples are a tougher challenge to set up than an ultrawide, but probably the more satisfying one. If you’re still deciding on triple sizes and stands, Boundless Racing go through both in the video below.

What PC do you need to run this?

The PC has to feed every one of those pixels at a steady frame rate. Sim racing is demanding, with a full grid, the physics, the weather and all your USB kit running at the same time. Size the GPU to the total pixel count across every screen you run. The CPU needs to keep up too, because the physics and the AI are processor work. My 12th-gen i9 seemed to struggle a little alongside the RTX 4090 at very high settings.

Podium 1 Racing put frame-rate numbers to each tier on their own triple setups, and their figures are in the table under the video.

Triple setup	Podium 1 Racing’s pairing	Frame rate they quote
Triple 1080p	RTX 4070 / 4070 Super with a Ryzen 5 7600 or Core i5-14600K	100+ fps on high settings
Triple 1440p	RTX 4080 / 5080 with a Ryzen 7 7800X3D or 9800X3D	120+ fps on high to ultra
Triple 4K	RTX 4090 / 5090 with a Ryzen 9 9950X3D (a 9800X3D also does the job)	90 to 120+ fps on high, with tweaks in heavy rain and full grids

Setting up triple monitors: bezels and mounting

The bezels (the casing around the edges of the screen) are important for a decent sim racing setup. The gaps between the screens break the immersion, so thin bezels help. The sim’s bezel correction setting lines the image up across each join.

The mount has to carry three heavy screens at matched angles. Boundless Racing build theirs from 80mm aluminium extrusion and never 40mm, because 40mm sags under three screens. Plan the power as well, because each of my LGs needs its own brick. Our iRacing triple setup guide walks through the settings, and the monitor stands guide covers the mounts in more detail. Sim-Lab’s mounts are in the table below.

Sim-Lab discount code: use SIMRACINGCOCKPIT at checkout for 5% off at sim-lab.eu.

The best budget monitor for sim racing

A 24 to 27-inch 1080p or 1440p IPS at 144Hz or more will get you racing. Pick IPS rather than a cheap VA, because of the dark smearing. A 27-inch screen at 1080p is soft up close, at about 42 pixels per degree from 70cm, so 1440p is the one to aim for. The AOC Q27G41ZE is the best value at the moment, and you can buy one now and add two more later when you want triples. If money’s really tight, UK readers can get the MSI MAG 274CXF in the table below. It’s a 27-inch 240Hz fast IPS, but it’s 1080p. OC Racing‘s budget build is in the video below.

The gaming PC guide covers what drives the monitor, the monitor stands guide covers what holds it up, and if you’re weighing up screens against a headset, the VR headset guide is the place to start.

Good luck and let me know how you get on in the comments!

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Topic: Sim Racing Monitors