How to Choose the Best Gaming TV for PS5 & Xbox Right Now

How to choose the best TV for gaming right now

In today’s world, the lines between a fantastic TV for general viewing and a top-tier gaming TV have blurred considerably. However, if you’re looking to truly unleash the power of your PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X and experience games at their absolute best, there are specific features that deserve your attention. This guide will walk you through the essential considerations for selecting a great gaming TV, helping you optimize your living room setup.

What to Look For in a Gaming TV

At its core, a good TV shares universal qualities, whether you’re gaming or just watching your favorite show. You’ll want crisp 4K resolution, ample brightness to combat glare, excellent contrast with deep, consistent blacks, wide viewing angles, and a color palette that perfectly balances vibrancy and accuracy. For gamers specifically, the ultimate TV goes a step further, offering a 120Hz refresh rate (or more), Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support, ultra-low input lag, and lightning-fast motion response to eliminate blur or visual artifacts during intense action. Balancing all these high-end features with your budget is often the biggest challenge, but it’s not impossible!

OLED and LCD: Understanding Display Technologies

When it comes to pure picture quality, especially for gaming, OLED TVs often take the crown. They deliver unparalleled contrast with perfect blacks, making games look incredibly immersive. However, this premium performance usually comes with a higher price tag. Additionally, some OLED models might struggle to achieve peak brightness in very sunny rooms, which is something to consider if your gaming setup is in a brightly lit space.

Within the OLED family, you’ll encounter two main types: WOLED (White OLED) and the newer QD-OLED (Quantum Dot OLED). Without getting too technical, the key difference is that QD-OLED panels incorporate a layer of quantum dots. This allows them to produce a wider, more vibrant spectrum of colors compared to traditional WOLED displays.

However, it’s not simply a matter of QD-OLED being universally superior. The overall performance of an individual TV model is more crucial than the specific panel type. Some premium WOLED TVs, for instance, utilize advanced technologies like a “four-stack” structure or Micro Lens Array (MLA) to significantly enhance brightness and color. Certain WOLED sets might also excel at minimizing reflections or maintaining deep blacks even in well-lit environments. Regardless of the specific variant, most OLED TVs offer excellent contrast, near-instant response times, and wide viewing angles.

If an LCD TV aligns better with your budget or if you need a TV for a room with a lot of ambient light, look for models with an advanced backlight system. Technologies like mini-LEDs and effective full-array local dimming can significantly boost contrast and lighting detail. Many LCDs, even some budget-friendly options, also incorporate quantum dots to enhance color vibrancy (often marketed as ‘QLED’ TVs). While these typically can’t match the extreme contrast or instantaneous motion of high-end OLEDs, they often offer superior brightness, are more affordable, and the best LCDs can still deliver a fantastic gaming experience.

HDMI 2.1: The Essential Gaming Connection

For anyone serious about maximizing their PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X/S experience, full HDMI 2.1 support on your TV is non-negotiable. This standard provides significantly higher bandwidth (48 Gbps, a huge leap from HDMI 2.0’s 18 Gbps), enabling a suite of features vital for cutting-edge gaming. These include Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) and Automatic Low Latency Mode (ALLM), which we’ll dive into shortly.

The most significant advantage of HDMI 2.1 is its capacity to deliver crisp 4K video at a blazing 120Hz refresh rate with current-gen consoles (and up to 144Hz for powerful gaming PCs). While not every PS5 or Xbox Series X/S title hits these frame rates consistently, or sometimes only at lower resolutions, games that do support it will provide an incredibly smooth and responsive experience. Furthermore, HDMI 2.1 incorporates Enhanced Audio Return Channel (eARC), enabling you to transmit high-quality, lossless audio from your TV to a compatible soundbar or receiver.

The more *full* HDMI 2.1 ports your TV offers, the better. The emphasis here is on ‘full.’ Due to HDMI 2.1 being backward-compatible with HDMI 2.0, some manufacturers have been known to label ports as ‘HDMI 2.1′ even when they don’t fully support all its advanced features. When shopping, always double-check the specifications to ensure your chosen TV truly delivers the HDMI 2.1 capabilities you expect for a premium gaming experience.

While HDMI 2.1 is currently the gold standard, the HDMI Forum recently unveiled the new HDMI 2.2 spec. This future update promises even greater bandwidth (up to 96 Gbps), potentially allowing for even higher resolutions and refresh rates, and could further improve audio/video sync. However, it will likely be some time before TVs with HDMI 2.2 ports are widely available, and its full benefits will initially only be realized by those with extremely powerful gaming PCs. Still, it’s a technology to watch for future console generations.

HDR – High Dynamic Range: Bringing Games to Life

High Dynamic Range (HDR) is all about expanding the contrast and color vibrancy on your screen. An HDR-capable TV can display a much wider difference between the brightest whites and the darkest blacks, revealing details that would otherwise be lost on a standard dynamic range (SDR) TV. This means more lifelike explosions, subtle shadow details, and a richer, more accurate color palette that truly brings games closer to the developers’ original vision.

