Xbox Series S compatibility
I’ve recently bought a Xbox Series S in the hope that I can game in 1440p at 120hz with HDR on my 55" Q900R, with the TV doing the upscaling from 1440p to 8K since those resolutions are perfect integer scales of each other. But I have run into all kinds of problems/limitations keeping me from gaming with this configuration, and I hope I am doing something wrong and it’s just a settings issue:
Apparently the Xbox eco-system only supports HDR when the console is outputting 4K, either at 60 or 120hz. When I tell the console to not allow 4K then HDR never activates, regardless of whether the game supports HDR or the console is using Auto-HDR. To me this is a false-advertised feature from Microsoft. I assumed that when they said 1440/120 for gaming, and 4K for movies/video, that the console will not allow gaming at 4K. But the console has no problem with upscaling everything to 4K/120 when I use HDMI-4 on the Q900R, using the included HDMI cable. I guess for some this is a bonus feature, but I do not see why 1440/120 is even advertises on the box if it’s not a supported resolution when using HDR.
I was trying to find games that run at 1440/120, or even 1080/120 like Ori and it seems to me that the resolution and refresh rate of the game has no affect on the output resolution of the console. When I switch between 1080/120 and 4K/60 in Ori I can tell that the game becomes more pixelated at 1080p, but when I check what type of signal is being received in the Samsung TV menu then it says the input signal is 4K/120 (119 actually when freesync is enabled). Even when I set the Xbox SS to 4K/60 and tell the game to use 1080/120 the TV still stays at 60hz (59hz with freesync). Does that mean the console is scaling the image to 4K and is dropping every other frame to fit 120fps into 60hz? As a PC gamer this really doesn’t make any sense to me at all. I do not understand why the console can’t just match what the game is rendering and let the TV take care of all the scaling.
I can not get ALLM to work. At some point I kept seeing messages indicating that the TV switched modes while switching between games, videos and the home menu, but when I checked the picture preset it stayed in game mode no matter what content I was looking at. After messing with the TV and console settings now “Auto” is greyed out in the game mode settings, and I have to manually switch game mode on or off, no matter what the ALLM setting is in the console.
I’ve never been happy with the color volume/gamut and black levels of the TV. When compared to my Q9FN, C7 OLED, or Vizio P55-E1 IPS TVs the Q900R colors are much more washed out, and I have never seen anything close to “inky” black. Things only get worse in game mode, with massive blooming when there are subtitles or small highlights in dark scenes. And if I am not mistaken things are even worse in 120hz mode. I haven’t had the TV calibrated, so is there a software solution to the blooming and washed out image? Most of the time I am looking at the TV at a 45 degree angle below the TV. When RTINGS measures the viewing angles do they look at the sides of the TV, or do they also factor in the angles below and above the TV? Should I try and move the TV closer to eye level? Could it be that the 55" does not have the same wide viewing angle filter or dimming zones as the 65" variant? Or could they even have switched out the panel with an IPS screen? I can get lush colors with inky blacks on my Vizio IPS TV as long I tell the source to send a HDR signal, but no matter what I do with the Q900R everything just looks washed out and “glowy”.
Is there a way to test Freesync on the Xbox? When I check the hz number in the Samsung TV menu while playing a game that supposedly supports VRR (like Shadow of War) the number never moves and just stays at either 119hz or 59hz depending on what I have the console set to. On the PC I can tell when the Hertz change, and can verify that the refresh rate matches the in-game FPS counter.
I’ve noticed that when the Q900R is in HDR mode and I set the gamma to -1 the image actually brightens up considerably, even more than when gamma is set to +3. Is this a known bug, or is that how the PQ curve is supposed to behave?
Is there anything I can change in the xbox settings to get a better image at 4K/120 in HDR? Should I leave 422 support enabled or disabled. 8bit or 10bit? Should I use the included cable that came with the console? I know the RTINGS review and the xbox menu says that the included cable does not support 4K/120, but it does seem to work; and I’ve tried a Kabeldirekt 8K HDMI 2.1 48 Gbps cable and could not see a difference. The signal also never cuts out like it normally would when the cable doesn’t meet the spec. Although I have seen a garbled screen when switching resolutions between 1440p and 4K, or SDR and HDR (with either cable). But going back to the home menu and then back into the game makes everything look normal again.
I realize these issues should better be addressed to Samsung or Microsoft, but they do not tend to acknowledge niche questions like mine, and I was hoping RTINGS and the community has had similar experiences with trying to get the Xbox One and Series XS to work with Samsung TVs