this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
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Single-monitor, non-ultrawide.
My take is that as long as your monitor is positioned sufficiently-closely to fill a sufficient chunk of your visual arc, you don't need larger monitors set further back.
If you want to be able to have ready access to the stuff you want to see, it's a software problem, not a hardware problem. Instead of having a ton of displays constantly showing stuff, where you're only looking at a fraction of it, you want to make it easy to switch to the stuff you do want to see.
Like, I've seen people who have a monitor that they're writing code on displaying something like Visual Studio. It's got a tiny portal into code, and then the entire surrounding area is filled with widgets showing information about that code, lists of files, etc, that's mostly being ignored, where the user is only using a tiny portion of the display's space at once. I think that that's a sign of mis-designed software:
The part where I can clearly read text is a comparatively-narrow cone in front of my eyes. Rather than turning my head and eyes for productivity stuff, I'd rather have software aimed at rapidly letting me put what I want to see into that cone, and if it's multiple things, to switch among them.
Also, if you use a laptop at all on the go, you've got limited options as to a ton of monitor space, so you probably want a workflow that works with that unless you're willing to alter your workflow on the go.
When would I consider an ultrawide or many-monitor setup? Well, there are some types of games where filling peripheral vision is useful. People have had many-monitor flight sim sets for a long time.
If I were really into a particular genre of game that did that, I might consider it.
Problem is, that competes with VR headsets, and in general, I think that VR headsets compete pretty favorably for that use case in 2025. Some flight and racing sim fans have physical hardware, and VR doesn't permit for interaction with those controls:
But that's really the only drawback, and I think that the people who build rigs like that are a very small niche: they're spending hundreds or thousands of dollars and lots of configuration and setup time on controls for a single game.
And HMDs aren't, in my opinion, really suitable as a general-purpose monitor replacement in 2025, so can't just use VR headsets or whatever everywhere.
So my take is probably "single monitor positioned relatively-close to eyes". My monitor is on one of those monitor mount arms, floats over my keyboard. If one wants to fill one's peripheral vision for video games, probably use a VR headset for that.
I really like the contrast on these, was waiting a long time for these to come down in price. But one caveat which may-or-may not matter to you: OLED monitors in 2025 do not deal well with variable refresh rate (VRR, FreeSync, GSync, etc). When the refresh rate changes, it messes with the brightness momentarily. I am pretty sure that this is not a fundamental limitation, but as best as I can tell from reading, it's not an issue that's been eliminated by any monitor manufacturer. I'd guess that there are a limited number of OLED controllers out there, rather fewer than monitor manufacturers, so not that surprising that issues would be common across manufacturers)