Damn the HDR performance is so abysmal. Half of the screen need to be overblown to get brightness to the bright object, these zones are absolutely massive and dimming algorithm is extremely raw. Is is just not usable at all, causes way more problems than benefits. Some highlights look really nice and you get similar feeling to viewing HDR on OLED (I have LG 55B7), but the rest of the frame has to be completely destroyed to achieve that. On video demos it looks somehow but real time rendering like games it gets completely lost. You don't even need a dark scene for the screen to look like if it had IPS glow all around it. Like I said, if you have bright object on the screen, more than half of the screen area gets completely overblown. Not like this is particularly surprising, I am following TV market closely and I know how bad those Nano IPS TVs are at HDR, and I didn't expect much, but damn, massive blooming is visible on a much wider variety of scenes than I expected, on vast vast majority. I expected to have problems only on darker ones.
The gamut thing that I talked about in deleted post in not entirely true either. It was looking good because HDR in Windows enabled itself by default (maybe because I had HDR display connected before, who knows) and what happens then is Windows taking over control over picture and will send SDR content with proper colors to the HDR screen, so the wide gamut of the display is not forced. Disabling HDR reveals insane oversaturation and forced wide gamut, which looks horrible. Tinkering with color balance in OSD helps a bit but cannot get it to proper sRGB look.
Now you can have HDR enabled at all times to fix this problem, but then you are forced to use Variable Backlight at all times, and I've already encountered examples where it is unstable and causes flicker.
G-sync module didn't blow me away either. It does not flicker nearly as much as my 38UC99 with low framerates and during stutters/loading screens, but it is not entirely stable either and feels similarly sluggish around lower framerates like low 50s or lower. Almost unproportionally so, like if it was having some frame pacing issues below like 65 FPS. Generally not impressive at all, VRR quality increase from UC99, outside of random flicker that LG has, is basically none.
This is quite problematic because the only upgrade left is response time and refresh rate. Refresh rate can basically be ignored since I typically push my games to the limits and 85 Hz of UC99 is not easily hit anyway. Response time difference is massive though. Even setting both to the same refresh rate, AW3821DW is way cleaner on UFO test and just dragging windows around to see how much they blur. The blur is way, way less AW. But that in itself doesn't really justify the upgrade for that kind of money, especially when the rest is quite seriously messed up.
I will probably return it. It just doesn't deliver on the points that I expected it to, the points that were my reason for trying to upgrade.
That said, I wouldn't say that I don't recommend it. If you are running some older terrible screens like AW3418DW, various Acer X34 iterations or older LG gaming screens, not to even mention abominations like AUO's AMVA ultrawides, then this is way, waaaay better and you are definitely going to be satisfied with the difference. I am just coming from a different place and it didn't make enough of a difference to justify spending that kind of money. I wanted seamless VRR and at least usable HDR. VRR is still not seamless and HDR is terrible.
