Has anyone already used Studio Display XDR with PC?

[Pezimak]

I tried my works Dell laptop today in the Apple Store with the XDR, tried thunderbolt 5 cable the Nexhype display port / USB to USB C cable, and various iterations. No matter what I did I could not get that XDR to go above 1080P resolution, plugged the laptop into the Standard Studio Display with the Thunderbolt cable and instant 5K resolution... But after testing them A LOT, I think I'm going to go for the standard Studio Display with nano texture. Simple plug and play with my setup, for my eyes documents looked better on it, bit less glare around the characters as it s LCD, speakers are superb in it.

My only decision to make is do I go VESA or height adjustable stand hmm...

At the moment I don't want to drop £3300 on the XDR with the 'hope' Apple update the firmware one day to allow it to work with my works PC laptop... I have to think about how I will be using the monitor day on day out for 8 hours plus..

 

[Cobalt`]

I tried my works Dell laptop today in the Apple Store with the XDR, tried thunderbolt 5 cable the Nexhype display port / USB to USB C cable, and various iterations. No matter what I did I could not get that XDR to go above 1080P resolution, plugged the laptop into the Standard Studio Display with the Thunderbolt cable and instant 5K resolution... But after testing them A LOT, I think I'm going to go for the standard Studio Display with nano texture. Simple plug and play with my setup, for my eyes documents looked better on it, bit less glare around the characters as it s LCD, speakers are superb in it.

My only decision to make is do I go VESA or height adjustable stand hmm...

At the moment I don't want to drop £3300 on the XDR with the 'hope' Apple update the firmware one day to allow it to work with my works PC laptop... I have to think about how I will be using the monitor day on day out for 8 hours plus..

Could you please share the specifications of this Dell laptop? I’m curious why the standard display shows 5k resolution, while the XDR display doesn’t.

 

[thenewepic]

'hope' Apple update the firmware one day

I don't think Apple would ever fix this on their side. Basically it's not an Apple problem. GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD are working so better ask Intel for the updated drivers.

 

[taphil]

I tried my works Dell laptop today in the Apple Store with the XDR, tried thunderbolt 5 cable the Nexhype display port / USB to USB C cable, and various iterations. No matter what I did I could not get that XDR to go above 1080P resolution, plugged the laptop into the Standard Studio Display with the Thunderbolt cable and instant 5K resolution... But after testing them A LOT, I think I'm going to go for the standard Studio Display with nano texture. Simple plug and play with my setup, for my eyes documents looked better on it, bit less glare around the characters as it s LCD, speakers are superb in it.

My only decision to make is do I go VESA or height adjustable stand hmm...

At the moment I don't want to drop £3300 on the XDR with the 'hope' Apple update the firmware one day to allow it to work with my works PC laptop... I have to think about how I will be using the monitor day on day out for 8 hours plus..

I have an Asus NUC15 with Intel graphics and TB4. TB works fine with the older SD, but with SD XDR I also can only get 1080P.

 

[goneil45]

I also brought my Dell Latitude 3520 work laptop (which on a spec level is one degree above garbage) into the Apple Store and plugged it into the SD XDR using the Thunderbolt 5 cable and could not get it above 1080p 60hz. It showed “Wired Display” in settings and I wasn’t able to control brightness (not surprised). But it looked beautiful even at low res. I wasn’t totally shocked by the this considering the Windows port is DisplayPort 1.4 vis USB-C and the graphics are Intel Iris Pro. I’m actually surprised it worked at all. So initially I called that win UNTIL I plugged the same PC into the regular Studio Display right next to the XDR. I managed 5K 60hz on it with the same cable Thunderbolt 5 cable.

As has been touched on before, this seems to confirm my suspicion that for whatever reason, the XDR is handling onboard graphics different than even the refreshed Studio Display (2026) and that it has nothing to do with what cable you use at all. It is deeply frustrating to me that a display that costs twice as much has far more limiting output capabilities as it stands right now. I could maybe understand the older Studio Display running things differently than the XDR; but the fact is, the updated standard Studio Display and the XDRs should be equals in terms of running minimal specs (as in anything below 5K 120hz). the fact than an inferior display can run a machine at 5K 60hz but the XDR doesn’t is infuriating to me.

 

[thenewepic]

I’m curious about linux drivers for the Intel graphics. As we’ve seen linux drivers for the NVIDIA GPUs support 5K@120 meanwhile Windows drivers for the same cards currently support up to 5K@60. It might be that linux drivers for the Intel work better with this display too.