To enjoy HDR, you need both HDR-mastered content and a TV capable of displaying it. HDR comes in various formats, broadly categorized by their use of static metadata (like HDR10) or dynamic metadata (like HDR10+ and Dolby Vision). Dynamic metadata allows your TV to optimize brightness and colors on a scene-by-scene or even frame-by-frame basis, offering a more refined picture than static metadata, which applies one setting for the entire content. Be aware that console and TV support for these formats can vary; for example, Xbox Series X/S supports Dolby Vision for gaming, while the PS5 does not.

The good news is that most modern TVs, even at the budget end, are ‘HDR-ready’ to some extent. The catch, however, is that not all HDR implementations are created equal. Some TVs excel at maximizing HDR’s potential, while others offer a less impactful experience. The same variability applies to HDR content itself. While the number of games supporting HDR is steadily increasing, the quality of HDR implementation can differ significantly from title to title, sometimes more so than with movies.

HGiG – HDR Gaming Interest Group: Simplifying HDR for Gamers

HGiG, or the HDR Gaming Interest Group, is a collaborative effort by major players like Sony, Microsoft, TV manufacturers, and game developers to standardize HDR gaming. The goal is simple: when you start a new game, your console or PC should automatically recognize your TV’s display capabilities. This allows the game to optimally adjust its HDR settings, ensuring you get the best possible picture without losing crucial details in extremely bright or dark scenes – think of a bright exit from a dark tunnel looking natural, not like a blown-out white area.

While the concept is excellent, its real-world application can be a bit complex. Not all TVs clearly feature HGiG settings, and only a portion of PlayStation and Xbox games fully support and utilize these guidelines. If your TV does offer an HGiG option in its tone mapping settings, it’s generally recommended to enable it before configuring your console’s HDR settings. For games that truly leverage HGiG and HDR, this should ideally provide an optimized image without further manual tweaking. Ultimately, your personal preference matters most, so feel free to adjust settings until you find what looks best to you.

ALLM – Auto Low Latency Mode: Seamless Gaming Performance

ALLM (Auto Low Latency Mode) is a fantastic quality-of-life feature for gamers. It allows your gaming console (like a PS5 or Xbox) to automatically signal your TV to switch into a low-latency picture mode. This bypasses unnecessary image processing that can introduce input lag – those crucial milliseconds that separate a perfectly timed move from a missed opportunity. Essentially, your TV automatically activates ‘Game Mode’ when it detects you’ve launched a game, then switches back to its regular viewing mode when you’re watching movies or TV, all without you having to touch a single setting.

VRR – Variable Refresh Rate: Smooth Gameplay, Always

For many gamers, Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) is a familiar and welcome technology. It directly addresses common issues like screen tearing, stuttering, and slowdown that occur when a game struggles to maintain a consistent frame rate. With VRR, your TV’s refresh rate dynamically adjusts to match the game’s output. This synchronization means your display won’t show a new frame until it’s fully rendered, resulting in noticeably smoother, more fluid, and responsive gameplay, even during frame rate dips.

Several VRR technologies exist, including Nvidia’s G-Sync, AMD’s FreeSync, and the HDMI Forum’s own VRR specification (part of HDMI 2.1). For VRR to function, both your TV and input device must support the same technology. Keep in mind that devices may also have specific refresh rate windows within which VRR operates; for example, the PS5’s VRR on a 120Hz display is effective between 48Hz and 120Hz.

To recap: The PS5 officially supports HDMI Forum VRR. The Xbox Series X and S support both HDMI Forum VRR and FreeSync. Gaming PCs, depending on their graphics card (Nvidia or AMD), will typically support G-Sync or FreeSync, respectively. While an ideal gaming TV would support all major VRR formats, it’s not a dealbreaker if, for example, it lacks G-Sync support but you primarily game on a PS5 or Xbox.

8K (You Don’t Need It – Yet)

Here’s one feature you can largely ignore for now: 8K support. While the PS5 and Xbox Series X are theoretically capable of 8K output, native 8K games are virtually nonexistent. The practical benefits of 8K resolution are negligible unless you’re sitting uncomfortably close to an enormous TV screen. Moreover, the limited number of 8K TVs available are typically very expensive, making them an unnecessary investment for current-gen gaming.

Finding a Great Gaming TV Today

While we don’t formally review TVs, thorough market research consistently points to certain models that are widely praised by trusted professional review sites. These generally excel in the key gaming-centric features discussed above, offering a fantastic blend of picture quality and responsiveness.

Remember that TV technology evolves quickly, and prices are always in flux. There’s never a single ‘perfect’ moment to buy. If you find a deeply discounted model from the previous year (e.g., a 2024 model as we approach 2025), it often represents excellent value compared to the very latest releases.