Horizon Forbidden West runs at 8K 120Hz on Samsung TV via HDMI 2.1 in world-first demo

[midian182]

What just happened? Samsung has shown off what it claims to be the first-ever public demonstration of a game – Horizon Forbidden West – playing in 8K at 120 Hz on a native 8K television over HDMI 2.1. While that sounds impressive, there were a few caveats.

Samsung showed off the demo at NAB earlier this month in partnership with Maingear and AMD, reports FlatPanelsHD.

The PC used for the demonstration was an all-AMD build from Maingear. It featured the powerful Ryzen 7 9800X3D paired with a Radeon 9070 XT, 32GB of RAM, and an MSI X670E Gaming Plus Wi-Fi motherboard. Not too surprisingly, the 8K output was upscaled from 5K using AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 upscaling tech.

Samsung didn't reveal anything about graphics settings in the game. Our review of the card shows that its average 4K performance of 74 fps places it between the RTX 4070 Ti Super and the RTX 5070 Ti. While there's no ray tracing option in the game, it's likely that the graphics were at the lower end to achieve this result, and FSR 3 was probably set at a performance-focused level with Frame Generation enabled.

The TV used in the demo was a Samsung 65-inch 8K Neo QLED TV model, custom-modified specially for the event. Samsung did not specify what the modifications were.

Related reading: AMD FSR 4 vs Nvidia DLSS 4 at 4K

It's believed that the "world-first" claims being made here are related to the game being played over HDMI 2.1. The standard can reach 8K@60Hz with its maximum bandwidth of 48 Gb/s, so DSC (Display Stream Compression) was used to reach 8K@120Hz.

Some suspected that the modifications to the TV Samsung talked about related to DSC, but its new 8K TVs already support the technology – virtually every 8K TV made from 2021 onwards supports it. So, it's likely that those customizations related to something else.

In January, the HDMI Forum announced the new Ultra96 cable, which will enable HDMI 2.2's increased bandwidth of 96Gbps. That's double the 48Gbps bandwidth of HDMI 2.1 and is more than the 80Gbps supported by DisplayPort 2.1. It means HDMI 2.2 will support 4K at up to 480Hz, 8K at up to 240Hz, and 10K at 120Hz without the use of DSC.

HDMI 2.2 is set to arrive in the first half of 2025, when companies will receive the full specifications, but it could be years before we see the standard appear in consumer devices.

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Horizon Forbidden West runs at 8K 120Hz on Samsung TV via HDMI 2.1 in world-first demo

 

[bviktor]

8K is stupid, has been stupid, and will always be stupid. The human eye is incapable of perceiving that many pixels from sensible distances, period. Sensible in this case means you can actually see the display without constantly turning your head and/or damaging your eyes from sitting too close.

In other news, Sony already announced they won't be making any more 8K TVs. Good for them, It's only a matter of time before others follow.

 

[yRaz]

8K is stupid, has been stupid, and will always be stupid. The human eye is incapable of perceiving that many pixels from sensible distances, period. Sensible in this case means you can actually see the display without constantly turning your head and/or damaging your eyes from sitting too close.

In other news, Sony already announced they won't be making any more 8K TVs. Good for them, It's only a matter of time before others follow.

8k is good for large format displays or displays you're ment to be closer to than the optimal viewing distance

 

[adaplect]

I'd be happier if they made the HDML connectors not suck. They have an up/down direction and they break easily.

 

[Dimitriid]

Using compression to achieve 120fps seems like probably the most counter-intuitive possible way to get there: There's already diminishing returns of going to 8k resolutions and way more so by using FSR, So let's negate the already minuscule benefit you get from it by compressing the image on top to get more frames in, you know just in case you might miss the artifacts and ghosting from FSR lets make sure it's extra noticeable by compressing the image.

Just demo 4k 120hz maybe? That's going to be pretty unfeasible to reach for most sub-5000 rigs anyway and that would actually I think still show the upper limits of hdmi 2.2 if that's what you wanted, but I guess big number = more good so just ruin the image instead?

This is why you should never let marketing people interfere with engineers who most definitively pointed this out I'm sure.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

8K is stupid, has been stupid, and will always be stupid. The human eye is incapable of perceiving that many pixels from sensible distances, period. Sensible in this case means you can actually see the display without constantly turning your head and/or damaging your eyes from sitting too close.

In other news, Sony already announced they won't be making any more 8K TVs. Good for them, It's only a matter of time before others follow.

The human eye cant see more then 30 FPS too, right? LMFAO.

 

[godrilla]

Here I am wondering where is the middle ground between 4k and 8k. Going to upload some of my 5 year old cx display for comparison in this Horizonzero dawn remastered.
I'm personally waiting for hdmi 2.2.

 

[VitalyT]

What's really stupid - showing off 8K in a 720p YouTube video, like the one posted here.