 

[Pezimak]

I also brought my Dell Latitude 3520 work laptop (which on a spec level is one degree above garbage) into the Apple Store and plugged it into the SD XDR using the Thunderbolt 5 cable and could not get it above 1080p 60hz. It showed “Wired Display” in settings and I wasn’t able to control brightness (not surprised). But it looked beautiful even at low res. I wasn’t totally shocked by the this considering the Windows port is DisplayPort 1.4 vis USB-C and the graphics are Intel Iris Pro. I’m actually surprised it worked at all. So initially I called that win UNTIL I plugged the same PC into the regular Studio Display right next to the XDR. I managed 5K 60hz on it with the same cable Thunderbolt 5 cable.

As has been touched on before, this seems to confirm my suspicion that for whatever reason, the XDR is handling onboard graphics different than even the refreshed Studio Display (2026) and that it has nothing to do with what cable you use at all. It is deeply frustrating to me that a display that costs twice as much has far more limiting output capabilities as it stands right now. I could maybe understand the older Studio Display running things differently than the XDR; but the fact is, the updated standard Studio Display and the XDRs should be equals in terms of running minimal specs (as in anything below 5K 120hz). the fact than an inferior display can run a machine at 5K 60hz but the XDR doesn’t is infuriating to me.

Precisely, there is no reason what so ever for the XDR to not support 5K 60 on a Windows PC laptop, if the standard Studio display does. To me I thought the text looked awful at 1080P.

 

[Pezimak]

Could you please share the specifications of this Dell laptop? I’m curious why the standard display shows 5k resolution, while the XDR display doesn’t.

Sure it is a Dell Pro PC 14250 14", has an Intel 13th gen i5 1345U with 16GB RAM and Intel Iris Xe graphics, with 128MB VRAM. No idea if that is manually assigned though as the BIOS is locked out.

 

[Cobalt`]

I’m curious about linux drivers for the Intel graphics. As we’ve seen linux drivers for the NVIDIA GPUs support 5K@120 meanwhile Windows drivers for the same cards currently support up to 5K@60. It might be that linux drivers for the Intel work better with this display too.

Yeah I am curious too since Pezimak did say:

plugged the laptop into the Standard Studio Display with the Thunderbolt cable and instant 5K resolution...

I wonder if the same machine could then output 5k at 60Hz on Linux.

Swapping operating systems isn’t a practical solution, especially if you absolutely need Windows. However, it could at least suggest that a software solution might be possible on the Windows side.

 

[Menno]

I took my HP ProBook (with Intel Iris Xe graphics and USB-C/DisplayPort output) to the Apple Store to test it with the Studio Display XDR.

It worked instantly — full resolution and 120 Hz, completely plug and play. No drivers, no tweaks. Pretty impressive for a relatively basic business laptop.

Both laptops are fully up to date with Windows updates pushed by our IT department.

We also tried my wife’s Dell laptop, and it handled 5K at 120 Hz just as smoothly.

Didn’t expect this level of performance from non-Apple hardware, but it just works.

 

[Pezimak]

I took my HP ProBook (with Intel Iris Xe graphics and USB-C/DisplayPort output) to the Apple Store to test it with the Studio Display XDR.

It worked instantly — full resolution and 120 Hz, completely plug and play. No drivers, no tweaks. Pretty impressive for a relatively basic business laptop.

Both laptops are fully up to date with Windows updates pushed by our IT department.

We also tried my wife’s Dell laptop, and it handled 5K at 120 Hz just as smoothly.

Didn’t expect this level of performance from non-Apple hardware, but it just works.

What cable did you use?

 

[craigc123]

@Cobalt` I was searching and stumbled upon your post here about getting Bazzite to work at 5K120. That’s great, but I am curious if it works with VRR for gaming or is it locked at 120Hz?

Not entirely related, but I am curious how the gaming performance is if you have tried it since I have seen a lot of people online saying that motion blur and ghosting are very bad on the Studio Display XDR, but I can’t seem to find any measurements/comparisons or reviews that touch on this or compare to other similar displays. I don’t mean GPU rendering since obviously that is going to be tough at 5K, but I mean the actual display performance. I know it won’t ever be able to compete with a proper gaming 4K OLED, but I am wondering how playable it is for casual gaming.

 

[jabbr]

@craigc123 yeah it would be nice to see some respond time numbers. Then again the quantum dot display in the M4/M5 MBP doesn’t measure that well in grey-to-grey but somehow looks much faster than my 14 M1 MBP. I think something about the miniLED backlight might make them measure worse in tests.

