The golden age of televisions has arrived. It used to be prohibitively expensive to buy anything larger than 55 inches or treat yourself to a 4K set, but these days you can get a large, high-res screen for under $1000. Some 8K TVs are even within reach. We're also rich with options from OLED vs QLED panels that deliver a top-tier visual experience in different ways. How much or how little you spend depends on what is important to you as a gamer.
The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X let you play games in 4K at buttery frame rates up to 120Hz. All of this greatness was previously only attainable on a high-end gaming PC. Luckily, the latest TVs for gaming have kept up, so gamers are spoiled for choice when picking out a new television. Our options also offer VRR or adaptive sync technology for more fluid gameplay. And even if your current gaming hardware can’t make the most out of a 4K television, image quality and lower latency of modern displays will vastly improve your gaming experience.
With so many choices, it can be hard to narrow down precisely what’s important to you, so we’re here to help. The TVs below are some of our favorites in a variety of categories - and click here to see them in the UK.
TL;DR – These are the Best 4K TVs for Gaming:
- LG C2 OLED Evo
- TCL Class 6-Series Roku TV Mini-LED (2022)
- Hisense U7H
- Sony A80K
- Sony X90K
- Samsung QN90B
- Sony A95K QD-OLED
LG C2 OLED Evo
Best 4K TV for Gaming
The LG C2 OLED Evo checks just about every box, with its first win being the OLED technology the TV is packing for the fastest pixel response times available and color control down to each individual pixel. Blacks are truly black, the screen gets insanely bright, and there’s little worry about annoying “halo” effects around bright objects on dark backgrounds. The absolute contrast also makes colors pop, and any scene, from landscapes and skies to dark caves and creepy basements, looks incredible.
However, it really shines as a gaming display thanks to the C2’s low latency, variable refresh rate support, and excellent software designed specifically for gamers. On board are four HDMI 2.1 ports, which all support up to 120Hz in 4K, along with G-Sync and AMD FreeSync for silky smooth frames no matter how intense the action gets. Additionally, a game optimizer automatically detects consoles, bringing up a menu to fine-tune and save picture settings that work best for the type of game you’re playing.
TCL Class 6-Series Roku TV Mini-LED (2022)
Best Budget 4K TV for Gaming
If you’re looking for a 4K picture on a 65-inch screen for less than $1,000, the TCL Class 6-Series is what you should grab. The panel features mini-LED technology with 360 local dimming zones, which helps improve contrast, brightness, and overall picture quality. Your images will pop and look even more life-like thanks to HDR support, and as for color performance, the quantum-dot display delivers rich, vibrant hues that outdo many other midrange TVs.
TCL didn’t skimp on gaming, and you can even hit a speedy 144Hz in 4K when VRR is enabled on the two HDMI 2.1 ports. That VRR, along with FreeSync Premium Pro baked in, lets you enjoy some tear-free, smooth motion perfect for competitive first-person shooters or racing games. ALLM support also means you’re in for lag-free action, while an Auto Game Mode delivers the best picture settings possible without you needing to lift a finger on compatible gaming devices.
Hisense U7H
Best 4K TV for Gaming in a Bright Room
Many televisions offer fantastic picture quality, software, and port selection, but only a select few are bright enough to overpower even the sunniest, window-filled room. That’s where Hisense U7H comes into play, taking over the spot from the Hisense U7G, ready to fight glare and deliver a great overall experience. This model offers an impressive 1000 nits peak brightness across up to 120 local dimming zones and an excellent contrast ratio, letting you enjoy both SDR and HDR content. It’s also no slouch in terms of color, thanks to quantum dot technology that produces a wide color gamut of rich and accurate hues.
The Hisense U7H isn’t missing out on gaming features either, as you’ll enjoy responsive gaming with its super low input lag, while two of its four HDMI ports support VRR and 120Hz gaming. That means you can hook up both the latest consoles and enjoy butter-smooth, tear-free frames. However, you may experience some ghosting around faster-moving objects, but that’s probably something you can overlook on a TV that’ll only set you back around $600.
