Whether You’re a Console or PC Gamer, Optimize Your Play Sessions With These Top Gaming TVs

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A great TV can elevate your gaming experience to new heights, offering crisp, high-resolution graphics and smooth animation. The best gaming TVs deliver great picture quality, rich colors, deep contrast, and wide dynamic range to make any game look more vibrant, more detailed, and more engaging.

In the last few years, many manufacturers have added a slew of gaming-focused upgrades, like using HDMI 2.1 ports that support the superior performance of the PS5 and Xbox Series X, and technologies like variable refresh rate support to keep your gameplay running smooth.

In 2023 any TV should be able to connect to any game console or PC, but that doesn’t mean you get the same experience from every TV. To fully take in and enjoy the visually and technically stunning games of today, you’ll need a TV capable of doing them justice. That means sorting through specs, ratings, and features to separate the best 4K TVs broadly from the best for gaming.

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Best Gaming TVs

What to Consider When Picking Out a TV For Gaming

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How We Selected The Best Gaming TVs

We researched expert sources such as Kotaku Australia, CNET, PC Magazine, RTings, and TechRadar, checking consumer reviews and feedback to select the top gaming TVs on the market. Beyond gaming-centric features like lag time and refresh rate, we focused our selections on image quality regarding resolution, brightness, and color reproduction. These are the TVs we recommend for the ultimate gaming experience.

The LG C3 is the latest in a line of best-in-class OLED TVs from LG, and the successor to our favorite gaming TV from last year. It carries through everything that made the C2 great, including excellent contrast, brilliant colors, and great gaming performance, often with minor improvements. The C3 utilizes LG’s new Light Control Architecture technology to improve its overall brightness and color coverage to enhance visuals in HDR. It also adds support for DTS surround sound audio and quality-of-life improvements like a new quick menu for your most used settings.

Taken as a whole, the LG C3 is similar to the C2 and not that far off from the C1. Everything you’ve heard about the line’s outstanding picture quality applies here, as well. Its blacks are rich and inky. Its colors are vivid, yet accurate. As with most OLEDs, its peak brightness lags behind that of QLED TVs at around 830 nits, but it’s bright enough to be used in daylight and offers an outstanding HDR experience thanks to its incredible dynamic range.

It also introduces a negligibly low amount of input lag, rendering motion blur and image smearing a thing of the past. Native support for Dolby Atmos and four HDMI ports to easily connect all of your devices and pass through full surround sound to compatible sound bars.

If the LG C3 is out of your price range, the LG C2 is on sale and still readily available. Even without the latest tweaks, it’s an outstanding choice with similar picture quality.

When it comes to offering the best bang for the buck, the Hisense U8H is the perfect blend of picture quality, gaming performance, and price. It offers exceptional brightness and great contrast thanks to its 336 to 528 local dimming zones. (It varies based on the size of the screen.) The Mini-LED panel is well integrated and doesn’t show blooming around bright objects quite as much as its extremely popular competitor, the TCL 6-Series (R646). (Though it’s also a great choice if you’re looking to spend less than $1,000 in most sizes.)

For gaming, there’s a lot to love here. Two of its four ports support HDMI 2.1, so you can plug in your Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 and have them run in 4K at 120Hz with full variable refresh rate support. HDR content looks outstanding on this TV with rich blacks and bright highlights, and its built-in speakers are surprisingly good.

If you hook up a sound bar, you’ll even be able to pass through Dolby Atmos spatial audio for an even more immersive experience. Just make sure to crowd on the couch if you’re gaming with friends as the viewing angles aren’t great on this set.

There are better options if you’re willing to spend more, but you’ll be hard pressed to find a TV this good for less.

The Sony Bravia XR A95K delivers the most crisp picture we’ve seen, thanks to its remarkable contrast and near-perfect blacks. Its perfect OLED backlighting doesn’t create any blooming around brighter elements, and it deepens the quality of dark lines and allows for a wider gradient of dark shades.

This creates definition in its picture that immediately catches the eye, especially when gaming. Its excellent contrast is matched by its peak brightness which is just shy of 1,000 nits, impressive for an OLED. Its wide dynamic range, bright highlights, and excellent color reproduction are perfect for HDR, where the A95K supports all of the major formats, including Dolby Vision.

The successor to last year’s pick, Sony’s A90J OLED, the Bravia XR A95K offers a profound upgrade with the introduction of its new quantum-dot enhanced panel. These dots enhance the color coverage of the panel while also increasing its brightness. It’s also able to clock all the way up to 120Hz for its refresh rate and features VRR support for smooth gameplay.

