Earlier this month, during NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) Show 2025 in Las Vegas, the 8K Association demonstrated a 'world first' for 8K@120Hz gaming on HDMI 2.1. The spec is notoriously limited to 8K@60Hz, but Display Stream Compression allowed them to overcome that limitation. The PC was entirely powered by AMD hardware and ran Guerrilla's Horizon Forbidden West game, which is known to be well-optimized.
Here's the excerpt from the official 8K Association website:
At one end of the booth, there was a demonstration of real time gaming using an AMD-based gaming PC and a special 65″ TV flown in from Korea by 8K Association member, Samsung, that supported 120fps display. The game was Horizon Forbidden West and the TV was a modified Neo QLED 8K set with
- Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM)
- Variable Refresh Rate (VRR)
- FreeSync Premium Pro
The PC was from Maingear and used an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU and an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT GPU. The game supports the Steam platform which allows analytics to be shown and confirming the 120Hz operation. The game was rendered at 5K and was then internally upscaled using AMD ML-based FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 technology.
The signal was sent to the TV using HDMI 2.1b with DSC support and the impressive smooth visuals attracted a lot of attention from visitors, especially those that were already aware of the game, which is visually very impressive.
8K gaming certainly still feels a little overkill, especially when some PC games have performance issues even at far lower resolutions. However, the latest GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD make it more manageable than ever with NVIDIA DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation and AMD FSR 4 Frame Generation. Actually, Warhorse's Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 was shown running at playable frame rates even at 16K resolution on the GeForce RTX 5090, and that's without Frame Generation, which is not supported in that game.
With the HDMI 2.2 spec announced at CES 2025 and its official release scheduled for later this year, 8K displays will likely become more common thanks to the doubled (96 Gbps) bandwidth. At the same time, it may well take a few years - we'll probably get a new generation of GPUs before 8K gaming really becomes widely attainable with both hardware and software.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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