If the SD XDR is close to the recent MBPs I’d be pretty happy with that motion performance.

 

[craigc123]

@Cobalt` I was searching and stumbled upon your post here about getting Bazzite to work at 5K120. That’s great, but I am curious if it works with VRR for gaming or is it locked at 120Hz?

Not entirely related, but I am curious how the gaming performance is if you have tried it since I have seen a lot of people online saying that motion blur and ghosting are very bad on the Studio Display XDR, but I can’t seem to find any measurements/comparisons or reviews that touch on this or compare to other similar displays. I don’t mean GPU rendering since obviously that is going to be tough at 5K, but I mean the actual display performance. I know it won’t ever be able to compete with a proper gaming 4K OLED, but I am wondering how playable it is for casual gaming.

I’m still curious to hear from people with first hand experience, but I ended up paying for RTINGS since they are the only ones who seem to have measurements for these things, and the results are very damning. The LG UltraGear 27GM950B-B (which appears to use the same panel) completely crushes the Studio Display XDR. In terms of motion blur and response times it’s not even close measured at the same refresh rates (120Hz and 60Hz). In fact, the Studio Display XDR has even worse motion blur at 60Hz than the 2022 Studio Display according to their measurements. I’m surprised there aren’t more people talking about this.

 

[jabbr]

@craigc123 did rtings harp on the slowness? Did they measure in milliseconds or some score system?

Too bad that LG has pretty poor reception from user reviews (blurry fonts, color distortion, loud fan). The hunt for the perfect monitor is endless

this person who wrote this blog review seems pretty content with the response times in regards to gaming:

"Gaming on it is better than I expected
I would not buy this display purely for gaming. That would be a slightly insane way to spend money when there are plenty of faster, cheaper, lower-resolution gaming monitors out there.

But if you buy it for coding and also play games on the side, it is genuinely great.

I have not had any issues with ghosting, the panel feels extremely responsive, and the extra processing overhead is tiny. I measured roughly 2.6 ms, which is basically nothing for the kind of gaming I do."

 

[craigc123]

@jabbr Yeah, I read that review too, but that seems to not match up with the RTINGS scores here. I don’t want to provide all of it since it is paywalled, but the Refresh Rate Compliance score they gave the LG an 8.1 vs. a 2.7 for the Studio Display XDR. They wrote about the Studio Display XDR:

The refresh rate compliance is terrible. Its response time isn't quick enough to make full color transitions at any frame rate.

And what that means:

Compliance measures how completely a monitor can display our fast gray-to-gray sequence at each frame rate.

Additionally the first response time at 120Hz (The average time it takes for pixels to transition from one color to another) is 3.9ms on the 27GM950B-B and 15.3ms on the Studio Display XDR. That is crazy to me especially for a display that costs over 3x as much. In fact, the only areas where the Studio Display XDR clearly wins are HDR brightness, color accuracy at different viewing angles, gray uniformity, and obviously the build quality. Pretty much everything else is a tossup. They give the XDR a slight edge in color gamut as well.

I actually think the LG might be better than the early reviews. It shipped with a lot of issues, but they recently pushed a firmware update that fixed a lot of the problems from what I can tell. I also saw this post about it which makes it seem not so bad:

https://www.reddit.com/r/HiDPI_monitors/comments/1tudwjy/follow_up_keeping_the_lg_27gm950bb

Also these recent reviews:

I feel like the LG may be worth a shot considering it has native connectivity for PC as well as gaming consoles, higher supported refresh rates, better compatibility even with macOS (don’t need to be running macOS 26 to take advantage of high refresh rates, I don’t think) and is less than 1/3 the price of the XDR. I just wish it had a glossy screen 😅.

 

[jabbr]

yeah I think that LG makes more sense if you're doing quite a bit of gaming.

Did you see this clip on gaming on the XDR? They measured 12.5ms grey-to-grey for what ever that's worth.

 

[craigc123]

yeah I think that LG makes more sense if you're doing quite a bit of gaming.

Did you see this clip on gaming on the XDR? They measured 12.5ms grey-to-grey for what ever that's worth.

Nope. I haven’t seen it. Thanks! I will give it a watch. The 15.3ms time is the equivalent measurement based on however RTINGs calculates it, I think. The range in response times is actually really wide too, the top 10% are 5.8ms and bottom 10% are 28.5ms on the XDR.