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The first big gaming announcement of this year’s CES really is Big. There’s nothing the PC industry likes more than a new product standard and Nvidia has created the mother-of-all-displays with its new Big Format Gaming Display (or BFGD in an apparent nod to the legendary DOOM weapon).
The first BFGDs will come later in the year from manufacturers including Acer, Asus and HP. At 65in they are undoubtedly big and come with all the features that gamers might expect, such as 120Hz refresh rates, G-Sync technology for smooth refresh rates, low latency, HDR with 1000nit brightness. The sets are based on LCD
The launch looks to be a response by the PC gaming industry to the fast-dropping prices of 4K TVs – which can be used as oversized monitors – with Nvidia saying: ‘If you play on a PC, don’t be tempted by the buzzwords and shiny tech – none of the big-screen displays will deliver the excellent experience you deserve.’
The new displays, despite not being TVs, do come with built-in Nvidia Shield, which effectively acts as the smart TV interface for the display, providing Netflix and the like, plus the ability to stream games from Nvidia and even play Android titles.
So what we have here is a TV, that’s not a TV, that really is a TV. It’s bound to be crazy expensive (no prices yet) but for the most dedicated of PC gamers it looks to fill a niche, providing a PC-centric large display to hook up to their behemoth gaming towers.
