Ultrawide vs Dual Monitor Setup - What's Better?

[Music] ladies and gents hope you're doing well so over the past few years i've tried various kinds of monitor setups from a single monitor to a dual monitor setup to a tv for a monitor and now i'm using a 34 inch ultra wide so today we're gonna compare a single ultrawide monitor with a dual monitor setup and it will hopefully help you to make the right decision when it comes to what setup will be best for you before we begin comment down below and let me know what monitor or monitors you're using today so first let's talk about price because comparing solutions that cost hugely different amounts of money is kind of pointless a few years ago ultrawide monitors were luxury products and you'd have to pay a big premium over a dual monitor setup if you wanted an ultra wide but that's not really the case anymore ultrawide prices have continued to drop over the past few years and after looking around for a while it looks like a single ultrawide monitor is about the same price as a dual monitor setup this of course heavily depends on what exact models we're talking about because both regular and ultrawide monitors vary a lot when it comes to refresh rate input lag resolution and of course size for the purpose of this video we're going to assume that you're trying to decide between a single 34-inch ultrawide monitor and two 27-inch 16x9 monitors because i think that's roughly the closest comparison we can make one of the advantages of a dual monitor setup is that because you'll probably only be gaming on one of them you only need one of them to be of a high spec at least as far as resolution and input lag is concerned the second monitor could just be a cheaper option for general use or you could have a more color accurate or a higher resolution monitor for your content production work so if you will be going with a single ultrawide monitor you need to make sure that it meets all of your requirements which can still end up costing more aesthetics are subjective but if you want my opinion a single ultrawide monitor will end up looking a lot cleaner on your desk if you are going to go with a dual monitor setup you might want to look into getting a monitor arm for your screen so that you don't have two different legs taking up pressure space on your desk having a monitor arm is also a good idea for an ultra wide display but bear in mind that these screens are generally a lot heavier so they will need a more sturdy and therefore more expensive monitor arm i learned this lesson the hard way i went out and bought a cheap monitor arm from amazon for about 80 dollars but because this monitor weighs so much the tilt mechanism was not strong enough to handle the screen so it would just sort of flop down towards the desk so if you do want to have a monitor arm factor that into your cost calculations because a really good monitor arm can easily end up costing you between two to four hundred dollars so let's move on and talk about actually using the monitors for multitasking a single ultrawide monitor is perfectly capable you have enough room to have two full screen windows side by side and there's even enough room to have three separate windows on the same screen the extra horizontal real estate you get from a single ultrawide monitor can be really nice for example when i'm editing my videos i do appreciate being able to see more of my timeline in my editing software however one thing to note is that 21x9 monitors generally have less vertical resolution and i do notice that because i use several layers when i'm editing my videos and sometimes i have to scroll down web browsing is great i like to have several and i do mean several tabs open at the same time and having an ultra wide means that all of those tabs don't get squished into oblivion like they do on a regular 16x9 monitor and i really do appreciate that looking at movies and videos is also a really great experience on an ultra wide display movies are generally shot in a 21x9 aspect ratio which means that they will fill up the screen perfectly and they won't have any letterboxing like you do with 16x9 monitors youtube videos these days including my own are also shot in a wider aspect ratio so that they look good on mobile devices so that's another win here for the ultrawide monitor on the other hand some programs mostly thinking about games here like to run in full screen and that means if you want to be able to change things while you're playing the game you have no option but to run them in windowed mode which first of all you might not want to do and second of all for many games that comes with a performance penalty here dual monitors have a clear advantage letting you keep your game running in full screen mode whilst you can display whatever you want on your second screen however if you actually want to change what is on your second screen you do still have to exit full screen from your game whilst you do that speaking of games my ultra wide gaming experience so far has been a mixed bag on the one hand the extra immersion you can get from getting all of that extra peripheral vision is truly amazing let me show you an example this is world of warcraft running in 16x9 this is how i've been playing the game for the past 11 years now here it is in 21x9 not only do i have far more awareness of what's going on around me but i also have loads more space for my user interface which means that the most important parts of the screen aren't taken up by my mini-map or chat function let's look at call of duty instead here i'm able to have a wider field of view without sacrificing the center of my screen as much i could have the same field of view on a 16x9 monitor but it would mean that everything in the middle would be even smaller and targets would become more difficult to hit now come the downsides first of all when you have such a wide field of view depending on how the game treats this extra resolution you might find that things towards the edges of the screen become skewed or distorted this is quite noticeable in call of duty cold war where as you can see the edges become skewed and appear to be closer than they actually are if you play a lot of competitive first-person shooters then an ultra-wide display may not be for you and not just because of the distortion but it's also because you have so much extra space that you have to cover with your eyes this is why almost all professional gamers are either using a 16x9 or even a 4x3 monitor now as crazy as you might think that sounds this allows them to focus in on the center of their screen without worrying so much about what's on the edges however for single player games i think the extra immersion is so nice that i am personally going to continue using an ultra wide screen going forward i want to mention another drawback see games these days are coming out with support for ultra wide resolutions but if you're into playing all the games many of them will need complicated mods in order to make them support ultra wide resolutions or they don't work at all let me give you an example remember skyrim i do and i still like to play it once in a while so i was very excited to try it out in an ultra wide resolution what i quickly realized however was that the game as standard doesn't support ultra wide resolutions at all what's worse still is if you launch the game in a 16x9 resolution it doesn't even center the game and give you black bars on the edges no it launches the game on the left side of your screen and on the remaining parts of the image on the right hand side you just get your desktop wallpaper or even a web page that you left open very annoying now i found a quick solution which was to edit this file and manually change the resolution to 3440 by 1440 which is the maximum resolution of my monitor now this actually works and if you're just running around in the game everything looks pretty normal that is until you try to open your inventory or your menu and that's when you realize that the game has actually cropped itself vertically to fit into this resolution and now half of your user interface is missing again pretty annoying now i've read around some more since then and i have found some mods that do seem to fix this problem but my point is that you might have to get your hands dirty to make some of these older games work on an ultra wide resolution so i think that about covers everything from my side ultrawide monitors are by no means perfect they have advantages and disadvantages just like pretty much everything in life some people love them and some people prefer the good old 16x9 monitors and that is completely fine it's also not like you can't have an ultra wide display and still have a second monitor you can absolutely do that just bear in mind that it means your second monitor will either be very far off to one side or you have to have it above your primary monitor which i personally wouldn't recommend because it means you'll have to strain your neck to look up at it and i don't think that's good for you but there are loads of people doing this and it does work so you can do it too thank you guys so much for watching as always if you enjoyed this video please don't forget to leave a like subscribe if you haven't already and i'll see you guys next time [Music] you

Channel: Quick Tech News

Views: 520,067

Keywords: quick, tech, news, qtn, technology, tips, tricks, ultrawide monitor, dual monitor setup, ultrawide monitor vs dual monitor, best ultrawide monitor, ultrawide monitor setup, two monitors vs ultrawide, ultrawide, dual monitor, ultrawide vs dual monitor, ultrawide gaming monitor, ultrawide monitors, ultrawide vs dual monitors, ultrawide vs multiple monitors, ultrawide monitor gaming, multi monitor setup, monitor, multi monitor setup vs ultrawide, 2 monitor setup, lg ultrawide monitor

Id: Sd-4Gkrc5Zo

Length: 9min 15sec (555 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 14 2021