Finally, 8K is making its way to gaming monitors – or at least that’s what Samsung’s new Odyssey Neo G9 2023 is pushing towards as it ushers in a new generation of gaming displays. But 8K isn’t. nothing new in itself – it’s been part of the mainstream gaming consciousness for nearly three years with GPUs and consoles – so why haven’t we seen more 8K gaming monitors?
As an era of next-gen displays begins to emerge, 8K looks set to become the next big gaming destination. But don’t buy the hype. It’s going to be a long time before 8K gaming really catches on, and there are a few big reasons for that.
what we have now
There’s one 8K monitor on the market right now – Dell’s UltraSharp UP3218K which retails for an obscenely low $4,000. It’s not new either, released nearly six years ago at this point. That means it doesn’t have connectivity like HDMI 2.1 or DisplayPort 2.1, and it’s locked to a 60Hz refresh rate.
Monitors evolve from year to year, so it’s odd that we haven’t seen more development in 8K on the front of the monitor. The most practical reason was connection standards. Even at a refresh rate of 60Hz, an 8K monitor requires a data rate of around 50Gbps. HDMI 2.1, which supports around 45 Gbps of data, only gained widespread support in 2020, and DisplayPort 1.4 only supports around 26 Gbps.
There’s compression to help monitors like the UltraSharp UP3218K, but put simply, there’s been no cable and port that can transfer the massive amount of data that an 8K resolution requires.
DisplayPort 2.1 changes that. It offers a data rate of 78 Gbps, and with connection support for 3:1 lossless compression, it can support 8K at 144 Hz with high dynamic range (HDR) enabled. We didn’t have a port or cable capable of transferring enough data for 8K gaming monitors when the UltraSharp UP3218K was released, but we do now.
The ecosystem surrounding DisplayPort 2.1 is the problem right now. AMD’s RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT support DisplayPort 2.1, and they’re extremely powerful GPUs, but not Nvidia’s latest RTX 40 graphics cards. Likewise, the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 are locked to HDMI 2.1. This connection supports 8K at 60Hz, but these consoles aren’t powerful enough to drive that resolution (they aren’t even powerful enough to drive native 4K).
Frankly, even the best graphics cards available today can’t drive 8K. The only reasonable GPU is the RTX 4090, and that’s largely because that graphics card supports Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) 3 which can generate new frames with AI. It’s important to remember that 8K has four times as many pixels as 4K, and most GPUs still struggle with native 4K today.
To drive this point home, AMD has released exclusive 8K gaming footage from the upcoming Lies of P shortly before the publication of this article. Sounds impressive, but can you watch the footage in 8K? Hardly anyone can, and that’s the problem.
At the very least, we’ll have to wait for next-gen Nvidia GPUs before we have a full PC ecosystem that supports DisplayPort 2.1, and even then it could be a few more years before we see monitors that support DisplayPort 2.1. at reasonable prices. On top of that, there’s a much more pressing reason why 8K hasn’t arrived in the monitor world yet.
Power demands
If you’re a frequent reader of Digital Treads, you may have read that the EU could effectively ban 8K TVs next year. Why? Power demands. As the 8K Association, a group of 8K industry advocates, points out: “More backlight power is needed to create the same screen [brightness] than the equivalent sized 4K TV.
As the resolution increases, the size of each pixel decreases. And the smaller the pixel, the more light from the backlight is needed to create reasonable brightness. That Dell 8K monitor? It typically draws around 90 watts of power. The 4K version is approaching 30W. That doesn’t sound bad – TVs can easily exceed 100W and even more – but that’s the power required when the screen is on, not the maximum power possible. And the game only amplifies those power demands.
A high-end 4K display like the Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 consumes significantly more power (three times or even more) than a typical 4K display due to high refresh rate and local dimming. The cost of extra power is insignificant in most parts of the world, but more power means more heat.
It’s hard to say how much heat. We don’t have 8K gaming monitors with high refresh rates. I’m speculating, but I imagine the high backlight requirements combined with high-end features like high local dimming zones and high refresh rate have created a barrier for 8K gaming monitors so far , and a key factor in this regard is heat.
Nor should the environmental impact be ignored. According to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, PC gaming consumes more electricity per year than a clothes dryer, water heater and electric heater, being exceeded only by lighting, air conditioning and refrigeration. Most of that power comes from the PC itself, but in an age of increasing GPU and CPU power demands, it’s hard to justify adding more power through a display and forcing your system to work even harder.
It is not an insoluble problem. LCD backlights have become remarkably efficient, and that’s mainly because there’s so much power wasted through the various stages of a display. On the other hand, OLED does not have this energy loss, but OLED technology is not as efficient at the moment. Further optimizations in OLED could make it much more energy efficient, and we’re already seeing that now. For example, eLeap is an emerging OLED technology that can significantly reduce power consumption by increasing light output with each OLED pixel.
Between power, heat, and environmental impact, there’s not one area that completely kills 8K gaming monitors. When combined, however, they’re a big hurdle for high refresh rate 8K monitors, at least for the next few years.
8K gaming, eventually
We’re entering a new era of gaming monitors, and the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 2023 is proof of that. However, it will take a few more years for connection standards to broadly support high refresh rate 8K displays, as well as developing efficiency standards to reduce the power requirements of such a high resolution.
One thing is certain: monitor brands will continue to push 8K as the next destination for gaming. We’ve seen it for a few years on the graphics card and console front, and monitors are starting to catch up. In that case, it probably won’t pay to be an early adopter – there’s still a lot of development we need to see in 8K and the hardware allowing for it before it’s a viable option for gaming .
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