8K Association shows off 'world first' 8K 120Hz gaming over HDMI 2.1 on AMD hardware

8K Association shows off 8K @ 120Hz gaming over HDMI 2.1 using AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and Radeon RX 9070 XT running Horizon Forbidden West.

8K Association shows off 'world first' 8K 120Hz gaming over HDMI 2.1 on AMD hardware
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TL;DR: The 8K Association demonstrated the world’s first 8K gaming at 120Hz over HDMI 2.1b using a Samsung Neo QLED TV and AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT with AMD FSR 3 upscaling. This milestone highlights HDMI 2.1b’s capability with Display Stream Compression, paving the way for future ultra-high-resolution, high-refresh-rate gaming experiences.

The 8K Association has shown off the world's first 8K @ 120Hz gaming over HDMI 2.1 at the recent NAB 2025 show (National Association of Broadcasting).

The team used a special 65-inch 8K 120Hz-capable Samsung Neo QLED QN950F TV over HDMI 2.1, plugged into a MAINGEAR desktop gaming PC with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor and Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card. 8K Association fired up Horizon Forbidden West, rendering the game at 5K and then using AMD FSR 3 upscaling technology to bump it up to 8K. The signal was sent to the 8K TV using HDMI 2.1b with DSC (Display Stream Compression) technology.

It's an impressive feat -- 8K is 33 million pixels, compared to the 8.2 million at 4K -- but even more so at 120Hz. AMD's flagship Radeon RX 9070 XT isn't the GPU that I'd be using for 8K 120Hz. NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 5090 is a much more powerful GPU with even more VRAM -- 32GB on the RTX 5090 versus 16GB on the RX 9070 XT -- and furthermore, FSR 4 or better yet, DLSS 4 should've been used.

I'd love to see what something like Cyberpunk 2077 running at 8K 120Hz using DLSS 4 and Frame Generation, or really any new title with FSR 4 (if you have to use AMD) or DLSS 4 with NVIDIA for an 8K 120Hz show off. However, it's very cool to see that 8K 120Hz is being driven over the beefier HDMI 2.1b standard using DSC.

The newer HDMI 2.2 specification was announced at CES 2025 earlier this year, delivering a huge 96Gbps of bandwidth and ready to drive up to 4K @ 480Hz, 8K @ a blistering 240Hz, and even 10K @ 120Hz under the new "Ultra96" high-end HDMI 2.2 cables coming in the future, you can read more about that in the link above.