Whoever said you couldn’t have your cake and eat it clearly never had a 65-inch OLED and a gaming PC in the same postcode.
While building my latest monster rig, the thought struck me like a bolt of pure, synaptic lightning: why am I gaming hunched over a desk in what is essentially a glorified cupboard, when I have a spectacular OLED television sitting pride of place in the living room doing nothing more demanding than hosting a rotating cast of consoles? This felt like a waste of everyone’s time. The TV’s time. My time. The sofa’s time.
I felt like a trail-blazer. A pioneer venturing boldly into uncharted waters. A visionary who had arrived, perhaps slightly late, at an idea that seemed so blindingly obvious in retrospect that it barely qualified as a revelation. And yet — here we are.
PC gaming on your living room television has historically been a bit of a weird science experiment — the kind that looks brilliant on paper and ends up being a compromise-riddled disaster in practice. Too fiddly. Too many cables. Windows doing Windows things. Your other half questioning your life choices as you wheel an office chair into the living room at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday.
These days, however, things are genuinely different. High refresh rate TVs with ultra-low input lag and dedicated PC modes have become commonplace. Steam’s Big Picture mode has evolved into something slick enough to make console owners nervous. And once you’ve experienced a properly configured gaming rig pumping pixels through a next-generation OLED from the comfort of a proper sofa, you will look at that spindly desk and that aggressively ugly gaming chair with the go-faster stripes and ask yourself some very serious questions about the choices that led you there.
Make no mistake: PC gaming with a monster rig on a quality OLED sporting G-Sync or FreeSync is a near-erotic experience. Perfect blacks, stunning colour accuracy, excellent HDR, impressively low input lag. All from the lazy, laid-back comfort of your squishy sofa.
I’ve had my gaming rig plumbed into a 65-inch OLED for well over a year. I’ve made the mistakes so you don’t have to. This is what I know.
Step One: Do You Actually Have the Right TV?
Before we go any further — what television are you working with? Because if it’s a mid-range 60hz panel from 2018 with the input lag of a tired postman, none of what follows is going to help you and you should probably stop reading now and go buy a better TV instead.
For a genuinely good PC gaming experience on a television, you need a set that supports at least 120hz refresh rate, Variable Refresh Rate (VRR), and either FreeSync or G-Sync compatibility. Without these three things, you’re missing the foundations that make the whole arrangement worthwhile. Input lag on a TV without Game Mode can be anywhere between 20ms and 100ms — the difference between a responsive gaming experience and feeling like you’re controlling your character through a letter box filled with treacle.
Samsung S95F QD-OLED – the current king of the gaming TVs (Image credit: Samsung)
If you’re in the market for a TV specifically for this purpose, the best choices right now are Samsung and LG. Both manufacturers have invested heavily in gaming features, and both offer genuinely exceptional input lag figures in Game Mode. The current top picks are the Samsung S95F (my personal setup, and it is an absolute weapon) and the LG G5. High-end OLEDs and Mini-LED panels from both brands are all excellent for gaming. One practical note: spring is an outstanding time to buy, as last year’s models get heavily discounted to clear space for new stock. Patience is occasionally its own reward.
Step Two: Does Your GPU Actually Have the Legs?
A 4K television is only as good as the hardware pushing pixels into it. If you’re running a GPU that was cutting-edge in 2018, you’re going to spend a lot of time watching a very expensive television display a very unimpressive frame rate. We’ve written at length about the GPU pricing situation and it remains grim reading, but investing in the right card makes all the difference here.
Make sure your graphics card can handle upscaling to 4K — either through raw horsepower or through supported upscaling technology like NVIDIA DLSS or AMD FSR. A GTX 1060 trying to drive a 4K OLED through the latest open-world epic is a sad sight for everyone involved. Nobody wants that. The TV doesn’t want it. The GPU doesn’t want it. The game certainly doesn’t want it.
Ideally you want an RTX 3080 or better for comfortable 4K gaming, or an RTX 4070 or above if you want to take advantage of DLSS 4’s Multi Frame Generation without weeping at your frame counter.
Step Three: The Cable That Actually Matters
Get a certified Ultra High Speed HDMI 2.1 cable. Not a regular HDMI. Not whatever came in a box with something else. A proper, certified HDMI 2.1 cable, which supports the full 48Gbps bandwidth needed for 4K at 120hz with HDR.
What to look out for when buying a proper HDMI 21. cable (Image credit: HDMI.org)
This is non-negotiable. Everything else in this guide assumes you have one. Without it you’re capping yourself in ways you may not immediately notice but will absolutely feel. They cost about a tenner. Spend the tenner.
