The best gaming TV is your best bet for big-screen PC gaming, and the best 4K TVs can deliver an experience that will rival the best gaming monitors out there for fidelity. And sometimes even surpass them. At the moment your choices for the glorious OLED panel technology, in PC terms, are limited to high-end gaming laptops or the best gaming TVs.
And now that the Nvidia RTX 3080 has launched, if you can find one, it makes 4K gaming utterly accessible. And will look great stretched on the sort of screen sizes you simply don't see in the world of monitors. Well, with a few exceptions. The new Ampere GPUs can nail 120fps at 4K in all but the most challenging games, and with many gaming TVs offering high-end refresh rates that makes them a perfect match.
While a regular PC display is certainly fine for your average build, if you're thinking about upgrading to an RTX 3080, or even the monstrously powerful Nvidia RTX 3090, you could easily make the most of that power by using one of the best TVs for gaming instead.
There are a couple of benefits to picking a TV as your primary display. For a start, a gaming TV, with a 120Hz refresh rate and high quality HDR, will be noticeably brighter than your typical gaming monitor. And then there's the size—you're likely to get a much bigger panel than you would with almost any of the traditional gaming monitors out there. Many high-end TVs also come with game-focused features these days too, so you can enjoy technologies such as FreeSync or even G-Sync compatibility on many models.
One of our favorite TVs for gaming is the LG OLED E9 series which also packs G-Sync support, thanks to an update rolled out last year. And while the one we have listed in this guide is last year's model, we still think it is well worth the investment, and a great choice for regular movies and TV too. We're getting into deals time soon, with Prime Day kicking off soon, and Black Friday typically being all about the TV deals, so now's a great time to start thinking about whether you might want to go down the 4K TV route for gaming.
We've made our pick for the best gaming TVs and listed them below. There are also a handful of bullet points to help you reach a decision on the best panel for your needs.
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The first OLED TV under 50-inches was always going to be a watershed moment for PC gaming. Sure, strapping a 65-inch monster to the wall so you can game on your couch is appealing, but this is the first OLED TV to actually retail in a 48-inch form factor you could realistically use on your desk.
It's going to have to be a pretty big desk, and sturdy too, but you'd be surprised just how rapidly you will adjust to having such screen real estate in front of you. And given that actual OLED monitors are rare as pigeon teeth right now, this is arguably your best bet for PC gaming on an OLED panel.
And though it is a TV, it's certainly not devoid of PC sensibilities. LG is now adding AMD FreeSync Premium support to the existing Nvidia G-Sync compatibility the company added to last year's models. Sadly it's not updating those models with FreeSync too, making the latest OLEDs the way to go for the Radeon faithful.
In terms of picture quality, no other technology can match the contrast and black levels of the self-emissive pixels in an OLED screen. Match it with a 120Hz refresh rate and superior HDR chops, and this is almost the perfect PC gaming screen.
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With each year, LG’s OLED panels get stronger and stronger for gaming. The E9 is 2019’s model, and it packs in many of the same features from the previous year’s E8 (our favorite gaming TV for so long), albeit with some key changes. The panel is still among the thinnest of all 4K TVs, and it brings unrivalled black levels thanks to the OLED tech, allowing individual LEDs to be completely switched on and off. That’s how you get such deep blacks and the clarity and sharpness of image with them. It makes the E9 panels perfect for darker games like Metro: Exodus and Resident Evil 2: Remake.
Even better news is that G-sync is enabled on all E9-series TVs when you have Game Mode active, so you no longer have to suffer through skipped frames and torn pictures when playing at higher frame-rates. Unless you're gaming on an AMD card... LG has recently stated it has no plans to support FreeSync on 2019 OLED screens at all.
Away from frame-syncing, HDR isn’t toned down in LG’s Game Mode either, so you still get that vibrancy while benefiting from a better response and refresh rates. Unfortunately, you can still only play 4K at 60Hz on the E9-series (as it was with the E8), but the response rate has been boosted over the previous year, and now sits at a handsome 6ms for 1440p and 13ms for 4K.
The LG E9 is also capable of Dolby Atmos 4.2 sound, which is perfect for 4K movies if you run them through PC, and while its HDR brightness isn’t quite on a par with the QLED panels from Samsung (which favor color vibrancy over deep blacks), the Dolby Vision here is superb. As with most OLED panels, the thinness of the screen means sound output itself is never going to be as rich as a separate speaker system (speaker size is sacrificed for aesthetics), but the E9 still manages surprisingly good audio too that surpasses the E8. We’d recommend a premium gaming headset to really set the experience off, or a top-class audio system, but it’s by no means a deal-breaker.