Sony A80K
Best Picture Quality in a 4K TV for Gaming
Sony continues to make major advancements with each iteration of their Bravia OLED lineup, letting them display scenes with better graphical fidelity than competitors. The Sony A80K keeps with tradition, featuring a processor that allows the display to offer rich, deep blacks and a high nit peak brightness to take full advantage of that HDR technology. And you’ll never experience any banding in the skies, while colors are spot on for an insanely realistic and immersive viewing experience.
Sony does make the PS5, so you know the Sony A80K is packed full of features for gaming. For starters, a Sony and PS5 exclusive Auto HDR Tone Mapping feature ensures your TV has the optimal HDR settings, while Auto Genre Picture Switch can detect the content you’re viewing, like a show versus a game, and switch modes to correspond with it. So, when gaming, it’ll automatically go to ALLM. Also, unlike older versions of this TV, you now get VRR support right out of the box for butter-smooth frame rates, and multiple HDMI ports support up to a 120Hz refresh rate in 4K.
Sony X90K
Best LCD TV for Gaming
By going LCD, you’ll save a whole lot of money, as Sony’s X90K is hundreds less than the A80K while offering almost all the same features, except it has a Full-Array LED panel versus an OLED. Admittedly, HDR won’t be as striking, and its panel doesn’t get super bright, but you still get deep blacks and solid viewing angles. And content should remain smooth with few pixelated artifacts or visible graduated lines in bright skies, thanks to excellent processing technology.
However, the X90K’s features make this TV a true standout with the brand’s top-notch upscaler, film modes, and use of the Google TV OS. In gaming, you’ll be tearing through the action at 120Hz in 4K with little worry, as both ALLM and VRR are built-in. And if you’re planning to use the PS5 with this TV, Auto HDR Tone Mapping and Auto Genre Picture Switch ensures your TV has the optimal settings for the content you’re viewing without you ever lifting a finger.
Samsung QN90B
Best 4K TV for PC Gaming
The line between TV and monitor is starting to blur, so many PC gamers are choosing a TV over a traditional gaming monitor thanks to the better color, brightness, and larger size they offer. The Samsung QN90B has a fantastic 64.5-inch display that delivers high-quality, smooth visuals up to 4K at 120Hz, while your mouse, keyboard, or controller will feel super responsive thanks to the low input lag and fast response times. Plus, the bright Neo QLED panel ensures you can see the monitor, whether you’re lounging on the couch or sitting at your gaming desk.
The Samsung QN90B doesn’t offer a DisplayPort connection for PC, but it's a solid option if your graphics card supports HDMI. All four of its HDMI ports offer 120Hz, which means you can also hook up a PlayStation 5 and an Xbox Series X. There are also a variety of gaming modes that support ALLM and VRR, so you’re in for some insane motion clarity.
Sony A95K QD-OLED
Best OLED 4K TV
Sony’s A95K features a QD-OLED panel using a combination of Quantum Dots and OLED technology to produce a brighter and more colorful image than traditional OLEDs. We’re talking a peak brightness of about 800 nits without any color cast, while blacks are truly black, and everything else looks insanely lifelike, from landscapes to skin tone. It’s no slouch regarding color accuracy either, as you get excellent coverage in the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts.
You may have bought the Sony A95K for its gorgeous 64.5-inch display, but it’s also a gaming beast with two HDMI 2.1 ports that support up to a 120Hz refresh rate, VRR, and ALLM, so you’ll enjoy butter-smooth, responsive gameplay. If you decide to hook up your PS5, Auto HDR Tone Mapping automatically optimizes HDR settings, while Auto Genre Picture Mode recognizes what you’re viewing, switching to game mode to minimize input lag. However, with such quality comes a high price tag, and this TV is going to set you back about $3,000
Where to Get the Best 4K Gaming TV in the UK
Everyone is looking to take full advantage of the incredible visuals on offer with the PS5 and Xbox Series X. There are plenty of brilliant options for 4K gaming TVs in the UK, and we've managed to find the majority from this list as well.