Step Four: Sorting the Keyboard and Mouse Problem
Let’s address the elephant in the room — or rather, the keyboard on the sofa. Using a wired mechanical keyboard and mouse when sitting eight feet from your PC case is, to put it diplomatically, a pain in the backside. USB extender cables run around the skirting boards are manageable; wire spaghetti tangled around your feet while trying to game is not.
The honest answer: go wireless. A quality wireless keyboard and mouse combination removes the cable problem entirely and is the upgrade that transforms the sofa gaming experience from “workable” to “actually rather pleasant.” The Logitech MX Keys and a decent wireless mouse are a solid starting point.
For those who must keep their wired peripherals, a decent lap tray is the best available compromise. Unglamorous. Effective. Done. Be warned, however: the market for lap trays that properly accommodate a full-size keyboard is, inexplicably, a wasteland. Budget accordingly and expect to make sacrifices.
For most gaming though — and this is the honest advice — pair an Xbox controller via Bluetooth. Xbox controllers have the broadest compatibility in the PC gaming ecosystem, require essentially no configuration, and are genuinely the right tool for sofa gaming. They simply work, which in the conte
Step Five: Getting Windows Behaving Itself
Windows was not designed with television-scale displays in mind, which you will notice approximately four seconds after connecting your PC to your TV for the first time when everything is either microscopic or inexplicably enormous.
First, label your HDMI input as “PC” in your TV’s settings. On most modern TVs this unlocks 4:4:4 chroma subsampling, which significantly improves text clarity and colour accuracy. It’s a small thing that makes an enormous difference to readability.
Next, enable Game Mode on the television. This bypasses a lot of the TV’s image processing pipeline — the sharpening, the motion interpolation, the various “enhancements” the TV applies by default that look fine for broadcast television and feel horrible for gaming. Game Mode turns all of that off and gets the image from your GPU to your eyes as quickly as possible.
In Windows Display Settings, set everything to its native maximum resolution and refresh rate. Don’t let Windows make decisions for you here; it will make bad ones.
Set Windows Scaling to 200% — or higher if you’re sitting more than a few metres back. You’re no longer eighteen inches from a monitor; you’re eight feet from a television. Text that looked perfectly legible at your desk will be illegible from the sofa without appropriate scaling. Don’t skip this.
Finally, disable Windows Auto Manage Colour Settings. This setting can silently override your carefully configured colour output and produce results that range from mildly wrong to deeply upsetting. Find it, turn it off, thank yourself later.
Step Six: Configuring NVIDIA Correctly
Assuming you’re running NVIDIA — and statistically speaking, you probably are — getting the NVIDIA app settings right is where most of the picture quality magic actually happens.
For a Samsung OLED like the S95F, the correct output settings are: Colour format: RGB, Colour depth: 10-bit, Dynamic range: Full. However — and this is important — check your specific TV’s specifications before committing to Full range, as some panels perform better with Limited range. Get this wrong and your blacks will either be crushed to nothing or lifted into a milky grey. Neither is enjoyable.
Once you’ve set your dynamic range in the NVIDIA app, match the HDMI Black Level setting on your TV to whatever you’ve chosen. Full range in NVIDIA should correspond to Full (or “Normal”) in your TV settings. Mismatching these two settings is one of the most common causes of washed-out or crushed images in TV gaming setups, and it’s entirely avoidable.
Getting these settings right is crucial to the whole set up (Image credit: NVIDIA)
Set Scaling Mode to Aspect Ratio — this ensures the image fills the screen correctly without stretching.
Under Output Colour Settings, set to “Handled by NVIDIA” and uncheck “Override to Reference Mode.” Colour depth should be set to the highest available (32-bit).
Set a global FPS cap a few frames below your display’s maximum refresh rate — so if you’re running 120hz, cap at 117fps. This keeps you within the VRR range and prevents the occasional flicker that can occur when frame rate briefly exceeds refresh rate. Also enable V-Sync globally — counterintuitive when you’re using FreeSync or G-Sync, but this is actually how the VRR system is designed to function correctly in this configuration. Trust the process.
Take advantage of DLSS 4.5 by setting it as the preferred upscaling method in your global NVIDIA settings. Preset M is optimised for Performance/Balanced modes, offering better overall image clarity and higher FPS. Preset L is designed for Ultra Performance mode, providing better stability at lower render resolutions, though it is slightly heavier on performance and can be softer.
Finally, allow the NVIDIA app to auto-tune your GPU for optimal performance, and set your Windows Power Profile to Prefer Maximum Performance. You didn’t build a gaming PC to let it coast.
Step Seven: Taming HDR
HDR on a PC connected to a television is either glorious or a catastrophic mess of blown-out whites and muddy midtones, depending entirely on whether you configure it correctly. There is very little middle ground.
