The Best Gaming Monitors for Sim Racing

The previous version of my cockpit had a Samsung G9 on it. 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 which monitor, at which size, and what advice I’d give a friend with a low budget.

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The best monitor for most people | What matters most for racing | OLED vs IPS: which panel to buy | Resolution, and 27 vs 32 inch | Single, ultrawide or triple screens? | Best single monitors (from $290) | Best ultrawide & 49-inch | Best triple-screen panels | What PC and GPU you need | Triple setup: bezels & mounting | Best budget monitor

The best monitor for most people

For most people, and I mean the hobbyist who wants to jump in the sim and get going with the minimum of setup, it’s an ultrawide, and the Samsung Odyssey G9 in particular (it’s in the ultrawide section below). 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. Frankly, the ultrawides are astonishingly good for most sim racers. If what you want is one screen that does the desktop, every game you own and the sim, then it’s the ASUS ROG Swift PG32UCDM: a 32-inch 4K QD-OLED at 240Hz, which has come down to about $849 at the time of writing. Prices move, so check the listing rather than trusting a figure in an article, including mine.

A single 32 is absolutely fine to get started, but if you want something wider the pricing steps up in fairly predictable jumps. A 34-inch 1440p ultrawide starts at about $330 for a fast IPS panel like the ASUS TUF VG34WQML5A, and about $650 gets you the QD-OLED version in the Alienware AW3425DW. The 49-inch Samsung Odyssey OLED G9 is $900 to $1,000 now, and the 45-inch LG UltraGear 45GX950A is about $1,300. All of them are in the ultrawide section below, with the Corsair 34 and 45-inch panels in the price monitor.

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. Here’s how I weigh them up.

Why OLED wins on blacks

OLED, because of the blacks. An OLED has no backlight; each pixel makes its own light, so black is a pixel that’s switched off and a lit pixel next to it doesn’t bleed into it. That’s what makes a night stint at Le Mans look three-dimensional instead of a grey haze, and because the pixel is the light source it changes state in about 0.03ms, so the kerb flying through the side of your vision stays sharp. Jay at JayzTwoCents has the clearest explanation of the panel types I’ve seen, and his line is that OLED is the upgrade for someone whose PC is already maxed out; for everyone else the money goes further on a good IPS.

So is IPS still worth buying? Yes. An IPS panel has a backlight that never fully turns off, so its blacks are very dark grey and you get that faint glow in the corners, but it goes brighter than OLED in a lit room, costs a fraction as much, and holds its colour when you look at it from an angle, which is exactly what the side screens of a triple setup need. Burn-in, for what it’s worth, doesn’t concern me. Look after your screens (a screensaver, the OLED care settings left on, don’t leave a static dashboard up all night) and you’ll be fine. The split I’d make is dark room and best image, OLED; bright room, tight budget, or three of them, IPS.

There are two other panel types to know about. Mini-LED is the bright-room answer: still an LCD, but with hundreds or thousands of dimming zones behind it, so it gets blinding and it can’t burn in, at the cost of a faint halo round a bright object on black. VA is the one I’d avoid for racing. It has good contrast on paper but the pixels are slow going from one dark shade to another, so a night stint smears in exactly the places you need to see.

The good news is that OLED no longer costs flagship money. A 27-inch QD-OLED is a $350 monitor now, and the brightest of the 27s is the Gigabyte with the new tandem panel:

If you’d rather see the panel types side by side than read about them, Monitors Unboxed do the definitive breakdown of IPS, VA and both flavours of OLED:

How much refresh rate do you need?

Less than the marketing wants you to believe, and it’s only half the number anyway. The jump from 60Hz to 120 or 144Hz is the one you’ll feel; it’s where motion looks smooth and your sense of speed becomes something you can trust. I set my refresh rate to 120Hz. 144 to 240 is a real but smaller luxury, mostly noticeable reading braking markers through a fast sweeper. The other half is response time, the milliseconds it takes a pixel to change: a 240Hz panel on a slow pixel gives you ghosting, a trail behind the kerb, which is worse than blur because you can see it. I think the order for a racing panel is motion clarity first (a fast refresh paired with a fast response), resolution second, and HDR peak brightness last. A sim runs at a fixed frame target, so on triples adaptive sync is there to smooth over the odd dropped frame, and I wouldn’t choose a monitor on it.

Resolution: 27 vs 32 inch, 1080p vs 1440p, and the 4K triple trap

For a single screen, 1440p is right at 27 to 32 inches, and 4K is a lovely upgrade if the GPU can run it and has the power you’ll need. A bigger panel doesn’t get more pixels; the pixels get bigger, so the sharpness is pixels per inch: a 27-inch 1080p panel is about 81 PPI and noticeably soft up close, a 27-inch 1440p is 108 PPI, and a 32-inch 1440p settles at 93, a touch softer than the 27 but bigger, so it fills more of your view at a sensible seating distance.