What to Look for in a 4K TV for Gaming
There are many qualities to consider in choosing the best 4K TV for gaming: Color accuracy, contrast, color gamut, viewing angles, power utilization, screen reflections, smart TV features, and more.
However, since we’re all primarily concerned about gaming here, a built-in “gaming mode" with low input latency (ideally, 35ms or less) is crucial here. Without it, you're guaranteed to have your head in your hands wondering why you can't pull off Scorpion's spear move in Mortal Kombat 11 or track targets in Apex Legends.
Input lag is a critical spec to pay attention to when considering a 4K TV for gaming, and RTings has a very detailed chart showing the results of its input lag testing on all the best 4K TVs in various modes.
OLED vs LED (or QLED)
In your search for the best 4K TV for gaming, you'll come across two primary types of TVs: OLED and LED. While they might be very similar in name, they are worlds apart as separate panel technologies.
OLED TVs are categorized as an emissive screen technology, which means the pixels generate their own light by using an electric current to excite its compounds. As the pixels on an OLED TV generate both the picture and produce their own light, they can achieve true black simply by running zero current through them. No energy, no light.
In contrast, LCD/LED displays have separate image generating and backlight layers that produce the final picture you see. In this relationship, the backlight (LED) illuminates the pixels (LCD), which generate the actual images you see. To achieve the same level of true black with LED/LCD sets, TV manufacturers have implemented fully array backlighting systems, which split the backlighting layer into zones known as "local dimming zones." When you run across this specification, know that the more local dimming zones a TV has the better it is.
Samsung brands its TVs with the company's proprietary QLED (or quantum dot LED TV) technology. These QLED TVs essentially contain an extra layer of quantum dots that enhances the brightness and color spectrum of traditional LED panels.
In this way, quantum dots essentially act as an enhancement filter to produce brighter and purer light than LEDs can. This is exactly why Samsung TVs can hit peak brightnesses that are often a thousand or several thousand nits brighter than OLED panels.
Ultimately you get a largely identical image from either display, but there are some unique drawbacks and advantages to each panel type.
LCDs can produce much higher peak brightness levels, but they can suffer from narrower viewing angles and muddier blacks as the display can't fully turn off its backlight like an OLED pixel can just go to black.
OLED displays, on the other hand, are often dimmer than LCDs and can suffer from potential image retention (also called burn-in) problems. This issue occurs when static elements, such as a network logo or health bar, on the screen become temporarily or permanently imprinted onto the screen.
The good news is television manufacturers are constantly improving their respective display technologies. LEDs are getting smaller and smaller, and that’s allowing many more of them to be packed behind a display, giving LCD panels more dimming zones and thus a better control of the image.
You can already find this in some TVs with Mini LEDs, like Samsung’s Neo QLED TVs. And that’s just a start. Micro LEDs go even smaller, offering granular lighting control that could become a serious threat for OLEDs because they, too, have the ability to turn completely off but without the same burn-in risk OLED has been known for, and they can shine much brighter.
Making sense of HDR
High-Dynamic-Range is a technology that greatly increases the range of brightness levels your TV can display, making a bigger difference between the brightest bright areas and darkest dark areas than non-HDR technology. It's a huge upgrade in visual quality, and one of the best things about 4K TV sets. But it's also a little complicated.
There are s number of major HDR standards supported by TVs today with HDR10, HDR10+, HLG and Dolby Vision being the most common. Most 4K TVs that support HDR have support for HDR10 and HLG, with a good number of the higher-end sets supporting Dolby Vision. When it comes to gaming, HDR10 is all you need, as that is what is output by the PS5, PS4, PS4 Pro, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One S/X.
