Best TV for Gaming in 2026

TL;DR – These Are the Best Gaming TVs:

1. Samsung S90F

Our top pick

Samsung S90F

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OLED blacks, perfect contrast, 1,400+ nit HDR highlights together with the remarkable motion clarity from its 144Hz refresh rate make the S90F the best TV for gaming.

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With 2025’s S90F, Samsung has finally brought together the best aspects of high-end televisions and the fastest PC gaming displays into one end-game package. It was close last year with the S90D (which was also a very good gaming TV), but the improvements Samsung has made to fullscreen brightness and HDR highlights push the S90F to the top tier of our recommendations, and make gaming on the S90F a fantastic experience, now viable even if you’re not living in a cave. Just make sure to get the 65-inch version, which uses Samsung's QD-OLED technology; other sizes use an inferior WOLED panel.

Gaming on the S90F is as good as or better than most PC monitors. With a 144Hz refresh rate and full VRR support, gaming is clear, fluid, and judder-free no matter if you’re playing at 60 fps or 120 or anywhere in between. As I noted in my review, playing Doom: The Dark Ages on the S90F, with near-instant pixel response times and incredibly low input lag, was an absolute treat. TestUFO pursuit shots (at a very fast 1,920 pixels/sec) back this up, showing only pure sample-and-hold blur without any smearing or trailing. And happily, Samsung's Game mode doesn't compromise the picture quality, so HDR EOTF tracking and calibration are still top-notch.

Speaking of the EOTF, on a 2% white slide, representative of a typical HDR highlight, my measurements confirm that the S90F tracks HDR target luminance nearly perfectly, with only a slight deviation in the darkest shades, below 1 nit. Samsung is a bit more conservative with brightness in game mode than in its movie modes, but peak brightness still reaches around 1,200 nits on real content – still incredibly punchy, especially with OLED’s extreme local contrast.

The S90F does almost as well on a 10% slide, meaning that Samsung can maintain very good output over a decent portion of the screen. But brightness falls as the window size increases: At 100% fullscreen white, the S90F can only eek out 250 nits, too dim for bright room gaming.

LCD competitors like the Hisense U8QG or TCL QM8K can pip the S90F in absolute luminance output, but their response times are simply too slow to keep up, and their viewing angles are much worse than OLED. For gamers who have the ability to control the lighting in their rooms, the S90F OLED means there’s no going back to LCD.

At launch, the S90F's $2,500 asking price was too high, but patience (and healthy competition) pays: The S90F can now be found for $1,500, and at that price, it's an easy win for gamers.

LG G5 – Photos

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2. LG G5 OLED

Best high-end TV

LG G5 OLED

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With its flagship G5, LG may have solved OLED's brightness problem, rivaling (or besting) FALD backlight LCDs. And happily, its flagship status comes with less sticker shock than you’d expect.

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Because of its tremendous performance/cost ratio, Samsung’s S90F earns our top spot for best overall gaming TV, but for those that have the additional budget to spring for a flagship product, both Samsung and LG are offering 2025 models (the S95F and G5) that push SDR/HDR brightness to new levels, improve reflection handling, and offer higher refresh rates. With end-of-year sales, they manage this without the luxury tax/diminishing returns price hike that normally comes with halo products.

In fact, a case could be made that LG, in particular, is tilting value towards the high end: Fullscreen brightness, a major area of weakness for previous gen and lower tier OLEDs, has been ramped nearly 80%, but the price premium for over the tier-down C5 is only around 40%. Case in point: The C5 gets you 220 nits fullscreen. The G5 gets you nearly 400.

We loved the 2,000+ nit highlights in our review, which we consider essential at this price tier, but LG has done a great job of balancing these with the drastically improved 100% APL, a huge year-on-year improvement over the G4 (one of our favorites from last year). This brightness boost also comes with an improvement to color purity as well; we measured 91.5% of the DCI-P3 color space, an excellent result for a WOLED panel. While LG is being tight-lipped about how exactly they achieved this, Panasonic's announcement of their Z95B, using the same panel as the G5, revealed the tech as Primary RGB Tandem, which allows the G5 to inch closer to Samsung's RGB QD-OLED performance.

