It's a display tech kind of day, so let's round things out with our third monitor-related missive, this time involving Samsung's new megascreen the Odyssey Neo G9 G95NC.
Samsung is showing the display off at the Gamescom in Germany and it's an absolute monster measuring 57 inches diagonally and sporting dual-4K native resolution. Samsung mentioned the screen in passing back at CES, but now you can actually order the thing, in some territories at least.
That dual-4K res makes for a pixel density of 140DPI and thus what we are talking about here is a pair of 32-inch 4K panels fused together. That's 7,680 by 2,160 pixels. Ouch. You'll be wanting a fairly hefty GPU, then.
That's especially true if you want to get anywhere near the panel's 240Hz refresh rate in modern games. Still, at least the monitor is being pitched as "dual-UHD" (essentially dual-4K) as opposed to the 8K pitch AMD appealed to when it previewed the screen briefly during the launch of the Radeon RX 7000 Series graphics late last year.
Incidentally, if you're wondering how dual-4K at 240Hz is even possible, well, this thing runs DisplayPort 2.1 for epic display interface bandwidth, making it one of if not the first monitors to be so equipped. There's also HDMI 2.1, but that almost certainly will dictate a lower refresh rate.
Panel tech-wise, we're talking VA with a mini-LED backlight. In other words, this is not an OLED display for better and worse. On the better side, there's VESA DisplayHDR 1000 certification. But the 1ms response can't compete with the 0.03ms response of the laltest OLED gaming monitors, including Samsung's own OLED G9.
Further details include extreme 1000R panel curvature and 2,392 dimming zones for the full-array mini-LED backlight. Put it altogether and this feels like something of a swansong for LCD monitor technology, at least for gaming.
The combination of huge scale with decent pixel density, fast response (for an LCD), high refresh and sizzling HDR performance ticks just about every box we can think of. It's hard to imagine anything much more epic from an LCD-based display, at least.
Best gaming monitor: Pixel-perfect panels for your PC.
Best high refresh rate monitor: Screaming quick.
Best 4K monitor for gaming: When only high-res will do.
Best 4K TV for gaming: Big-screen 4K gaming.
As for the sordid matter of money, the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 G95NC has been priced up for pre-order on a few official Samsung websites including the UK at £2,199.
It's not quite appeared for sale on Samsung's US website. But you can be confident the price will be somewhere north of $2,000. The UK pre-order indicates delivery for 29th August, so we expect it will be more widely available shortly.
It won't be perfect. An LCD monitor with what is ultimately a low-resolution backlight will never match OLED for per-pixel lighting precision. But that isn't always a huge problem in games. And that pixel densiity on such a large scale will be a sight to behold. Now, where's that RTX 4090 we had knocking about...?