A TV that supports Dolby Vision would only be useful if you have a standalone 4K Blu-Ray player or a streaming media box with Dolby Vision support.
Except for a couple of hard to find Sony TVs, all HDR-capable HDTVs are 4K TVs. For all practical purposes, there are no 1080p HDR TVs. So if you want to buy an HDR-capable TV set to play PC, PS5 or Xbox Series X/S games at 1080p, you'll be buying a 4K TV.
Hey, it's good to be future-proof anyway, right?
It's also important that the peak brightness of an HDR TV will be quite high in order to produce a big difference between dark and light areas in HDR mode. If a TV supports HDR but isn't very bright, you won't really see much of an improvement in image quality. For my own suggestions, we've ensured that every option in this guide supports HDR10, and has a sufficiently high peak brightness to make it look good.
Adaptive Sync and You
Adaptive sync used to be one of those features you could only exclusively on a gaming PC and gaming monitor, but all of that's changing now.
For the uninitiated adaptive sync or variable refresh rate (VRR) are both technologies that enable a display to synchronize their refresh rate to the output of your device. Nvidia and AMD first debuted their respective G-Sync and FreeSync forms of VRR on the PC.
However, in the latter half of 2019 we saw adaptive sync technology trickle down to consoles, as LG and Samsung introduced G-Sync and FreeSync on its respective 2019 TVs. In 2023, everyone seems to be in on the fun. Vizio, TCL, Sony, Hisense, and pretty much every major TV maker you can think of has FreeSync, G-Sync or VRR support on their mid-range to high-end sets, which makes them the perfect screens to play the Xbox Series X and PS5 on.
Getting the most out of your 4K TV
Outside of playing games on 4K capable gaming PCs and consoles. 4K and HDR content lives primarily on these services below.
- Cable and Satellite: Providers are slowly rolling out more 4K and HDR content using HLG (Hybrid Log-Gamma) HDR as opposed to HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, or Advanced HDR. Most newer TVs have HLG support and some older can support it after a firmware update (be sure to check your specific model).
- Netflix: Most new Netflix original series and movies, (outside of animation and kids stuff) are in 4K, some with HDR as well.
- Amazon Prime: Many Amazon Prime Originals are also in 4K, again with HDR in some cases.
- YouTube: The biggest repository of cat videos also has a surprisingly large amount of 4K content, too.
- Mixer: Microsoft’s game streaming service Mixer can stream in 4K, too.
Streaming in 4K requires a pretty good internet connection and one of the best routers. For example, Netflix recommends users should be able to support at least 25Mbps of throughput on their home network. If all that is a bit confusing, I've posted a summary of them all right here for you.
To take advantage of 4K content you need a streaming box or console capable of streaming in 4K, or you can use the integrated smart TV app.
Of course, if you don’t want to stream, you can buy 4K UHD Blu-ray discs. This is the costliest option, but it provides the best picture and sound quality.
A quick note on HDMI: To take advantage of the latest features, you’ll need HDMI 2.1 compatible ports (on your console, receiver/switch, and TV). These ports offer 48Gbps of bandwidth, giving you the room you need to send 4K 120fps or 8K 60fps video with HDR.
If you're in the market for something more affordable, check out our guide to the best cheap TVs for gaming. We also have guides to help your PC get into shape for the new era of 4K gaming, including the best 4K gaming monitors and the best graphics cards.
You may see cables labeled as “4K certified” or something like that, but you won’t know whether your cable is truly up to spec unless it clearly indicates HDMI 2.1 or “Ultra High Speed”, and you don’t want a simple cable to be the thing holding you back. That said, you can still go for a simple cable. You don’t have to go for a fancy cable with impressive branding. As long as the cable is listing its HDMI 2.1 or “Ultra High Speed” specification, you should be able to count on it delivering your signal perfectly well.
Kevin Lee is IGN's Hardware and Roundups Editor. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam.
Danielle Abraham is a freelance writer and unpaid music historian.
