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.