LG UltraGear 32GR93U review: Top-notch 4K gaming at a great price

The LG UltraGear 32GR93U gaming monitor is a fine example of a high-quality product at a reasonable price that is designed to do the basics very well. 

There’s nothing flashy or cutting-edge about it. It doesn’t have a curvy screen or an OLED or Mini LED panel, and it doesn’t support a massively high refresh rate; 144Hz is pretty much the lowest you can offer and still describe a monitor as a thoroughbred gaming tool.

What it does have is an enticing price point. At the time of writing, you can pick one up for under £580 – and a very crisp display it is, too. The panel isn’t just sharp, it’s also colourful and bright and has excellent motion-handling characteristics.

LG UltraGear 32GR93U review: What do you get for your money?

LG hasn’t tried reinventing the wheel with its new UltraGear monitor. It’s a flat, angular black plastic affair that, complete with the stand, weighs 8.3kg. If you fancy attaching it to a desk arm, it weighs 6kg without that stand, all of which is pretty standard.

LG describes the display as “three-side Virtually Borderless”, meaning it has reasonably slender bezels of 9mm at the top and sides while the chin below the screen is a deeper 25mm.

The stand is a rather slender affair that doesn’t rob you of too much desk space. As is usual, it fixes to the main display unit with a quick-release mechanism. Alternatively, you can mount it to the wall or a third-party stand using the 100 x 100mm VESA mount.

Oddly, the UltraGear 32GR93U doesn’t have any sort of left-right swivel movement, just tilt, height and clockwise pivot. To be fair, the last is massively more valuable than the first, but it’s still a little peculiar that, in order to change the horizontal viewing angle of the screen by even a few degrees, you need to move the entire assembly.

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LG UltraGear 32GR93U review: What type of connections does it have?

The UltraGear 32GR93U has a basic range of I/O ports. There’s a brace of HDMI 2.1 and a single DisplayPort 1.4 port for video input, along with an upstream USB-B port and two downstream USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports for connecting peripherals.

All the video and data ports are at the back near the top of the cabinet, facing outwards rather than downwards, making them much easier to access than is usually the case.

It’s worth noting that the full 144Hz refresh rate is supported via both HDMI and DisplayPort.

LG UltraGear 32GR93U review: How good is the image quality?

To cut a long story short, the LG UltraGear 32GR93U has the most visually impressive display of any conventional IPS gaming monitor I’ve encountered.

Let’s start with the basics. It’s bright, hitting 453cd/m2 in SDR mode and 505cd/m2 in HDR. Being a standard IPS affair, the contrast ratio is only 1,193:1 (in SDR), but that’s perfectly healthy – even if blacks can look a little grey in low-light environments.

There’s colour aplenty, too, with the monitor able to deliver up to 98.4% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut (equivalent to 139% of sRGB or 95.7% of Adobe RGB) out of the box. Turn on the sRGB clamp in the Game Mode menu, and the sRGB gamut fixes at 100.6% with a Delta E variance of just 1.09 (the lower the better), which is an excellent result.

Other measurements I took in the monitor’s default mode were equally impressive. The gamma was nearly perfect at 2.22, and the Visual Daylight Temperature was a perfectly reasonable 5,867K. The matte finish to the screen doesn’t detract from the clarity, but it keeps reflections at bay.

Panel uniformity was spot on in terms of brightness, with minimal variance across the screen. It was a tiny bit dimmer on the left side, though. The latter is impossible to distinguish with the naked eye so is not something you need worry about.

Motion fidelity is superb for a 144Hz IPS display, with minimal ghosting or smearing noticeable when the Response Time setting is set to Fast. There’s no apparent deterioration when you knock the response time down to Normal, however some inverse ghosting does manifest in the Fastest setting. Adjusting the response time has no impact on brightness.

I also think LG deserves credit for not loading the LG UltraGear 32GR93U with too many spurious motion-improving tools. It has simply designed a quality panel and fitted it with a response time adjuster that actually works. 

While I’m on the subject, LG claims the UltraGear 32GR93U has a G2G response time of 1ms which, given the perceived quality of the motion handling, I won’t accuse them of fibbing about. There’s also certified support for Nvidia G-Sync and AMD FreeSync Premium , with an option to swap between the basic and wide frequency range of Adaptive Sync/VRR should you experience any screen tearing.

The 32GR93U carries a VESA DisplayHDR 400 stamp of approval, but HDR performance is obviously somewhat limited without some form of full-array local dimming. The panel just can’t render the sort of extreme contrast that HDR requires. That said, LG has paid enough attention to Windows HDR tuning so that you can leave your PC in HDR mode permanently without having to suffer from an overbright desktop.

Interestingly, several of the gaming modes (Gamer 1, Gamer2, FPS, RTS and Vivid) still work in HDR mode. It’s more often the case that such features are completely locked out in HDR.

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LG UltraGear 32GR93U review: Are there any other features I should know about?

There are no speakers inside the UltraGear 32GR93U, which won’t be a problem for most gamers. The 3.5mm audio jack does, however, support DTS Headphone :X surround-sound, which can be helpful in determining the direction of attack in-game.

The monitor’s user interface is a simple and intuitive affair that operates via the small joystick that protrudes from the bottom of the cabinet in the centre. The only issue I had with the design was that to access the joystick easily, I needed to shove my keyboard out of the way. You can download an LG display management Windows app, but you can’t use that while you’re playing a game.

On the rear of the UltraGear 32GR93U, you’ll find LG’s Hexagon Lighting system, which consists of two angled LED strips on each side of the cabinet. Unlike similar systems, the lights are bright enough to be visible in environments other than near-dark but there’s no option to have a light show run in sympathy with the screen, so you’re stuck with a choice of four fixed colours, or a colour cycle.

Lastly, multiple crosshair overlays , a frame rate counter, a black stabiliser and something LG calls Dynamic Action Sync – which reduces the input lag of attached peripherals – round out the gamer-specific features.

LG UltraGear 32GR93U review: Should I buy it?

The new LG only has one small drawback, which is its basic handling of HDR, but if you want high-standard HDR, you need either a Mini LED or OLED display and for that you will need to spend considerably more than the £580 the LG wants for the UltraGear 32GR93U.

As it stands, the UltraGear 32GR93U is a very impressive performer, thanks to its bright, sharp and colourful screen with very impressive motion-handling abilities. For the money I don’t think you can do much better.