With its thin bezels, the XR A95K makes the most of its size, devoting more space to its picture and less to the frame. It features four HDMI 2.1 ports and speakers capable of 3D Bravia XR surround sound, though you still might want to invest in a sound bar since it also supports Dolby Atmos spatial audio. The biggest downside we’ve noticed is that the ambient light sensor has a tendency to raise the blacks, though you can easily disable the setting.

The Samsung S95B, the brand's attempt at a “hybrid” QD-OLED TV, makes incredible use of quantum-dot technology to make a bright OLED. Where OLEDs are usually dimmer than the competition, Reviewed found that the S95B was able to maintain a sustained brightness of over 1,100 nits in HDR, making it one of the brightest OLED TVs you can buy. (As it happens, the SDR brightness was closer to average.) Its self-emitting pixels guarantee perfect blacks and incredible dynamic range, while the quantum dots help colors to pop off the screen.

It’s also perfectly furnished with all kinds of features for gaming. All four of its HDMI ports support HDMI 2.1, so you can enjoy its full 120Hz refresh rate with every input, each with full support for AMD FreeSync Premium VRR (essentially tested and quality-certified variable refresh rate support).

Once you’re actually playing a game, you can bring up Samsung’s built-in Game Bar to swap picture presets, enable input lag reduction, and even increase motion clarity in low frame rate games while still maintaining excellent responsiveness. The S95B also supports HGIG, a game-specific HDR format that tailors HDR performance for gaming.

Its picture quality and gaming prowess only come with a couple of trade-offs, though. Xbox Series X players may not love that it lacks Dolby Vision HDR support. The automatic backlight limiter can also be visible in very bright scenes that take up large sections of the screen. Ultimately, it’s outstanding image quality and extra bright picture more than make up for these nitpicks, making it a top choice for OLED gaming.

If you aren’t sold on OLED, QLED is the next best thing. Our favorite QLED, the Samsung QN90C, features a quantum-dot enhanced Mini-LED display to deliver outstanding color coverage and peak brightness just under 2,000 nits. In its review, RTings noted that this isn’t quite as bright as its predecessor, the QN90B, but that it processes brightness much more accurately, leading to a more stunning HDR experience. It also offers excellent local dimming support and great contrast, though you can’t count on the absolute pitch blacks that you’d get with an OLED.

The QN90C makes TV and movies look great, but performs even better with games. It features a low response time of approximately 10 milliseconds with Game Mode enabled. It also features high frame rate support up to 120Hz at 4K and Variable Refresh Rate for smooth, tear-free gameplay. When you put everything together, the QN90C is in a class of its own: Not only does it offer great gaming specs and features, but its outstanding brightness and dynamic range make it a complete treat for the eyes.

If you need a TV that doesn’t sacrifice features or picture quality for size, the Samsung Q60C is for you. It comes in sizes as small as 32 inches, which is very rare among 4K TVs. Just as important: It uses a quantum-dot enhanced panel, which offers brighter, more vivid colors and high native contrast for better blacks than many competing TVs in its class.

Its picture looks great for movies and games, offering excellent responsiveness of only around 10 milliseconds, so your inputs will come through instantly. Just don’t look to it for advanced features like local dimming, 120Hz, or VRR support. Its peak brightness is also fairly low, just shy of 500-nits, so HDR content won’t pop the same way it will on a larger, more expensive TV. The Q60C may not impress next to a big screen, but its picture quality and core features make it the best small TV you can buy.

Remember how we said you should consider last year’s LG C2? Well we really meant it. LG’s C-series has been a go-to choice for PC gamers craving that big screen experience. Its OLED panel offers better colors and contrast than most gaming monitors and, since the launch of the C3, it can often be found cheaper than those that do. Available in a comparatively small 42 inches, which will look gigantic in a desk-based PC setup – Just make sure you’re able to sit back far enough to comfortably enjoy it.

Repurposing a TV as a gaming monitor is more possible than ever, but it’s important to remember that TVs aren’t designed around PC use. The C2 won’t fall asleep the same way a gaming monitor will, and it won’t turn on just by wiggling your mouse. It has an automatic brightness leveler that can dim the screen while you’re browsing the web or working in a spreadsheet. Even the pixels are different, which can decrease text clarity.

The good news is that the LG C2 is one of the most popular choices for use as a gaming monitor and virtually all of its shortcomings have workarounds. Some are simple changes in the settings or service menus. Others involve installing software or changing settings on your PC. With a little time and effort, however, the C2 transforms from a great TV into a fantastic gaming monitor at a very reasonable price.

Q+A With Our Experts

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