 It finally happened. G-Sync on OLED. That's right, G-Sync on an OLED TV. And today, ladies and gentlemen, wait, we are going to be trying it. So LG sponsored this video. Thanks guys. Where I'm gonna be giving you guys the goods on how this came to be and taking it for a test drive. This is how sandwich enthusiasts must have felt when someone finally put ham and Swiss together for the first time, right? Cause like just ham, that's not that great. Just Swiss, it's like bland, right? Ham and Swiss. ["Squishy"] ["Squishy"] While we get set up, oh, oh wow. Okay, we'll go through some background information. G-Sync is Nvidia's name for the variable refresh rate gaming technology that they pioneered that reduces visual anomalies like tearing, stuttering, and lag, allowing games to look their best and feel super responsive. And OLED is a display tech that has a handful of advantages over traditional LCD. So for one, because every pixel emits its own light all the way from 700 to 800 nits down to completely off, that means it's got perfect blacks and infinite contrast. For another thing, the pixel response times are actually closer to that of a CRT or a plasma, which means that there's no smearing during fast movement. And finally, OLED offers very competitive color performance. So this particular unit has a 10-bit panel and boasts nearly 99% coverage of the DCI color space. Oh yeah, I guess one other benefit if you're into it is OLED panels can be super thin because they don't need all those layers. There's no backlight behind it. Well, that's just great, except for one small problem. For variable refresh rate or G-Sync to work, the graphics card from your gaming system has to be able to communicate with your display. Otherwise, how on earth would your TV know, oh, hey, there's a new frame ready for me? And how would your graphics card know, okay, we're clear to send a new frame? Now on the PC to solve this problem, we use DisplayPort, which is royalty-free, carries more bandwidth, generation for generation, has a locking connector, and has supported this critical bi-directional communication with an open VESA standard for years. Thing is, in the consumer electronics industry, we're still relying on HDMI. So AMD's solution to this problem was to create a proprietary extension to support adaptive sync over this connection, relying on their market share and home gaming consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation to drive TV manufacturer adoption. Nvidia, meanwhile, has evidently been playing the waiting game, so let's talk about the feature of this TV that makes the magic happen. And it's all over here. Every one of the four HDMI ports on this TV is HDMI 2.1, and HDMI 2.1 is flippin' sick. It nearly triples the bandwidth of HDMI 2.0, allowing 4K TVs to run it up to 120 hertz at full resolution without any frame interpolation or anything like that. It supports eARC for better sound quality through supported soundbars and speakers. It allows the automatic detection of latency-sensitive devices, like, for example, a game console so that your games won't feel floaty or laggy, so it'll just go into game mode automatically. And on supported devices, it allows VRR or variable refresh rate operation over an industry standard implementation rather than a proprietary extension. And what's cool is it actually took LG building their own hardware in order to get these cool HDMI 2.1 features like 4K 120 hertz and variable refresh rate working on their 2019 OLEDs. Now with that said, oh, we're not gonna be able to try all of them today because even the most state-of-the-art computer that exists now doesn't have HDMI 2.1. In fact, there isn't a single consumer device that outputs an HDMI 2.1 signal. So the best we can do is one of these. Fortunately, that's not too shabby. All right, so let's see if this picked up immediately here. I kinda doubt it will. We're definitely at 4K, but we are at 30 hertz right now. Is that gonna fit? There we go, okay. So it knew it was HDR capable, but the computer itself did not know to switch to HDR when the TV. Okay, that's fine. All right, so I wanna know if it's just gonna show up. And no, it's not. So that actually makes sense because it was only recently that Nvidia released a software update to their 20 and 16 series graphics cards allowing their HDMI ports to utilize the variable refresh rate feature from HDMI 2.1. So then they actually went and validated LG's entire 2019 lineup of OLED TVs as G-Sync compatible. So with this update then, we're not getting any of the extra bandwidth that a true HDMI 2.1 graphics card could push. So we're not gonna be running at 4K, 120 hertz, but we are getting support for up to 1080p or even 1440p at 120 hertz or 4K at 60 hertz. And all of those are with G-Sync down to 40 FPS. So that's either a 40 to 60 FPS window or 40 to 120. And with a theoretical HDMI 2.1 graphics card, we could actually run 4K, 120 hertz, 40 to 120 window. Enough chit chat though. Let's get this installed and see if it works as advertised. Wait, sorry, one last thing. So in order to ensure that G-Sync is gonna work, we need to apply the latest update for our TV as well as our graphics drivers. So we'll just give that a couple of minutes. Okay, so we're in game mode. Input latency looks perfectly reasonable. Let's go ahead and fire up our control panel and see if G-Sync shows up. If it doesn't, I actually don't really know what to do right now. Fortunately it does. Set up G-Sync. Man, this makes me so excited right now. G-Sync OLED. And of course HDR. So what's crazy is that previously, Nvidia has differentiated regular G-Sync from G-Sync Ultimate with HDR. But this is regular G-Sync compatible, but because it's an HDR TV, we should be able to G-Sync HDR on it. Okay, gotta just chill out and actually launch a game. So we're gonna know real quick if HDR is working or not. Hey, there we go. Okay, looks like when we updated the TV, it got a little confused. Heard itself in its confusion and Windows disabled HDR. Okay, let's try that again. Look at that. Launching a game. Boom. So they're actually using a special line refresh rather than frame refresh method that allows the input latency to be even lower than it otherwise would be. And that is feeling real good. For 60 FPS, that is freaking awesome. So we're in game. It looks great, but let's do a slow pan. My controller is gonna help me with this to see just how smooth it is. That is about as butt tree smooth as it gets, my friends. Especially when you consider that we're running at only 60 FPS. HDR is definitely working. Well, it's exactly what I expected it to be. HDR and OLED together at last. Can I? Oh, oh, oh, and I'm dead. Oh, and face on the rock. Okay. Well, as usual, it doesn't make you a better gamer, but boy, does it ever look good. However, playing games at 4K 60 FPS honestly isn't the thing I was most interested in. Let's go ahead and change things up a little bit here. All right, so now it gets even better. 