What is DyAc?

DyAc (Dynamic Accuracy) is a proprietary BenQ Zowie technology which is used on their (higher end) gaming monitors, designed to reduce eye tracking motion blur (see: Blur Reduction Technology) during gameplay. It is the successor to the company’s Blur Reduction, featuring improved performance and clarity.

Being able to clearly see what’s going in a fast moving game is of vital importance, so most monitor manufacturers now offer their own proprietary version of blur reduction, usually done via a technique which is called ‘backlight strobing.’ BenQ Zowie’s DyAc utilizes a custom algorithm to strobe the backlight to prevent fast moving scenes from blurring, thus potentially improving your own ingame performance.

Intro

Modern (gaming) displays use LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) technology where, simply put, a light beam passes through thousands of liquid crystals to produce the image on the screen. If you look at a modern display close up you can even see the individual pixels that make up the image. This technology brings a number of advantages with it over the CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) displays of old; displays are now way thinner, they produce less heat, and the image that LCD displays can produce is much, much sharper than what typical CRT displays can put out.

Unfortunately there are also disadvantages: these crystals take a while to ‘close’, which means that the previous image that they were displaying can still be visible for a fraction of a second. This isn’t a huge deal for stationary images, but this can cause motion blur (or ‘ghosting’) on fast-moving objects in the game.

A way to combat this blur is by shortening the amount of time each frame is on screen. That’s done by (for example) producing higher refesh rate monitors, but also by what we call ‘backlight strobing’, i.e. turning the backlight off in between frame refreshes, thus shortening the amount of time that a frame is displayed even more.

DyAc is BenQ Zowie’s backlight strobing technology, which has been specifically designed for (FPS) gaming.

How can DyAc and DyAc+ help in games

DyAc is BenQ Zowie’s proprietary algorithm for backlight strobing. It’s specifically designed for reducing the blur on very fast and erratically moving objects, such as, for example, when your screen is shaking due to firing a gun with heavy recoil, or when you’re making quick swipes across the screen. This technology, along with the higher refresh rate of their DyAc enabled gaming monitors, results in a much smoother image when compared to traditional non-gaming focused displays.

DyAc’s flickering is (like most proprietary forms of motion blur reduction nowadays) invisible to the naked eye when it’s on, so it causes no issues with gameplay such as a double image effect. DyAc can be (contrary to popular belief) fully turned off as well, so people who would rather not use it can opt to do so.

DyAc was also (according to BenQ Zowie’s limited information on the subject) developed with controlling ‘shocky’ recoil, such as that from the AK-47 in CSGO in mind, though its use obviously isn’t limited to CSGO only. Since the screen refreshes the image much more fluidly when DyAc is active it becomes way easier to track and control your crosshairs when you’re spraying.

DyAc monitors use a customized LCD panel with changes made to the circuitry and firmware settings to achieve greater clarity in (FPS) games. We’ve reviewed some of BenQ’s monitors which feature DyAc (the BenQ Zowie XL2546 and XL25646K) so if you want to check out those reviews you can.

With the release of the K models, Zowie has also released a new version of DyAc, called DyAc+. That’s an improved version that uses the exact same principles as DyAc to reduce screen shake and aids in controlling recoil.

Update: Zowie has recently released their own article on how DyAc works and can help you perform better, so click here if you want to check that one out!

Lars

Reviews, Community, FPS

Former semi-pro gamer turned writer, product reviewer, and community manager.