Unveiling Tomorrow: Samsung’s Spectacular OLED Gaming Monitors Redefine the Experience

I anticipated a slew of new gaming monitors at CES 2025, yet I honestly didn’t foresee Samsung — alongside MSI, Asus, and others — unveiling OLED screens with a remarkable 500Hz refresh rate. Furthermore, I never imagined that I would actually endorse the competitive-centric refresh rate.

Label me a convert, though. I had the opportunity to experiment with Samsung’s latest Odyssey OLED G6 at CES, which operates at 27 inches with a 1440p resolution and that jaw-dropping 500Hz refresh rate. And even though I’m not particularly a competitive gamer, there’s a distinctly visible pathway for OLED to excel where earlier high refresh rate monitors, like the Alienware AW2524H, have struggled.

I settled down to play a bit of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds on the monitor — a popular demo game for Samsung — and I was astounded by the clarity of motion. That’s a notion that’s tricky to articulate, irrespective of the medium, but motion clarity is crucial when engaging with competitive games like Fortnite, or my current obsession, Marvel Rivals. OLED as a technology is uniquely poised to capitalize on the ultra-high refresh rates that the most serious gamers require.

It’s crucial to clarify some terminology here. Refresh rate refers to how many times your monitor updates per second, and it’s measured in frequency. A 500Hz refresh rate signifies that the Odyssey OLED G6 refreshes the display every 2 milliseconds. The consequences of a high refresh rate in competitive gaming are apparent; a monitor that refreshes more swiftly enables you to process and respond to what you observe quicker. This shifts the emphasis from mere milliseconds — even the most adept players in the world aren’t competing on a scale of a few milliseconds — to motion clarity. You’re able to track targets more easily and react effectively if you’re presented with more distinct images within a single second.

However, there’s another aspect at play regarding motion clarity, which is response time. Response time indicates how swiftly a pixel can transition from one color to another. This measure has been nearly erased from discussions about gaming monitors, as most manufacturers advertise a 1ms response time for transitions between shades of gray — which you might term gray-to-gray response time. In reality, response times tend to be considerably higher than the 1ms that most gaming monitors profess. With that knowledge, you might grasp how refresh rate and response time are interconnected.

There’s a complex tangle of specifications depending on the monitor and the game you’re engaging with, yet the essence of motion clarity is a combination of refresh rate and response time. Prior attempts at achieving a high refresh rate face challenges due to relatively sluggish pixel response times. Even with an elevated refresh rate, blurring and other visual disturbances arise if the response time cannot keep pace.

This brief spec overview is vital for comprehending why the Odyssey OLED G6 is significant. A 500Hz refresh rate on this monitor isn’t equivalent to the 500Hz refresh rate on the Alienware AW2425H; this difference arises from Samsung’s QD-OLED technology — and all OLED technology, for that matter — which essentially features instant response times. In summary, OLED technology is optimally designed to showcase the advantages of a refresh rate as high as 500Hz, and the Odyssey OLED G6 highlights that perfectly.

You can perceive the refresh rate. That’s more than I can assert for the majority of gaming monitors. The game appeared exceptionally smooth and sufficiently sharp thanks to the 1440p resolution. However, what matters more than either is the feeling of total control over my character. It’s a sensation that’s difficult to articulate, but it becomes exquisitely obvious the moment you position yourself in front of the Odyssey OLED G6.

That said, it doesn’t imply that I would personally invest in a monitor of this kind. You need to be intensely engaged in games that can even achieve such high frame rates, such as Counter-Strike 2 or Valorant. Even if you dabble in competitive games, something like the 240Hz refresh rate on the Asus ROG Swift PG32UCDM is more than sufficient. Yet, for those few who seek the utmost motion clarity available on a monitor, the Odyssey OLED G6 is shaping up to be an incredibly appealing option for 2025.