LG G5 – Panel Tests

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Picture quality is everything we've come to expect from OLED panels: perfect blacks, incredible contrast that even multi-thousand zone FALD backlights can't achieve without blooming, and spectacular off-angle viewing. And this performance extends to LG's "Game Optimizer" mode as well: instant response times, native 165Hz refresh rate with VRR, low latency with ALLM, plus a ton of useful options for tweaking shadow and highlight balance. For gaming, even in fast-paced shooters like Apex Legends, the G5 is as good as it gets.

For downsides, our biggest issue with the G5 didn't have anything to do with its picture quality; the problem is LG's WebOS. Cluttered, slow, and difficult to navigate, LG's UI seems to be regressing from previous years, spurred on by their need to AI-ify everything. We've even lost the input selection button on the remote in favor of an AI button, a decision which is baffling.

But if you can get past the clunky menus (which is something unfortunately shared by Samsung as well), the G5 is the top-tier gaming TV of 2026. Whether you’re playing games or watching movies, SDR or HDR, basement cave or bright living room, the G5 delivers an awesome experience.

Why the G5 over the S95F? The LG is $300 cheaper and both perform nearly the same. Save the cash and enjoy.

Hisense U8QG – Photos

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3. Hisense U8QG

Best TV for bright rooms

Hisense U8QG

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About as good as it gets for a FALD backlit LCD TV: 2,048 backlight zones deliver excellent contrast and eye-wateringly bright highlights that can peak at 4,000 nits.

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The choice in this category was a very, very close contest between two LCD sets: TCL’s QM8K and the Hisense U8QG. We were hugely impressed with both the TCL and the Hisense, and it seems that the two companies are in lock-step, both pushing the boundary of what’s possible with FALD backlit LCD technology. We’re now getting more and more dimming zones, absurd brightness, and ever-increasing refresh rates. But for the best bright room gaming experience, we recommend the Hisense U8QG.

While the U8QG can hit 4,000 nits in highly specific cases, a better, more realistic metric for showcasing its brightness performance is to look at where its EOTF curve tops out with a 2% window size compared with 100% fullscreen white. The U8QG can reach more than 1,300 nits for highlights, but impressively, its fullscreen luminance only drops to 780 nits, which is still massively bright. That capacity to deliver mega fullscreen nits combined with an excellent AR coating means that the U8QG is a truly impressive bright room performer.

An OLED, like our top pick – the Samsung S90F – can go toe-to-toe with the U8QG at a 2% window size, but it takes a massive hit for fullscreen white, down to 250 nits, less than a third of what the Hisense can do.

Color performance stays excellent as well – bright, deep, vivid, and nearly full coverage of the DCI-P3 color space – enabled by the U8QG’s quantum dot enhanced backlight. Just don’t get too far off center or the viewing experience starts to suffer. TCL’s QM8K is similar in this regard, but it has fewer backlight zones, is slightly dimmer, and doesn’t have the same quality anti-reflective coating, which is why our nod goes to the U8QG.

Gaming/motion performance on the U8QG is good but not stellar. It supports 165Hz (+VRR) at 4K resolution on all its HDMI ports, and it even has an enhanced 288Hz mode at QHD for PC gamers, but its pixel response times aren’t in league with OLEDs or IPS gaming monitors. My response time measurements bear this out: an average of 20ms, but with some transitions lingering for around 30. Pursuit shots of the TestUFO alien give an accurate visual of what you can expect; objects have too much blur and dark colors show significant trailing.

While the Hisense U8QG doesn’t match OLED competitors like the Samsung S90F or LG C5 for motion clarity or viewing angles, its great fullscreen brightness and effective AR coating make it a sensible choice and the current go-to LCD to beat for gaming in bright rooms.