The correct sequence matters here. Enable HDR in Windows first, then go to your TV’s settings. In the TV’s picture settings with HDR content active, set: Brightness and Contrast to maximum, Peak Brightness to maximum, Dynamic Contrast to off, Sharpness to 0 (or 10 on newer LG panels, which use a different scale), and disable any energy saving options — these will dynamically dim your panel at the worst possible moments.
Set Dynamic Tone Mapping to off and enable HGiG (HDR Gaming Interest Group) mode if your television supports it. HGiG tells the TV to let the game handle the tone mapping rather than applying its own on top, which produces significantly more accurate and intentional HDR presentation. Most modern gaming TVs support it. Use it.
Now run the Windows HDR Calibration tool and follow the steps. This takes about three minutes and meaningfully improves the HDR calibration for your specific display. It is not optional if you want HDR to look its best.
Step Eight: Sorting the Audio
If you have a Dolby Atmos-capable soundbar connected to your TV, you face a choice about signal routing that’s worth thinking through before committing to a cable run.
The cleanest Atmos setup is to run your PC’s HDMI output directly into an HDMI input on the soundbar rather than through the TV — provided your soundbar supports HDMI 2.1. This keeps the full audio bitstream intact and avoids any potential processing or latency introduced by the television passing audio through to the bar. If your soundbar only has HDMI 2.0 inputs, skip this and run through the TV instead, using eARC for audio return.
Online resource for older versions of the Dolby Access app (Image credit: uptodown)
For Dolby Atmos on Windows, you’ll need the Dolby Access app. Here’s something the official documentation won’t tell you: older versions of the app (v3.x or earlier builds such as v3.14 or v3.0.2204.0) are significantly more stable than current versions for PC gaming Atmos passthrough. Modern versions have introduced licensing changes that cause intermittent issues for some users. If you find Atmos misbehaving, rolling back to an older version is worth trying. The gaming community has documented this extensively and the older builds are not hard to find.
A word of warning: the Windows Store will automatically update the app to its latest version, and no — you cannot turn this off. More Windows nonsense to contend with, as if you needed any more. The best you can do is delay the update by up to 90 days in Windows Update settings, and keep a downloaded copy of your preferred older version ready to swap back in when Microsoft inevitably decides to be helpful on your behalf.
Step Nine: The Living Room Experience
Use Steam Big Picture mode as your default interface on Windows startup. This transforms your PC into something that behaves like a console in the best possible sense — a clean, controller-navigable library that presents your games without forcing you to interact with the Windows desktop from eight feet away. Nobody wants to try right-clicking a Start menu from the sofa. Nobody.
I am no longer constrained by console frame rate limitations. The ability to sit back on the sofa and experience games at their absolute visual ceiling — on a screen the size of a pub wall, in a room with actual heating and a comfortable seating arrangement — is genuinely difficult to go back from. Once you’ve experienced Red Dead Redemption 2 or Baldur’s Gate 3 on a 65-inch OLED at maximum settings, a monitor in a spare room feels like watching through a porthole.
Keep your GPU drivers updated at all times. On a TV setup especially, driver updates frequently include improvements to HDR handling, VRR compatibility, and display detection. The one time you ignore an update is the one time it contained a fix for the exact flickering issue you’ve been living with for three months. Update the drivers.
The Honest Bit at the End
Are there downsides? Yes, a few worth being honest about before you start dismantling your desk setup.
Keyboard and mouse gaming from the sofa, even with a good wireless setup, is never quite as precise as a proper desk arrangement. Competitive multiplayer at high sensitivity is awkward. Some games weren’t designed to be played from a distance and no amount of scaling adjustment fully compensates for a UI built for a 27-inch monitor at arm’s length.
Windows and HDMI also have a complicated relationship. Display Port — the connection used by virtually every PC monitor — is a fundamentally more stable signal pathway than HDMI. On a TV you don’t have that option, and the result can occasionally be a black screen on wake, an HDR handshake that needs renegotiating, or a refresh rate that’s silently dropped itself back to 60hz without telling anyone. None of these things happen often with a properly configured setup, but they happen. Keep calm, check your display settings, and carry on.
Overall though? With the right television, the right cable, and the configuration detailed above, this is the finest way to experience games from the comfort of a living room. The image quality of a high-end OLED at this size, with your gaming PC running at full capacity, is genuinely something to behold.
Now you just need to figure out what to do with that desk. And you can finally — finally — get rid of that ridiculous gaming chair. The one with the go-faster stripes. You know the one. It’s time.
Recommended TVs: Samsung S95F / LG G5 OLED. HDMI 2.1 cables: look for “Ultra High Speed” certification on the packaging — anything else is not guaranteed to support full 4K/120hz bandwidth.