High refresh rate gaming is a glorious experience, and so is high resolution gaming too, but ne’er the twain shall meet, at least on PC, due to various roadblocks. Sure, high refresh rate 4K TVs are common in living rooms, but on PC the hardware hasn’t existed previously because gamers prefer lower resolutions at high refresh rates for fast and fluid gameplay. Plus there’s the fact that no single GPU available today can run AAA games at 4k with a high refresh rate, and the connections also haven’t supported that type of configuration previously. None of that has dissuaded Samsung however, as at CES it announced the world’s first 4K gaming monitor that can run at a jaw-dropping 240Hz refresh rate.
The curved gaming monitor, which is dubbed Odyssey Neo G8, will be arriving sometime in 2022 and is packed with next-gen features. For starters it’s a 32″ curved panel, with a 1000R curvature, which for the laymen means it’s really curvy, as in “wrap around.” It sports a 4K (3,840 x 2.160) resolution, 240Hz refresh rate, 1ms grey-to-grey (GtG) response time, and Samsung Mini LEDs for a staggering 2,000nit peak brightness for what the company calls “Quantum HDR 2000.” It also supports Nvidia G-Sync and FreeSync Premium Pro for AMD cards, and has LEDs on the back that project colors being shown onto your environment for more immersion. As far as that refresh rate goes, things get a little tricky here. Previously there was not a single connector that could handle 240Hz at 4K resolution, and there still isn’t, kind of. Both DisplayPort 1.4a and HDMI 2.1 don’t support that configuration, as both of them only offer 4K resolution at a 120Hz refresh rate. However, as Ars Technica points out, HDMI 2.1 can merge two display streams via the VESA standard called Display Stream Compression (DSC), effectively allowing the ultra-high refresh rate via two independents connections.
