[Hardware] Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 G95NC 8K ultrawide gaming monitor review

[Aronus]

Is there such a thing as too much screen? Obviously, yes. Try plonking, say, a 65-inch HDTV on your desktop as PC monitor and the limitations of size are obvious enough. But the incredible, preposterous new Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 G95NC Dual UHD is no thinly disguised TV. It's a proper PC-optimised panel. And yet this 57-inch uber-wide monster still has us wondering if you can have too much of a good thing.

What you're looking at, in effect, is a pair of 32-inch 240Hz 4K gaming monitors fused into a single 57-inch ultra-curved panel. So, that's no fewer than 7,680 by 2,160 pixels, or just over 16.5 million in total and twice that of 4K. Ouch.

A single 240Hz 4K monitor would be pretty special. But double that resolution running at such a high refresh rate is genuinely unprecedented. Indeed, it's so novel that only AMD's latest RDNA 3-powered Radeon RX 7000 Series GPU can hit the full 240Hz courtesy of their DisplayPort 2.1 interfaces. Nvidia's RTX 40-series GPUs are limited to DP 1.4 can only do 120Hz.

Of course, you could argue that's usually going to be an academic distinction. Good luck hitting 240Hz at dual 4K in Cyberpunk with all the ray-tracing twangers maxed out, or any other graphically demanding game, even on an RTX 4090. However, it's definitely a bit problematic that this most demanding of PC monitors can't run at full performance with the current world's fastest GPU. If you can afford this monitor's $2,499 sticker price, you can almost certainly afford to go all in on a $1,599 RTX 4090.

 

Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 G95NC 8K ultrawide gaming monitor review | PC Gamer