In a world-first demonstration, Samsung showed Horizon: Forbidden West running in real-time at 8K and 120Hz — or did they? The game was shown running on a Samsung TV over HDMI with a buttery-smooth framerate, and that’s impressive enough on its own. On the other hand, there are a few considerations that could make this feat difficult to reproduce on your own (aside from the tremendous cost; an 8K-capable gaming PC isn’t cheap.)
First of all, the Samsung TV used was reportedly modified, but it isn’t clear how. HDMI 2.1 can’t support the bandwidth required for video resolution like this, although HDMI 2.2 is expected to have much greater capacity. To overcome this limitation, Samsung used a technology called Display Stream Compression (DSC), but this feature is already available on Samsung TVs.
Secondly, it wasn’t true, native 8K. Horizon ran on an AMD Ryzen 9800X3D CPU and an AMD Radeon RX 9070XT GPU, which outputs at a maximum of 5K resolution. Samsung upscaled the picture through AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 tech, which is similar to Nvidia’s DLSS technology.
Don’t get us wrong: even achieving non-native 8K and running it at 120Hz is worthy of a long whistle, but is it fair to claim 8K gameplay when Samsung had to fudge the settings? According to FlatPanelsHD, maintaining true 8K resolution in video games will require frame rates well above 60 frames per second.
As this was a world-first demo, it might be a while yet before systems capable of handling games at 8K/120Hz are readily available, and likely even longer before they reach affordable levels for the average gamer. That said, we can only imagine how visually impressive a game like Horizon looked. Even if we had a recording of the footage, it wouldn’t translate through your screen unless you also had an 8K monitor.
