GoKawiilis a reviewer covering laptops and the occasional gadget. He spent over 15 years in the photography industry before joining The Verge as a deals writer in 2021.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
My eyes have seen the PC gaming promised land, and it’s a beautifully bright world without a shred of blurriness. It’s warm, it looks lovely, and it’s impeccably sharp. Also, it’s expensive as hell.
I’ve dipped my toe in this world by testing a pre-production version of the upcoming Asus ROG Strix Scar 18, which was recently announced ahead of Computex 2026. It’s a gigantic 18-inch gaming laptop that comes with a top-of-the-line 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX CPU and can be fully kitted out with an RTX 5090 Laptop GPU and 128GB of RAM. Asus sent me a model to test that’s maxed out on all specs except storage (it’s got “just” 4TB). And of course, the company isn’t announcing any pricing yet — not even for a base RTX 5080 model. We all know, thanks to RAMageddon, it’s going to be gut-punchingly expensive.
But what makes the Strix Scar 18 especially unique is its screen: a 4K, 240Hz display with an anti-glare matte finish and a special feature called Extreme Low Motion Blur (ELMB). The Mini LED panel has over 2,000 dimming zones and up to 1,600 nits of peak brightness in HDR mode. It’s when you turn HDR mode off that the magic actually happens. This allows you to use ELMB and have all those dimming zones automatically split up the display into smaller horizontal bands of pixels, refreshing them row by row very quickly — kind of like a traditional CRT.
How ELMB works compared to a traditional screen, according to Asus’ promotional video. Image: Asus
The result is an amazingly crisp picture that shows almost no motion blur during fast action in games. And it achieves this without black frame insertion — a more common method to reduce motion blur that causes a flicker effect and can negatively affect screen brightness.
And as you’d expect, this thing is an absolute beast when it comes to playing the most graphically demanding games. I loaded up Cyberpunk 2077 in 4K on Ultra settings with ray tracing turned on and DLSS set to Balanced, and it maintained a respectable (though beautiful) 45fps. That boosted to about 70fps with DLSS turned to Ultra Performance, but you could easily throttle down some other settings or engage frame generation for much higher frame rates. A less graphically demanding competitive shooter like Counter-Strike 2 could run at high settings and maintain 180 to 200fps.
It’s the “frames win games” kind of titles like Counter-Strike and even MOBAs like League of Legends that the ELMB display complements the most. If you want to have the fastest twitch-level response to what you see onscreen, you want the clearest picture possible — and that means a fast-moving image free of motion blur. But even if you’re not an esports player with god-tier reflexes, it’s quite satisfying to play fast-action games with this level of sharpness and clarity. And when you don’t need it, you can switch off ELMB and turn on HDR to get eye-searing levels of brightness during more cinematic games.
Previous Next
... continue reading