Panel speed and image smoothness are the keys to a good gaming monitor, and the Acer Predator X25 pushes those concepts to its limit. This monitor features a blink-fast 360Hz refresh rate, standing alongside the Asus ROG Swift PG259QN as the fastest-refresh desktop monitor we’ve seen yet. Its action is incredibly smooth, its picture is bright, and its input lag stands among the lowest we’ve seen. The $799.99 price might be a bit hard to swallow for a 25-inch 1080p monitor, though.
A Predator Design With Teeth
The Predator X25 is sleek and dark, with a thin black band running around the sides and top of the screen, and a half-inch matte-black bottom bezel with a silver Predator logo in the lower left corner. The band gives way to an exhaust grille just behind it, running along the sides and top.
The monitor sits on a black-necked stand with a gunmetal-color, Y-shaped base that lets the monitor slide up and down (over about a 4-inch range), tilt forward and back (from -5 to 25 degrees), and swivel left and right (-20 to 20 degrees). It also has a standard VESA mount on the back for using your own stands or arms.
Most ports sit in the center of the back of the monitor, facing down. These include two HDMI ports, a DisplayPort input, an upstream USB port, two downstream USB Type-A ports, a headphone jack, and the connector for the power adapter. Two more USB-A ports face left on the back of the screen. A translucent white band also runs across the center of the back of the monitor in an upside-down “U” shape, covering a series of RGB lights.
A four-direction joystick and four additional control buttons sit on the lower right corner of the back of the monitor.
The RGB lighting on the back of the Predator X25 can be controlled with the Acer RGB Light Sense app, which offers some simple but powerful options. You can program the lights yourself with various effects and colors, or you can set the lights to match the colors that are on your screen at any given time, providing ambient lighting that complements whatever you’re doing. The lights can also be set to sync with any audio playing through the built-in speakers. If you play League of Legends, you can also install the RGB Light Sense LOL app, which makes the lights respond to the action in the game. (Currently, it works only with LOL.)
The lights don’t get too bright, but they offer a pleasant glow, especially if the monitor is near a wall to reflect the light. The screen sync mode is particularly nice, since the lights automatically will add to the color of whatever is on your screen without any need for additional configuration.
Testing the X25: A Portrait of Sheer Speed
The Predator X25 is a 25-inch, 1,920-by-1,080-pixel monitor with a Fast IPS panel and a native refresh rate of 360Hz. It features VESA DisplayHDR 400 and Nvidia G-Sync.
We test monitors with a Klein K10-A colorimeter, a Murideo SIX-G signal generator, and Portrait Displays’ CalMAN 5 software. Out of the box, the Predator X25 shows a very dim picture, with a peak brightness of 58.794cd/m^2 and a laudable black level of 0.037cd/m^2 for a decent contrast ratio of 1,606:1. This is because the X25 is set to the Eco mode by default, and the other picture modes are much, much brighter.
In the Standard picture mode, with an SDR signal, the X25 shows a peak brightness of 167.631cd/m^2 and a black level of 0.037cd/m^2, working out to an excellent contrast ratio of 4,509:1. These numbers don’t change significantly in other picture modes, such as Action. (See more about how we test monitors.)
With an HDR signal, the monitor gets much brighter, showing a peak brightness of 468.750cd/m^2 and a similarly elevated black level (0.123cd/m^2) for a slightly lower contrast ratio of 3,811:1. Still, this is excellent for a gaming monitor; most we’ve seen have contrast ratios closer to 1,000:1 than 4,000:1.
While the Predator X25 excels at brightness and contrast, it doesn’t quite impress in color range. The chart below shows the monitor’s color levels in Standard picture mode compared with the sRGB color space…
The monitor covers almost all of sRGB, at 98.5%, which is close to Acer’s claim of 99% sRGB coverage. These colors are also quite accurate.
However, it can’t come close to the wider DCI-P3 digital cinema color space, which other gaming monitors in this price range have striven for recently. The next chart shows the Predator X25’s color performance with an HDR signal compared against the DCI-P3 color space…
It covers only 79.7% of the gamut, while the Asus ROG PG259QN covers 98.3%, the Porsche Design AOC Agon PD27 covers 89.4%, and the MSI Optix MAG274QRF-QD covers 96.8% of DCI-P3 (and all of these easily cover sRGB).
The Predator X25 is packed with gamer-focused features, including the new Nvidia Reflex latency tester built into the OSD. Reflex tests the lag time between mouse clicks and your gunfire onscreen, letting you know how much time you might be losing with each shot. This is different from the input lag we test, which is purely how fast the screen changes with a signal, but it can offer some feedback about your mouse’s responsiveness.
To enable it, you select Nvidia Reflex Latency Analyzer under G-Sync Processor in the OSD, plug your compliant mouse into the red USB port on the monitor, and set the detection rectangle (which it monitors for changes, such as muzzle flashes) based on the layout of the shoot-’em-up you’re playing. A measure of the lag between your clicks and shots in the game will appear in the upper right corner of the screen. This is an interesting tool, but we can’t judge its usefulness or accuracy without seeing it on a few more monitors.
As for traditional input lag (the amount of time between when a monitor receives a signal and the screen updates), we test that with an HDFury Diva HDMI matrix. With a 60Hz test signal, the Predator X25 shows an input lag of 1.4 milliseconds. This is incredibly low, even for a gaming monitor, tying with the MSI Optix MAG274QRF-QD and the Porsche Design AOC Agon PD27 for the lowest input lag we’ve seen yet.
Media and Gaming Performance
Despite the relatively limited color range, the Predator X25 looks quite good when displaying non-gaming content. Our 4K Costa Rica test footage (output at 1080p to match the monitor’s native resolution) looks bright and colorful with an HDR signal through Windows 10. The greens of plants and lizards are rich and vibrant, as are the blues of the sky and water, and the reds of flowers. Details are sharp for the resolution, but you won’t get quite as crisp a picture as you’d get with a 1440p QHD gaming monitor like the AOC Agon PD27 and MSI Optix MAG274QRF-QD mentioned above.
The Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition benchmark looks very good on the Predator X25. Colors look vivid and natural, and the monitor’s strong contrast shows solid detail in the characters’ dark clothes. The action is super-smooth, with no choppiness. However, the 1080p resolution means the picture still isn’t as sharp as comparably priced 1440p gaming monitors in similar sizes.
The action in the esports classic Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is also very smooth on the Predator X25, showing off the monitor’s 360Hz refresh rate and support for Nvidia G-Sync. Movement looked fluid, and I didn’t notice any screen tearing or choppiness even when spinning around quickly near a wall, the kind of action that would trigger it if prone to do so.
Bright and Smooth at 25
The Acer Predator X25’s 360Hz refresh rate ensures extremely smooth gameplay, and its extremely low input lag means your play will be responsive. On top of that, it’s quite bright and high-contrast for a gaming monitor, and its color performance is strong, too, even if it doesn’t have the widest color gamut available in a panel of its class.
It’s very expensive for a 25-inch, 1080p monitor, though, even one with a 360Hz refresh rate. The Predator X25 is a capable competitor to the Asus ROG PG259QN, as an ultra-high-refresh-rate monitor, but for the same price the Porsche Design AOC Agon PD27 seems a bit more appealing than either monitor, with its slightly larger, higher-resolution 27-inch 1440p screen and still very high 240Hz refresh rate. The MSI Optix MAG274QD-QRF is another excellent performer for half the price, with its own 27-inch, 1440p screen and a still-very-strong 165Hz rate.
