Samsung offers 4K monitors with 240Hz refresh rate

4K is saturating the TV market, but the sharpest standard display resolution is not as common in PC monitors due to price and limitations. PC gamers specifically choose PC monitors because they can generally achieve higher refresh rates than TVs, which are typically 60Hz or 120Hz, making fast-paced gaming action smoother. But refresh rates above 144Hz usually require a QHD resolution or lower. Samsung’s introduction today of a 4K monitor that can run at 240Hz changes that.

Samsung told me it would announce the monitor’s price and release date, part of the brand’s announcement at CES 2022, “later this year.”If it arrives in 2022, it should be the fastest 4K monitor on the market – assuming another brand doesn’t announce a similar screen (who knows what else we’ll hear about at CES; the tech show won’t even officially launch until then). until Wednesday).

4K @ 240Hz

The Odyssey Neo G8 has a 1ms GTG response time and can update 8,294,400 pixels 240 times per second. When asked, Samsung didn’t specify if the monitor uses compression for this, but apparently it does because its port consists of two HDMI 2.1 ports and one DisplayPort 1.4 port.

On its own, HDMI 2.1 can only reach 120Hz at 4K resolution, but using VESA’s video stream compression (DSC), it should reach 240Hz, as Tom’s Hardware explains. Similarly, DisplayPort 1.4a natively runs 4K content at up to 120Hz, but with DSC, a 4K capable display can beat that. There are plenty of 4K monitors that already use DSC to play 4K at 144Hz, but 240Hz is unprecedented.

Monitors that use DSC claim that image quality is not degraded. In fact, VESA claims that its compression method is visually lossless. Most people won’t notice the difference, but random artifacts will inevitably show up.

Another option would be DisplayPort 2.0 At 80Gb/s bandwidth, DisplayPort 2.0 would provide 4K at 240Hz without any compression. We don’t know of any confirmed DisplayPort 2.0 monitors at the moment, but that could change, perhaps during CES. In January 2021, VESA informed me that DisplayPort 2.0 products should be available in the second half of 2022.

Of course, to use DisplayPort 2.0, we also need to see the announcement of DisplayPort 2.0 graphics cards. Neither Nvidia nor AMD have officially confirmed the existence of any such cards, but patches for the AMD Linux graphics driver discovered by Phoronix this summer suggest support from AMD may be on the way.

However, in order to stream 4K at 240fps, you will need not only the right port, but also a very powerful graphics card. Please note that achieving such a frame rate in graphics-intensive AAA games is out of the question for the time being.

If your graphics card and monitor can’t sync, the Odyssey Neo G8 also supports G-Sync to combat screen tearing and stuttering with Nvidia graphics cards, while FreeSync Premium Pro does the same with AMD graphics cards. The “Premium Pro”add-on means it also works with HDR and low frame rate compensation.

Teaching a New Dog Old Tricks

If the Odyssey Neo G8 doesn’t sound like something new to you, it’s because it was designed to look like the Odyssey Neo G9 49″, the line’s flagship, announced last July, and the Odyssey G9 49″, which was one of the three monitors. to introduce the 1000R curve when Samsung announced it at CES last year.

All monitors have a 1000R curvature (the coolest you can find in modern PC monitors), a white back with spaceship-like carvings, and a bright light called CoreSync that lights up depending on the colors displayed.

Samsung told me that the Odyssey Neo G8 is a VA panel with Mini LED backlighting. It can reach up to 2000 nits of brightness and provide deeper contrast than a standard LED monitor because more LEDs can fit in the screen.

Even though it’s still a step away from OLED, all of these factors make the monitor a strong candidate for HDR gaming and movie watching. Samsung hasn’t mentioned any VESA HDR certifications despite the monitor claiming it exceeds the highest level (1400 nits) brightness requirement (DisplayHDR 1400).