Investing in one of the best gaming TVs has never felt more urgent. While we don't have every detail surrounding the PS5 and Xbox Series X, what we can say for sure is that they're going to look better on a properly specced gaming TV than a first-gen HD flatscreen, with all of the visual enhancements that brings with it.
Why should you be on the hunt for the best TVs for gaming? And what makes a TV better for gaming than, say, watching a movie? It all comes down to 4K resolution, High Dynamic Range (HDR) support, and lower input lag thanks to new Auto Low-Latency Modes and support for video sync technology like AMD FreeSync and Nvidia G-Sync. If you plan on hooking up your PC to your TV, you'll want one or both of these technologies.
If this is your first time buying a TV, we'll help walk you through all the key specs you need to know about and we'll recommend a few of our favorite TVs that we use at home as our primary screens for the PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.
Best TVs for gaming at a glance:
- Best gaming TV: Samsung Q70R QLED TV
- Runner up: LG B9 OLED
- Smooth motion: Sony Bravia X950G / XG95
- Budget pick: Samsung RU8000 Series
- For US gamers: TCL 6-Series
4K resolution
If you're looking for one of the best TVs for gaming, it's important to find out what a TV actually needs to be able to do to unlock its full gaming potential. For starters, the most basic requirement is 4K.
The Xbox One S outputs all of its games in 4K, which is achieved via surprisingly good built-in upscaling. The PS4 Pro outputs games in 4K too, using a mix of upscaling and in-game enhancement.
The Xbox One X, meanwhile, has been designed with enough power to drive more games than ever before with native, game engine-integrated 4K support. Yes, you can still get non-4K Xbox One and PS4 consoles, and the Nintendo Switch isn’t interested in 4K either. And yes, non-4K games will have to be upscaled by a 4K TV, so won’t be totally ‘pure’.
However, upscaling is remarkably good on the best 4K TVs now, and can be done without adding significant delay to the time it takes a TV to render pictures.
Horizon Zero Dawn (PS4)
High dynamic range (and high peak brightness)
Sitting right alongside 4K in today’s video world is high dynamic range (HDR) technology. This delivers pictures with a much wider light range than the standard dynamic range pictures we’ve been living with for decades in a bid to get the pictures we’re seeing on our screens looking closer to the way our eyes see the real world.
The Xbox One S supports HDR on some of its games, and via some of its streaming apps. The same situation applies for both the PS4 and PS4 Pro, and naturally the Xbox One X will deliver HDR too. Most people would say that HDR done well delivers more impact than 4K, especially on small TVs.
The only problem is that HDR puts a lot of pressure on a TV, since it demands both much more brightness than SDR, and better contrast so that the extra brightness and deeper blacks can potentially share the screen simultaneously.
Many movies and games target 1,000 nits or so for their brightest elements, so if you have a TV less bright than that it won’t unlock HDR’s full potential. That's especially true in a video game environment, where graphics can be more stark in contrast terms than ‘real life’ tends to be.
- More interested in TV specs than gaming? Check out the best TVs 2020
Low, low input lag
If you’re a really serious gamer – especially when it comes to reaction-based online games – you need to care about input lag. That's the time it takes for a particular TV to render image data received at its inputs. Obviously you’re looking for low numbers if you don’t want to be gunned down by an opponent your TV hasn’t even shown yet!
Manufacturers don’t tend to provide input lag figures in their provided specifications. However, we generally measure input lag on the TVs we test, and have provided the measurements for each set included in this guide.
Surround sound
Sound design has always played an integral part in a great gaming experience. It’s getting taken to another level these days, though, with the arrival of surround sound gaming. In fact, the Xbox One S and Xbox One X consoles even support Dolby Atmos: Dolby’s most advanced sound system yet, which introduces a height channel and ‘object based’ precision to the soundstage.
Things to pay attention to are whether speakers are facing forwards (as this will almost always give you a more direct, clean sound); rated power output; whether there’s a dedicated bass speaker (often found on a TV’s rear); built-in soundbars; and the number of individual speakers used.
The best gaming TVs of 2020
OK, now that the essential buying advice done and you're an AV expert, let’s now pick out our selection of the best gaming TVs you can currently buy, taking in a combination of price and sheer quality.
While we'd really love to recommend Samsung's higher-end Q90R flagship QLED TV as the best gaming TV - it's really not a practical purchase for most gamers on a tighter budget. What we'd recommend instead is the Samsung Q70R QLED TV that has many of the Q90R's best features at a price more in line with what a gamer would be willing to pay for a new TV.
That said, despite sitting lower down in the QLED line-up, the Q70R includes the same comprehensive smart platform, extensive connections, and cutting-edge features found further up the range. This isn’t the flashiest-looking TV that Samsung has ever made – check out our Samsung TV 2020 guide for something fancier – but if your funds are limited the Q70 is a bright, bold and beautiful 4K QLED screen that’s worth checking out.
it's worth mentioning that the Q70R's 2020 successor, the Q80T QLED, is also now on the market, so do check that out if you want something a bit higher-spec. For similar performance at half the price, though, you'll want to plough forward with the slightly older set.
Read the review: Samsung Q70R QLED TV
While the LG B9 OLED doesn’t have nearly as much HDR-friendly brightness as Samsung's QLED lineup, it’s stunning when it comes to the other end of the brightness story, delivering gorgeously rich, deep black colours completely free of the sort of clouding issues that LCD TVs suffer with. Also, while OLED can’t yet go as measurably bright as LCD, the way the darkest pixel in an OLED picture can sit right next to the brightest with no contamination between the two gives the C9 OLED a lovely luminous quality that’s particularly effective during dark game settings.
