New OLED gaming monitors from top companies coming out this year should look much clearer and crisper. LG Display and Samsung Display, which provide the actual panels typically used in gaming monitors, are finally lining up the colors of their subpixels in vertical RGB stripes — remember when we used to worry about Pentile OLED displays? – which means, among other improvements, the panels should have easier-to-read text.
You can see for yourself how Asus and MSI are announcing 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 the text clarity issues that have particularly plagued ultrawide 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 shape of the V structure is a bit of a misnomer; This indicates that the subpixels are in a vertical orientation, not in V. Samsung Display says the structure “improves the clarity of text edges, making it ideal for users engaged in text-intensive tasks such as document editing, coding or content creation.”
Samsung Display is already “supplying panels to seven global monitor manufacturers including ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte from December 2025.”
As for LG Display, it announced last month that it would introduce “the world’s first 27-inch 4K OLED panel for monitors with an RGB stripe 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 subpixel, or orient the RGB pixels in a triangular pattern, the company says the RGB stripe panels are “optimized for operating systems and font-rendering engines like Windows, ensuring excellent text readability and high color accuracy” as well as providing “optimal performance” in FPS games.
Perhaps confusingly, “RGB Stripe” isn’t the only new RGB screen technology from LG Display at CES. It’s also promoting “Primary RGB Tandem 2.0,” which it calls “an advanced version of LG Display’s proprietary Primary RGB Tandem technology, which produces light by layering three primary colors of light (red, green, and blue) into independent layers.”
As we discussed last year, tandem OLED (and primary RGB tandem OLED in particular) is all about dramatically increasing the brightness of OLED panels, which has been one of their few weaknesses over competing screen technology. Samsung Display’s QD-OLED panels use quantum dots to increase the brightness of their panels, while LG Display is now betting on these stacks. Asus says its PG27UCWM is both an RGB stripe panel and tandem OLED panel, although it’s unclear whether it uses version 2.0.
For gaming monitors, LG Display is promising that Primary RGB Tandem 2.0 will “enable monitor displays that achieve peak brightness of up to 1,500 nits” and up to 4,500 nits for OLED TVs using the technology. We were impressed with version 1.0 of the primary RGB tandem in the LG G5 TV, and we’ll be checking out 2.0 at CES.
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