Setup	Sharpness (PPI)	Immersion / FOV	GPU load	Verdict
27″ 1080p	~81 (soft)	Narrowest, tightest desk	Lightest (most FPS)	Budget triples only
27″ 1440p	~108 (sharpest)	Good	Moderate	The value triple sweet spot
32″ 1440p	~93	Widest FOV, most immersive	Moderate	The single-screen default
32″ 4K	~140 (superb)	Widest + sharpest	Heavy	Best single if the GPU can feed it

For triples, I’d go 1440p every time, not 4K. Three 1440p screens is about 11 million pixels; three 4K screens is nearly 25 million, and even a current flagship card struggles to hold 25 million pixels at a stable 120fps in a wet race. I run 32-inch 1440p panels as triples and the text isn’t blocky from where I sit, because I’m about 90cm from the centre screen and the side screens are in my peripheral vision anyway. So the resolution you pick is really decided by how much graphics card you can afford. This side-by-side of 27 against 32-inch triples is the clearest look at the trade-off:

How do you set field of view (FOV) correctly?

The classic single-monitor mistake is cranking the in-game FOV slider up to see more of the track, which stretches everything into a fisheye and wrecks your sense of distance and speed. A correct, mathematical FOV gives you the world at 1:1 scale, which is what lets you judge a braking point the same way every lap. The catch is that a correct FOV on one 16:9 screen shows you a fairly narrow slice of it, and the fix is more screen, not a bigger slider. An ultrawide or triples widen the view while keeping the scale right. Our field of view guide has the calculator and the per-sim settings.

Single, ultrawide or triple screens?

I’ve written about VR against triples before, but never ultrawides against triples, and having run both on this cockpit it boils down to simplicity versus immersion.

The G9 was a really great monitor if you just want to get set up and race. It’s so much easier than configuring triples, and I appreciated it while it was on the simulator; it’s now my main work PC monitor, which is amazing. If you race and work on the same PC, or you’ve got a desk setup for the wheel like we did with the Moza R3, an ultrawide that suits you is a really good shout.

I moved to three LG UltraGear 32GP850-B panels, 32-inch 1440p at 165Hz, mostly because I was curious whether I could get that extra bit of immersion, and I could: the screen real estate wrapping round you is extremely satisfying. 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 on the LGs is the power supplies. They’re separate bricks, so you end up with three mains cables, three PSUs and three little 19V leads running to the monitors, and it causes so much extra cable tidying. Triples in general are fiddly, and when you’re testing kit as often as I do you can lose your best iRacing config, which is frustrating. Not ideal! Kireth’s comparison of all three routes (plus VR) is the best 12 minutes you can spend before you commit:

The best single-screen monitors for sim racing

The best single screen I can point you at for racing and gaming together is the ASUS ROG Swift PG32UCDM at the top of this guide, a 32-inch 4K QD-OLED at 240Hz, and at about $849 now it’s a much easier recommendation than it was at $1,250. You don’t have to spend that to race well, though, and Corsair’s Xeneon range covers the whole ladder in our daily price monitor, so use those numbers rather than mine.

The Xeneon 32QHD165 (32-inch IPS, 1440p, 165Hz) is the value entry at around $290: big, bright, sharp, and it can’t burn in. The 32QHD240 is the same size with a quantum-dot panel at 240Hz and HDR600 for about $400, though it ships without a stand, so it wants a VESA arm.

If you want OLED without the ASUS price, 2026 is the year it got cheap. The MSI MAG 274QP QD-OLED X24 is a 27-inch 240Hz QD-OLED at about $350, with a better stand than the Alienware AW2726DM that James at GeekaWhat says brought OLED to the masses (his caveat on the Alienware: 200 nits, dim in a bright room). And if you want the contrast without any OLED at all, the KTC M27T6S puts 1,152 Mini-LED dimming zones behind a fast IPS panel for under $300. Corsair’s own 27-inch QHD OLED is in the daily price monitor below:

The best ultrawide monitors for sim racing

Ultrawide is the smart middle ground: much of the peripheral vision of triples, no bezel gaps, a fraction of the GPU load, and one cable, which after a year of triples I appreciate more than I expected to. Two sizes make sense, a 34-inch 21:9 or a 49-inch 32:9 that wraps right round you.

At the top is the Samsung Odyssey OLED G9, which I ran on my own cockpit and would still point most hobbyists at. It’s effectively two 27-inch 1440p screens fused into one 1800R curve, at 240Hz on a QD-OLED panel, and the price has fallen to between $900 and $1,000 depending on which year’s model you find (the G93SC is the 240Hz one; the cheaper G91SD is 144Hz). At that money it undercuts a decent triple setup once you add the stand and the GPU. At 34 inches, Corsair’s Xeneon 34WQHD240 is the QD-OLED ultrawide in our catalogue when it’s in stock.

