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 because like
just ham that's not that great just swiss it's like bland right
swiss
while we get set up oh wow okay uh
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 black sand
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 basa 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 e-arc for better sound
quality through supported sound bars 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 going to 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 uh one of these
fortunately that's not too shabby all right
so let's see if this picked up immediately here i kind of 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
uh 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 going to be running at 4k 120 hertz
but we are getting support for up to 1080p or even 1440p at 120 hertz or 4k
at 60hz 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 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 i 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 hurt 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 going to help me with this to see just
how smooth it is that is about as butt
trees move 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 and i'm dead oh and face on the rock
okay as usual it doesn't make you a better
gamer but boy does it ever look good however playing games at 4k 60fps
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 um 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 you know back when you're running at 1280x1024 or
whatever the case may be so i am really curious to see how this
looks from uh from a normal viewing distance and still at the desktop this
does not look great like text is not very sharp so you can 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 game once you know the whole scene is in
motion that 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 six move pans now that is unreal
no tears no stutters and
it just feels crazy responsive right we're
supposed to be looking at the uh the resolution compromise so here let's
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 120fps over 60fps any
day of the week if you guys want to 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
frame rate versus low frame rate versus high frame rate video and i want to 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
24.23 that's a pretty good time for me
like honestly it feels pretty good
i wish my mousepad was a little bigger but i mean that's my biggest complaint
right now come on
uh 26.31 i mean i'm at the point now where i'm
kind of 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
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 got to kill 15 of them as fast as you
can and apparently you can do it better than
me so go for it i'm gonna i'm about to get
ready no go for it first off your sensitivity is so high
any time now colton all right okay take it back take it back yeah you
win you win you win you're much better okay terrorists win
all right ed have a seat first
have a seat
21.17 dang all right
i win all right you win all right now let's try a game where both smoothness
and performance are going to matter this one so it says battlefield 5 running at
ultra settings on our rtx 2080 ti is
right within the g-sync window that is going to 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 going to 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 dip to right there so without g-sync that's going to
affect the smoothness of your animation it's going to add 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 is not billing this thing as a gaming tv per se because it's good
for well anything you could want to 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 uh have a gaming
display in the living room at home so i think it's
probably time for 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