Gamers, meanwhile, will be delighted to hear that unlike its previous two predecessors, the B9 OLED no longer dims the picture down heavily when running in its low-latency HDR Game mode. It also supports 120fps gaming at HD resolutions, full 4:4:4 PC colour, and a superbly low input lag figure of under 20ms.
Read the review: LG B9 OLED
The Sony X950G – called the Sony XG95 in the UK and X95G in Australia – hits the sweet spot between price and visual performance, offering just enough visual panache to warrant its mid-range price point.
While other TVs seem to use their inordinate brightness without discrimination, making most content bright for the sake of brightness, the X950G saves its peak brightness levels for the most intense HDR scenes, making games like Spider-Man on the PS4 Pro look amazing.
Short and sweet, it's a brilliant mid-priced 4K TVs that work nicely with Sony's consoles. Every one of the improvements Sony has introduced over and above last year’s already excellent X900F series – better processing, more brightness, slightly more backlight dimming zones, improved motion performance – delivers the goods, resulting in picture quality that humbles many more expensive TVs.
Read the full review: Sony BRAVIA X950G / XG95
If your living room – and budget – can't handle a 65-inch TV, take a look at the truly spectacular RU8000 Series that was made for gamers. With crazy low input lag of around 6ms with Variable Refresh Rate, this is about as responsive as a TV can be. It's also great for sports, too, thanks to its above-average motion handling.
So why is it lower on our list? It doesn't do the best job upscaling content and it has a lower peak brightness than Samsung's QLED Series, which can all make HDR-compatible games look truly breathtaking.
That said, if you're sticking to FPS games or sports games like FIFA and Madden, this is probably the 4K gaming TV for you.
Read the full review: Samsung RU8000
If you have deep pockets and a checkbook filled with blank checks, we’d tell you to reach deep and shell out for only the best 4K TVs on the market – LG’s crazy-thin OLED W8 or Samsung’s ultra-bright Q9FN QLED. But that’s not always realistic: for the vast, vast majority of us, our budget to spend on a 4K UHD TV is limited to somewhere under $1,000 – and often it's even less than that.
To that end, it’s absolutely fair to say that the TCL 6-Series is the best TV you can possibly get in this price range. Its performance per dollar is unmatched and its picture quality – despite a few minor flaws – will truly impress you.
Said simply, if there’s a better value 4K TV on the market, we’ve yet to see it.
Read the full review: TCL 6-Series (R615, R617)
A little more buying advice for the road...
If you want to learn more about shopping for gaming TVs, we've added a bit more info below. Read on to level up your AV knowledge skill!
Bits and B.O.B.s: Connected to the HDR point, you might want to think about your gaming TV’s bit depth. The best HDR experience requires a 10-bit screen able to support 1024 values of each RGB colour - otherwise you will get an inferior colour performance, including, possibly, colour striping where you should see subtle blends. Most premium HDR TVs these days are 10-bit, but it’s far from a given at the relatively affordable end of the TV market.
The Xbox One S and PS4 consoles automatically assess the bit-depth of your TV and select the optimum HDR video output accordingly. The Xbox One S even provides a description of your TV’s capabilities under 4K TV Details in its Advanced Video Settings menu. The Xbox One X will presumably do the same.
To be clear, it’s entirely possible for an 8-bit TV to deliver a good HDR colour performance if they have a strong video processing engine. But 10-bit panels certainly have an immediate advantage.
One other point to add here is that some TVs - including high-end Samsung models - actually support 12-bit colour management/processing, even though their panels are only natively 10-bit. The Xbox One S and presumably Xbox One X both provide Colour Depth boxes in their Video Fidelity settings that let you select the maximum bit performance for your particular TV.
Colour purity: Another advanced setting but important thing to consider for the ultimate gaming visuals is chroma subsampling.
This video compression term refers to a TV’s colour purity, and is usually written in such terms as 4:4:4 and 4:2:0. These numbers reveal how many pixels colour is sampled from in the top and bottom rows for every two rows of four pixels. So with 4:2:0, for instance, colour is being sampled from two pixels in the top row and no pixels in the bottom row.
From this it follows that the bigger the numbers are, the purer the colour performance will be, as there’s less ‘guesstimating’ of what colours should look like. The problem is, full 4:4:4 colour support requires a lot of extra image data, and so cannot be handled by the HDMI connections or processing of all TVs.
In truth, the differences in picture quality between 4:4:4 and 4:2:2 and even 4:2:0 aren’t usually enormous. They can be more pronounced with gaming graphics than video, though, so it’s worth trying to check what a TV you’re thinking of buying can support - even though it’s not information regularly carried in TV spec lists. The latest consoles are pretty good at detecting the optimum chroma subsampling a TV can support, automatically adjusting their outputs according.
It’s something that can cause annoying ‘handshaking’ issues with some TVs, though, so both the Xbox One S and PS4 Pro now provide subsampling ‘limiter’ options in their video output menus (‘Enable 4:2:2’ on the Xbox One S, and 2160 YUV4:2:0 on the PS4 Pro).
Frame rate handling: Now that the Xbox One X is almost here and promising native 4K resolution games running at 60 frames a second, make sure that whatever TV you buy has the latest specification HDMI sockets. If it doesn’t have at least one HDMI socket built to the v2.0a specification, it won’t be able to receive 4K resolution at anything higher than 30 frames a second.
Fortunately far more of this year’s 4K TVs do feature HDMI 2.0a sockets than in previous years, but it’s still something that’s worth double checking - especially if you’re buying a particularly cheap TV.
The new HDMI 2.1 standard will no doubt become the benchmark for high-end gaming in time, but we're yet to see it really rolled out across commercially-available sets.
- After a compact, mid-price set? Check out these 40-inch TVs
- If you need a console upgrade too, check out our guide to the best games console 2020
May 05, 2020 at 09:07PM
Henry St Leger
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