Samsung Odyssey G9 49" - Firmware Upgrade and Other Notes
I picked up the Samsung Odyssey G9 49" some months ago during the (nearly too good to be true) GameStop PowerUp promo. With a curvature of 1000R it matches the human eye's FOV at 1 meter and provides a great experience for games which support the 32:9 aspect ratio. Although Samsung primarily targets gamers for the marketing of the display, productivity apps are excellent as well; 49" + Windows 11's enhanced support for window docking has allowed me to do away with a dual-display setup.
There are a few oddities which may help others:
Adaptive-Sync cannot be "On" with Screen Size "Auto" #
If your game does not support an ultra wide 32:9 aspect ratio, you cannot use AMD's FreeSync or NVIDIA's G-SYNC. The "Auto" setting for Screen Size provides vertical black bars on the left/right to provide proper display of non-ultra wide content; when this setting is disabled due to Adaptive-Sync your game will become horribly stretched across 49" of display 🤮.
Even games which do technically support 32:9 may actually reduce FOV to that of 16:9 to eliminate an FOV advantage in multiplayer - you end up with a scenario where content looks proper at first glance but is completely disorienting (PUBG!). In this case changing to a 16:9 resolution is your only recourse and thus Screen Size "Auto" and Adaptive-Sync "Off".
Firmware upgrades can only load from USB drives which have an MBR partition table with a FAT32 volume #
This limitation took me a bit figure out, but it's well-known that MBR+FAT32 is the lowest common denominator for embedded USB storage support.
- Do not buy a new USB drive - browsing the web I found threads where others recommend * buying new drives that magically work. This is only incidental as the drives are * low-capacity and happened to be pre-formatted MBR+FAT32.
- Set your USB drive to the MBR partition scheme via diskpart (the Disk Management GUI * may also work as well). This will destroy your existing volume(s) - do backup your * data if needed.
- The volume must be FAT32, ensure your partition is no larger than 32GB
- Extract the .img file from the .zip provided by Samsung and do not alter the name. * Copy to the root of the volume on your USB drive (for example: "M-T9549GGAA-1016.0[1109].img")
- The display supports upgrade from only one of the two USB ports. I can't recall which I used so flip a notional coin and if that doesn't work try the other.