- Real-time 8K 120fps gaming was shown from an AMD-powered gaming PC
- Horizon Forbidden West was the demo game
- The Samsung TV was a customized unit
Here's some exciting news that comes with an odd caveat that will maybe temper your excitement: a (seemingly) world-first demo was shown of 8K 120fps real-time gaming on a Samsung 8K TV over HDMI.
That's impressive, but there are some odd questions about it, because even though all the tech involved appears to be available imminently in consumer products, the 8K Association said that the TV was custom modified (via FlatpanelsHD).
The game itself was playing on a beefy AMD gaming PC – don't expect this performance on a PS5 Pro – and was rendered at 5K and upscaled to 8K.
What did Samsung just show off?
So, the real 'world-first' element here appears to be the demo of 8K 120fps gaming over HDMI. HDMI 2.1 can't actually handle the full bandwidth of 8K at 120Hz, so a tech called DSC is used to compress the video – in the future, HDMI 2.2 should overcome this.
In the meantime, however, it's necessary. And you might assume that this tech is what needed to be customized in the TV, since it hasn't generally been a feature of the best 8K TVs in the past – but actually the latest Samsung TVs, such as the Samsung QN900F, are rated to support DSC already. So it's unclear why the TV needed to be modified, leaving a bit of a question mark over the demo.
The Samsung TV was connected to a Maingear PC with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU (the same as the one in our new 8K gaming PC) and an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT GPU, with the 5K picture it generated turned into 8K using AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.
So there were a few fudges needed to get to 8K 120fps gaming, but that might be fine. There's already lots of upscaling going on in gaming anyway, so we can forgive that. And it may be that the latest Samsung 8K TVs do have the correct HDMI support for compressed 8K 120Hz transmission, and there was another reason for it to be customized.
Perhaps this level of gaming clarity is coming to our front rooms soon… as long as you have the cash. That's $3,300 for the 65-inch 8K TV, $800 for the GPU, and $500 for the CPU – plus the rest of the PC. Although that's much cheaper than doing it with an Nvidia RTX 5090, at least.
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