Yes, You Can Use PS5 with an Ultrawide Monitor

Contrary to popular belief, you can game on a PS5 with ultrawide monitors. We gave the setup a trial run with COD Black Ops Cold War and liked the results quite a bit. 

Like every monitor maker we get asked all the time if PS5 gaming is possible on monitors with 21:9 or 32:9 resolutions. That’s a natural question to ask, as unlike Xbox consoles the PS5 and its predecessor do not support ultrawide resolutions as of mid-2021.

Not officially, that is, but the reality is that it’s not a problem, and with some tuning as we’ll show you, the end result isn’t bad at all. You see, the engineers at Sony took ultrawide 1440p monitors like the BenQ MOBIUZ EX3415R into account when designing the PS5 and its firmware. So when the PS5 receives a 1440p input, it converts it to 1080p. As for the ultrawide/21:9 screen format, the console and monitor collaborate on taking a 1920 x 1080 image (which is much smaller than 3440 x 1440) and intelligently scale it up to fill the screen. It’s definitely possible to enjoy a very good full screen experience on ultrawide monitors with little to no scaling or stretching weirdness apparent.

We have a quick guide to help you get the best image results on an ultrawide when connected to a PS5, so bear with us. 

There’s no 1440p, and you could just select 1080p. That’s what the console will “think” of the input as. BUT! We recommend going with 2160p to force all games into max pixel output. It may not be actual 2160p, maybe 1800p in many games, but doesn’t matter. The PS5 will send out the most visual data it can in any given game, and it’s always better to downscale or supersample than upscale. Better have more data than less. The EX3415R and most ultrawide monitors these days have no problems accepting a 4K signal. You won’t get any distortion, clipping, or signal loss, and things like textures will look far better as they’ll be based on 4K versions of the assets. 

Those same Sony engineers have a very unique way of letting you set console refresh rates. Since the EX3415R supports 144Hz and the PS5 has several games that run at 120Hz (like COD Black Ops Cold War, which is the main game we tested with), you probably want to take advantage of that. So, the PS5 has these game presets you should look into. Tucked away within Save Data/App Settings, the Game Preset section allows you to toggle Performance or Quality for all games. Performance favors framerate, quality goes with resolution. Set it to Performance to make sure every game that supports this feature will use it to reach 120Hz, or at least the highest FPS possible. 

You then go into the game’s internal settings and switch 120Hz on whenever available. This setting will be greyed out or locked as “disabled” if the game preset is on Quality. 

BenQ monitors, and honestly those of pretty much any reputable brand, assume you want a full screen with no black bars. Therefore, the default is to fill the screen with whatever input signal is detected. If it’s 1080p from a PS5, the EX3415R calculates the best way to stretch the image to a 21:9 format with hardly any visible distortion. It’s not ideal like having the input match the screen’s native resolution, but very close.

Still, the monitor’s OSD does give you choices. You could change the display mode to a 1:1 pixel match, resulting in black bars around the entire image. We recommend Full, but you can experiment. Don’t forget BenQ MOBIUZ monitors have heaps of game-centric screen modes, like FPS, racing, and sports. Plus Light Tuner and Black Equalizer to fine tune bright and dark areas of the picture to prevent detail loss. Explore the features and settings, there’s a lot there to make your PS5 gaming experience more enjoyable. We sure enjoyed playing COD Black Ops Cold War in 120Hz on the EX3415R. No reason you should deprive yourself of the same joy!