CES: Samsung Announces World’s First 240Hz 4K Gaming Monitor
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.
Since it’s compressing the input to achieve that refresh rate, there’s a possibility that there will be a loss of image quality, but VESA says the result is lossless, so most people would never notice. We’ll have to wait and see what reviewers think once they land on test benches later this year. DisplayPort 2.0 could have also handled this scenario since it supports 4K at 240Hz without compression, but that standard is still missing in action despite being approved over a year ago. As Ars notes though, products with this new connector might arrive in the second half of 2022, so our fingers are crossed.
Like everything else announced at CES, there are no specifics on pricing or availability, only that it’ll appear sometime this year. Also, even though no current GPU has enough muscle to run this particular configuration with AAA games, the rumors about the next-gen GPUs hint that they might be up to the task. If that is the case, that combo could indeed be gaming nirvana, assuming you have the budget for it, and also have a GPU-purchasing bot handy.
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