Sharp teases 8K monitor with 120Hz refresh and HDR

Sharp has just made me drool all over my keyboard with the tease of its 27-inch 8K monitor with a 120Hz refresh rate and HDR-capable. The 8K display was teased at the IGZO booth of CEATEC Japan 2016.

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The mammoth 8K resolution slams your graphics card with a huge 7680x4320 native res, while the even bigger 120Hz refresh rate will have your GPU under more pressure than ever before. 120Hz is a high refresh rate for lower resolution panels like 1920x1080 and 2560x1440, but 8K at 120Hz would require far more GPU horsepower than triple-monitor 4K 60Hz setups at resolutions like 11,520x2160 (which I personally use as the highest GPU load thanks to the insane native resolution). Throwing HDR onto the table makes the monitor look better, and require even more GPU power.

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But rendering 120FPS minimum at 8K is absolutely impossible right now, no matter the GPU hardware - I would dare say that even the next-gen offerings in the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2080 Ti, or the future Volta-based graphics cards (or even the crazy Volta GPUs with 48GB of HBM2 or GDDR6) - nor AMD's next GPU architecture in Vega, or even their next Navi GPU will handle 8K 120FPS in games on a single card.

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Sharp's 8K monitor prototype is quite thick right now.

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Here we have the rear of the 8K monitor, with a bunch of cables coming out of it - final versions of 8K monitors won't be like this, as this is a very early prototype from Sharp.

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Even photos taken of the 8K monitor playing 8K content look insanely detailed.

What is IGZO? The new monitor uses an IGZO-powered IPS panel, with the IGZO side of things being a semiconductor material used in the backplane of the panel. It's made from indium, gallium, zinc, and oxygen - thus, IGZO - and it can be used on various panels like TN, IPS, and OLED. IZGO has some advantages over silicon semiconductors like the fact that electron mobility is 20-50x higher, meaning IGZO displays can use smaller transistors, which allows for higher pixel densities and reduced power consumption.