2560 by 1440 120 Hertz is kind of for Nvidia anyway, they're like best case scenario here. But the thing that was weird to me is that that's not a resolution that we can use their new integer scaling feature on. So there's gonna be some interpolation. Now, with that said, from our experience with 4K and 5K desktop displays, we have found that running at non-native resolutions is not nearly as noticeable as it used to be, back when you're running at 1280 by 1024 or whatever the case may be. So I am really curious to see how this looks from a normal viewing distance. And still, at the desktop, this does not look great. Like text is not very sharp. So you can really see like some jaggies on the text. One thing actually that we can use this to show though, is check that out. Unlike on an LCD, there's no smearing, even with white text on a fully black background, like you can really read the text as I'm moving it around. Hopefully, in game, once the whole scene is in motion, those little jaggies are not that noticeable. Let's give it a shot. Guys, I gotta say, 120 FPS locked, like we can do some sick smooth pans now, that is unreal. No tears, no stutters, and it just feels crazy responsive. Right, we're supposed to be looking at the resolution compromise. So here, maybe we can have a look at her hair if we get in on a bit of a close up here. So you know what? I can see a bit of a reduction in the definition of her hair, for example, but on anything that's at kind of a normal distance from the camera, it's not too noticeable. I'd say, honestly, the only thing that I would do here is add maybe a touch of sharpening filter, but I would definitely take this over 1080p, and I would also take 120 FPS over 60 FPS any day of the week. If you guys wanna see the full details of that, you can check out this video over here. Of course, this is just Tomb Raider, though. It's not exactly the most latency-sensitive game, so let's get a shooter up here and see how that feels. So to have a look at something a little bit more latency-sensitive, I fired up the bombsite defense map that we used for our low frame rate versus high frame rate video, and I wanna see what kind of a time I can put up on this particular display. Now, obviously, limiting myself to 120 frames per second compared to the maximum that I had the day that we did our test, which was 240, is I'm not expecting my best time or anything, but as long as I'm pretty close, I consider that darn good. So that was 29 seconds. Let's do one more run. Let's see. 24.23. That's a pretty good time for me. Like, honestly, it feels pretty good. I wish my mouse pad was a little bigger, but I mean, that's my biggest complaint right now. Come on! 26.31. I mean, I'm at the point now where I'm kinda ready to say that, other than that I'm running G-Sync instead of just letting the frame rate be uncapped, like there would be no excuse for me to not be as competitive as I can be anyway on a display like this. 26.31. Not bad. All right, Colton. Have a seat. Oh no! What have I done? No, you're definitely better than me. What do I do? What is this? This is a gaming TV. Roger. Actually, it's just a TV. It just happens to have super low input lag and run at 120 FPS at 1440p. So you have to kill, what is it? 15 of them, Ed? Yeah, you gotta kill 15 of them as fast as you can. Okay. And apparently you can do it better than me. So go for it. I'm about to get wrecked. No, go for it. First off, your sensitivity is so high. Anytime now, Colton. All right. Okay, take it back. Take it back. Yeah, you win. You win. You win. Watch your back. Okay. Terrorists win. All right, Ed, have a seat. Wait, first. Have a seat. 21.17, dang. I win now. All right, you win. All right, now let's try a game where both smoothness and performance are gonna matter. This one, so it says Battlefield V running at ultra settings on our RTX 2080 Ti is right within the G-Sync window that is gonna give us the most benefit out of this display. So we're sitting anywhere from around 55 to 75, 80 FPS as we're charging this gun position here. So a game like this is exactly where you're gonna get the most benefit out of a display like this, because we're running right in the sweet spot of its G-Sync window. So anywhere from around 80 down to as low as around 55 frames per second, as you can see, we dipped to right there. So without G-Sync, that's gonna affect the smoothness of your animation. It's gonna have tearing or stutter, but with G-Sync, it won't. So for our last trick, we've got the classic NVIDIA G-Sync pendulum demo, which simulates swinging between 40 and 60 FPS, showing off the way that G-Sync smooths it out. And of course it's working exactly as we expect. So LG's not billing this thing as a gaming TV per se, because it's good for, well, anything you could wanna do with it, but confirmed it is freaking sick for gaming. My only regret is that their announcement for this technology actually came out in between me filming and us releasing my video, getting rid of the OLED in my living room so that we could have a gaming display in the living room at home. So I think it's probably time to play TV shuffle and move one of these to my house. So thanks to LG for sponsoring this video. And of course, providing the TV that we showed you guys today. Thanks to you for watching. If you guys are looking for something else to watch, maybe check out the video where I first upgraded to an OLED, because I go over some of the benefits of OLED outside of just gaming.