 

[AlexIL]

They still pushing that dumbed down Horizon with att the gimmicks they could. Make that girl beautiful again and we will play. Nobody interested in playing everyday girl character. 8K or 80K won't make a difference.

 

[Lew Zealand]

So many other things need to be improved in video games like better geometry, layering, clipping, lighting, ambient occlusion, path tracing with actually decent performance.

But Samsung is a TV company which can't do any of those useful things for games so instead they market "moar fake pixels better" and hope people are stupid enough to notice that "8K" improves nothing.

 

[dangh]

They still pushing that dumbed down Horizon with att the gimmicks they could. Make that girl beautiful again and we will play. Nobody interested in playing everyday girl character. 8K or 80K won't make a difference.

It's a great game, and I do not mind playing Alloy. I do not need supermodels everywhere, and new horizon could maybe use some small fixes here or there, but the fl is good as it is.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

It's a great game, and I do not mind playing Alloy. I do not need supermodels everywhere, and new horizon could maybe use some small fixes here or there, but the fl is good as it is.

FL was better before getting uglified to fit modern political stances.

I'd be happier if they made the HDML connectors not suck. They have an up/down direction and they break easily.

But then they couldnt make lots of money selling you moar cables.

 

[Ohnooze]

It's a great game, and I do not mind playing Alloy. I do not need supermodels everywhere, and new horizon could maybe use some small fixes here or there, but the fl is good as it is.

What's interesting is that the actual actress is an attractive girl. But damn did they do a number on her face. Looks like someone's been punching her in the face and it's all swollen up.
The actual game is just ok imo. Beautiful world but that Hallmark movie acting and dialog is so damn cringe.

 

[dingusbot8000]

"You know what will make Horizon a totally unboring, and not a lame slog of a game?? More pixels!!"

said no one ever.

 

[m4a4]

It's a great game, and I do not mind playing Alloy. I do not need supermodels everywhere, and new horizon could maybe use some small fixes here or there, but the fl is good as it is.

What's interesting is that the actual actress is an attractive girl. But damn did they do a number on her face. Looks like someone's been punching her in the face and it's all swollen up.
The actual game is just ok imo. Beautiful world but that Hallmark movie acting and dialog is so damn cringe.

It was one of those games that was hyped up (being a PS exclusive), but didn't deliver. Phoned it in a little more than halfway through because it was just not that appealing (the shield armour was the last "fun" thing I pushed for). And they certainly did do the model dirty.

I just don't get it, why is Horizon (still) so hyped up? That Lego version didn't even sell from what I heard...

 

[toooooot]

It was one of those games that was hyped up (being a PS exclusive), but didn't deliver. Phoned it in a little more than halfway through because it was just not that appealing (the shield armour was the last "fun" thing I pushed for). And they certainly did do the model dirty.

I just don't get it, why is Horizon (still) so hyped up? That Lego version didn't even sell from what I heard...

First game was a solid one. Even if it did not have a killer gameplay, it looked very pleasing and appealing to single player gamers. But they made many stupid decisions going into the second game, such as main character face downgrade or making a strong reference to Musk with their evil white rocket man character. The game reeks of many priorities that do not belong in good games.

 

[Ohnooze]

First game was a solid one. Even if it did not have a killer gameplay, it looked very pleasing and appealing to single player gamers. But they made many stupid decisions going into the second game, such as main character face downgrade or making a strong reference to Musk with their evil white rocket man character. The game reeks of many priorities that do not belong in good games.

Oh yeah the devs lean in only one direction for sure. I don't plan buying the next one anyway. This one was very woke imo and in the most cringe way too. Plus the whole Indian garb art design is just so bad.

But hey that's ok...I don't have to buy their games in the future. I'm clearly not their target audience.

 

[MasterAce]

Why FSR3? This game has an exellent inhouse sollution that is better than FSR3 and there’s FSR4 as well.

 

[yRaz]

Why FSR3? This game has an exellent inhouse sollution that is better than FSR3 and there’s FSR4 as well.

It's probably been in development longer than they have had access to FS4. In the the same way how you can get a "lossless signal" by decompressing sound the same way it was compressed(think lossless audio) the same is probably true for video. So if they compressed it with FS3 and decompressed it with FS3 you *should* end up with the same image.

 

[AlexIL]

Deleted it

 

[ScottSoapbox]

Just demo 4k 120hz maybe? That's going to be pretty unfeasible to reach for most sub-5000 rigs anyway and that would actually I think still show the upper limits of hdmi 2.2 if that's what you wanted, but I guess big number = more good so just ruin the image instead?

This is why you should never let marketing people interfere with engineers who most definitively pointed this out I'm sure.

What??

I run 4K 144hz on my 2024 TV with a RTX 3080. That isn’t a even the absolute max of HDMI 2.1 let alone 2.2.

 

[Puiu]

At the current rate of GPU performance improvements, we'll get decent 8K framerates in about 7-8 years.