PitLanePete’s walk-through of racing on a 49-inch ultrawide is a good look at what the format feels like on a rig before you spend four figures on one:

And if you want the ultimate do-it-all, the LG UltraGear 45GX950A is a 45-inch WOLED at a 5K2K resolution with an 800R curve. The extra vertical resolution fixes the fuzzy text that made 45-inch OLEDs a compromise for desk work, so it bends between a wrap-around race screen and a proper ultrawide workstation, and it’s about $1,300 now rather than the $2,600 it launched at. Corsair’s bendable Xeneon Flex 45 is the other 45-inch route; it physically flexes from flat to curved.

The best monitors for triple-screen setups

Buying triples is a different job, because you’re buying three matched panels and the price per screen and the viewing angles count for more than any hero spec. There are two things to look for: 1440p, so the GPU can feed all three, and an IPS or OLED panel with wide viewing angles, because the side screens sit at a sharp angle to your eyes and that’s exactly where VA washes out.

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 27-inch 1440p IPS at 260Hz for about $160 each, so three of them lands at roughly the price of one good ultrawide. If the budget stretches a little, the ASUS TUF VG27AQL5A at $219 each buys a faster panel, a proper adjustable stand and 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!).

If money’s no object, then in 2026 you buy three matched 27-inch OLEDs and get the same instant response and contrast as a single OLED, tripled across your whole field of view. It needs a properly strong GPU, and as I said above, burn-in isn’t something I’d lose sleep over if you look after them. Whichever three you buy, triples are a tougher challenge to set up than an ultrawide, but probably the more satisfying one. Boundless Racing walk through matching the panels, the sizes and the mounts in their triple-screen guide, and it’s worth the watch before you buy three of anything:

What PC do you need to run this?

A lot of people buy the monitor and forget that the PC behind it has to feed all those pixels at a stable frame rate. Sim racing is unusually demanding, too: a full grid of AI cars, a physics engine running hundreds of times a second, wet weather, and all your wheel and button-box USB kit leaning on the machine at once.

There are two rules. Size the GPU to the total pixel count, not the number of screens. Then think about the CPU as well, because sim racing leans on it as hard as the GPU: the physics and the AI traffic are processor work. Even my 12th-gen i9 seemed to struggle a little with an RTX 4090 at very high settings, which I felt as slight bottlenecking in the busiest moments, so don’t limit yourself by assuming the CPU has no say. AMD’s X3D chips, with their enormous cache, punch well above their price here. The sensible pairing by setup:

Setup	Pixels to push	Sensible GPU	CPU
Single 1440p	~3.7M	RTX 4070 / 4070 Super	Ryzen 5 / 7
Single 4K or triple 1080p	~6-8M	RTX 4070 Ti / 4080	Ryzen 7 7800X3D
Triple 1440p (the sweet spot)	~11M	RTX 4080 / 5080	Ryzen 7 7800X3D / 9800X3D
Triple 4K (only if you must)	~25M	RTX 4090 / 5090	Ryzen 9 9800X3D / 9950X3D

Podium 1 Racing put real frame-rate numbers to each of these tiers 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

Beyond the GPU, there are two more things to get right on triples: the bezels and the mount (and, as my photo above shows, the cables). The bezels (the casing around the edges of the screen) are important for a decent sim racing setup. The gaps between screens break immersion more than anything else. Thin-bezel panels help, and most sims let you set the bezel correction so the image lines up across the join. If it still bothers you, a bezel-free kit uses angled optical strips to hide the gaps.

The mount is the other thing to get right. Three monitors are heavy and need to sit at matched angles, so a proper triple stand or a cockpit-mounted arm isn’t optional. Go for a stiff 80mm aluminium extrusion rather than a 40mm one, or the whole array shivers over kerbs. And plan the power: if your panels use external bricks, as my LGs do, that’s three more things to hide. Sim-Lab’s Vario mounts are the ones in our catalogue, and the monitor stands and mounts guide goes through the freestanding and rig-mounted options in detail:

The best budget option (and where to start)

You don’t have to spend $290 to start racing properly. A 24 to 27-inch 1080p or 1440p IPS panel at 144Hz gets you on track, and you can move it to a triple wing later or hand it down to the desktop. The trick on a budget is to stick to IPS, not VA, because a cheap VA panel smears exactly where you need clarity, in the shadows and at night. The AOC Q27G41ZE above is the budget panel I’d buy one of now and two more of later. OC Racing built a proper wrap-around on a very small budget, which shows what careful shopping gets you:

The monitor is the centre of your view, but it sits in a wider rig. The gaming PC guide covers what drives it, the monitor stands and mounts guide covers how to hold it, and if you’d rather put the screen on your face, the VR headset guide is the other route to full immersion. Good luck and let me know how you get on in the comments!

Topic: Sim Racing Monitors