TCL QM7K – Photos

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4. TCL QM7K

Best TV under $1,000

TCL QM7K

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TCL has succeeded in bringing high-end features for a reasonable price: FALD, a quantum dot enhanced backlight, 144Hz refresh rate with FreeSync Premium Pro, and excellently tuned pixel response times. Perfect for gaming on a modest budget.

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This category sees another very close competition between the two mid-range titans: the TCL QM7K and the Hisense U75QG. You really can’t go wrong with either; both offer full array local dimming, quantum dot backlights (or KSF phosphors in the case of the U75QG) for great DCI-P3 color space coverage, and 144Hz+ high refresh rates with VRR for gaming. But because TCL tuned its HVA panel to the as-good-as-it-gets level for LCD, the QM7K tops our list for best mid-range gaming TV.

The Hisense can get significantly brighter, has more dimming zones, and is the better choice for movies and television, but it’s let down by its motion performance. While the U75QG boasts a slightly higher max refresh rate of 165Hz, its response times simply aren’t good enough to beat the 144Hz mode on the TCL, which is excellent for both console and PC gaming.

But in our review, we weren’t just impressed with the gaming performance: TCL has done an excellent job reducing blooming and haloing with its local dimming algorithm, and with support for both HDR10+ and Dolby Vision, the QM7K will work with any content, whether that’s streaming movies or the latest HDR games.

If you want the best gaming TV under $1,000, the QM7K is the logical choice.

TCL QM6K – Photos

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5. TCL QM6K

Best budget TV

TCL QM6K

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Don't expect to be blown away by the HDR experience, but TCL's QM6K is respectable: OK brightness, excellent colors, a 144Hz max refresh rate with VRR/AMD FreeSync Pro, coupled with excellent pixel response times makes it a win for gamers on a budget.

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All candidates for our best budget gaming TV award had to meet three specific requirements:

1. Full array local dimming
2. Quantum dot or other enhanced backlight
3. 120Hz + refresh rate with Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support

There are a lot of decent televisions out there that meet some of these criteria, but we contend that, in 2026, great HDR gaming requires all three. Edge-lit TVs can’t show the stark local contrast that makes HDR content pop, and they suffer from serious blooming, especially off-angle. Standard LED backlights also fall well short of covering the DCI-P3 color space, leaving colors dull and lifeless. And with modern gaming consoles fully supporting 120Hz “performance” modes with VRR, a fixed 60Hz refresh rate means the gaming experience is tarnished with the tearing and judder associated with typical V-Sync behavior.

In our review, we were very impressed with the QM6K. That sentiment still stands, making the QM6K our definitive pick for best budget gaming TV. Especially impressive was its ability to handle HDR highlights without significant blooming or haloing, given its limited zone count. Color performance is also excellent, helped by the KSF phosphor in its backlight. For watching movies and playing games, we also found off-angle viewing to be great, with limited loss of contrast and color saturation even well off-center.

TCL QM6K – Panel Tests

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TCL also has a knack for finely tuning the response time performance of their HVA panels: The QM6K has excellent response times and presents a smooth and judder-free gaming experience at any framerate thanks to its 144Hz max refresh rate and support for VRR, FreeSync Premium Pro, and ALLM. Two full-speed HDMI 2.1 ports allow simultaneous connections for both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles, leaving the other HDMI ports available for lower refresh rate devices.

Below $650, though, concessions have to be made. Fullscreen brightness isn’t particularly good. This is not a TV that will “wow” you with bright highlights. This isn’t helped by TCL’s decision to use a glossy screen coating with no real anti-reflective treatment. If your primary viewing environment is brightly lit, the QM6K might not give the pop you’re looking for. We also found the Google TV interface slow and laggy.

Still, TCL has somehow delivered a very respectable performer with the QM6K, making it our top pick for best budget gaming TV.

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