In the legendary Doom series of games, the “BFG” was the ultimate weapon—the room-clearing, awe-inspiring Big F****** Gun. Late Sunday night at CES 2018, Nvidia revealed BFGDs: Big Format Gaming Displays, created in conjuction with Asus, Acer, and HP. BFGDs may not slay demons, but like their wink-wink namesake, Nvidia’s new monitors are massive, loaded with cutting-edge technologies, and might well be the ultimate weapon in a high-end gaming arsenal.
“Big” doesn’t do these displays justice. At 65 inches’ diagonal width, BFGDs outsize the televisions in many households. They still honor the “gaming display” part of their name, though.
Similar to the initial G-Sync HDR displays announced at CES last year, BFGDs are basically the Holy Grail of PC monitors. These beasts run at 4K resolution at a blistering 120Hz—a frame rate no single graphics card can maintain at that resolution in modern AAA games. Even the vaunted GeForce GTX 1080 Ti can’t fulfill it. But Big Format Gaming Displays also support Nvidia’s game-smoothing G-Sync technology, as well as gorgeous high-dynamic range visuals. And like the other G-Sync HDR monitors, BFGDs pack an eye-searing 1,000 nits of brightness, a full-array direct backlight, and support for the DCI-P3 color gamut. In plain language: G-Sync HDR monitors are wonderfully bright and look absolutely stunning in action.
BFGDs also pack full Nvidia Shield TV functionality and come with a Shield controller and remote, befitting their super-sized TV dimensions. That means these displays include full Android TV capabilities, voice controls, game-streaming from the cloud or another local PC, you name it. The second-gen Nvidia Shield TV is the best media streamer for geeks and an appropriate companion for a monitor this gargantuan.
“G-SYNC HDR technology also supports video playback at native framerates, including popular 23.976, 24 and 25 FPS formats,” Nvidia said in the Big Format Gaming Display release. “This matches the screen’s refresh rate to the video source’s actual frame rate, eliminating interpolation and presenting the video content as it was intended to be viewed by the director.” Nifty!
So Nvidia BFGDs are big, bold, and badass. But crucial questions—price and availability—remain. Nvidia says BFGDs are expected to launch in summer 2018, with more information about pricing released around that time. (Spoiler: They’ll be staggeringly expensive.) Take that with a pinch of salt, though. The initial 4K, 120Hz G-Sync HDR monitors announced at last year’s CES were also expected to launch in the summer time frame, but they’ve quietly been delayed until sometime this quarter. Breaking new ground in display technology can have its hiccups.