A “Dual-Mode” monitor is a equipment that has a screen with two refresh rates that work with different resolutions. An example of this is the Asus ROG Swift OLED monitor (in the image accompanying this article) recently presented at CES 2024, which can switch between 4K – 240 Hz and Full HD (1080p) 480 Hz.
The goal of a Dual-Mode monitor is to allow gamers to game at a high resolution without sacrificing the panel's refresh rate, and also offers the ability to go ultra-fast if the screen resolution is lowered.
Advantages of a Dual-Mode monitor
The most notable quality of this type of gaming monitor is that it can reach a very high refresh rate of 480 Hz, which is ideal for competitive games because the response time is immediate, ensuring that the player does not lose vital milliseconds when playing. time to execute an action.
However, to reach the 480 Hz figure, the monitor drops its resolution to 1080p, so the image quality will not be the best. Although this is important so as not to exhaust the computer's resources when processing a very high frequency with an equally demanding resolution.
As we mentioned, the resolution of the monitor can be easily changed, since it has a physical button that, by simply pressing it, will take the resolution to 4K, lowering the frequency to 240 Hz. This image quality is ideal for having greater sharpness without drastically lowering the frequency.
So, because the monitor offers two modes on a single screen, this means that you will not need two monitors, that is, one for work and one for play, since you will have the best of both worlds in one place.
Who needs a Dual-Mode monitor?
Logically, the main beneficiaries of this technology are professional players and also demanding gamers who want the highest performance in their competitive titles, since a 480 Hz refresh rate will make them make the most of every millisecond of the game.
Now, to use the two monitor modes, it is mandatory to have top-level hardware. With this we refer to video cards, currently the only ones that support 4K – 240 Hz and Full HD – 480 Hz are: 7900 XTX or 7900 XT from AMD and RTX 4090 or RTX 4080 from NVIDIA. So it is a considerable investment of money because they are expensive products.