Back at CES 2018 Nvidia announced a new type of massive gaming monitor; the Big Format Gaming Display (BFGD) . They are essentially fully loaded 65" gaming TVs with NVIDIA G-Sync and Shield, and HDR, built by some established manufacturers. Now the first one has actually arrived, and it's the HP OMEN X Emperium 65 ( See it at HP See it at Currys PC World UK ). It’s a 4K HDR high-refresh rate display with NVIDIA G-Sync and a fully-integrated NVIDIA Shield. With its included soundbar it’s everything you need to pair with your console and computer for some truly epic gaming. The price tag is also epic at $5,000, making it easily the most expensive gaming monitor ever. So what is it like to game on this sucker, and is it worth it? Read on to find out!

HP OMEN X Emperium – Design and Features

HP OMEN X Emperium – Testing and Gaming

“ Light output at this level really makes highlights pop out and feel more realistic.

“ The soundbar is a little lackluster.

Purchasing Guide

HP OMEN X Emperium 65 On HP See It

For all of the gaming tech emphasis of the Emperium, its look is surprisingly understated for a gaming monitor. There are ultra-thin bezels and masking with the OMEN and NVIDIA G-Sync badges along the bottom of the screen. A single red IR light indicator is on the front at the bottom left and another red diamond-shaped power light indicator is on the right side. Both of these can be turned off in the menu. The legs have an industrial, angled look and feel heavy duty. At no time in my testing did I ever think the Emperium was anything other than steady and stable, despite it's size.Around the left side are all of the other AV connections. The HP has one DisplayPort, three HDMI (one with ARC), an optical port, an Ethernet port, two USB ports (for a total of four including the two mentioned above), and a 3.5mm output to the soundbar. At the top of the connections section is a motion sensor that turns on a light when you wave your hand near it, illuminating all of the connection ports. It’s a great quality-of-life feature that facilitates making the proper connections. I wish every monitor and TV had it. I found the number of connections to be just enough for my computer, two consoles, and cable box, but could see a desire for one more HDMI for a Switch dock or streaming box.An external streaming box isn’t necessary though, because the HP OMEN X Emperium has a NVIDIA SHIELD built in. The SHIELD has apps for Netflix, Amazon Prime, and VUDU that all deliver 4K HDR, in addition to many others. There is also access to the cloud-based service GeForce NOW (for those in the Beta), that allows you to stream games you own or a library of free games. If you have a GeForce GTX 650 or higher you can use GameStream to stream a game on your computer to the Emperium (4K HDR requires a GTX 10-series card). 4K will also require a robust home network and while a 5GHz wireless connection can work I recommend connecting via Ethernet to the monitor. I found wireless gameplay could get choppy with graphically intense games.Being a NVIDIA G-Sync display, the HP Emperium utilizes G-Sync variable refresh rate technology. G-Sync VRR is the anti-tearing technology we know and love, and now it works in windowed mode for games, so if you need to alt-tab out during Overwatch there’s no more tearing. It’s also a G-Sync HDR display, with a peak brightness of 1,000 nits and 95% coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut, which means a more accurate depiction of images.The panel has a max refresh rate of 144Hz with overlocking, although with 4K HDR content DisplayPort is limited to 120Hz. Most consoles over HDMI will still top out at 60Hz. The exception is the Xbox One (both S and X), which received an update in 2018 that enabled HDMI 2.1 functionality. Thing is, the Xbox still needs an ultra high speed HDMI cable, a HDMI 2.1-compliant display, and Xbox games that are native 4K. The Emperium is not HDMI 2.1 compliant, so you'll need to choose either 4K or 120Hz. You can't get both with the Emperium.The soundbar slides right under the Emperium when its legs are attached and matches the angles of the legs. It can also be attached to the monitor with included braces that replace the leg units when wall mounting it. The soundbar is a little over five inches, so extra depth is added overall when attached to the bottom of the monitor. In the center (right under the OMEN badge when placed under the monitor) are the illuminated control buttons for power, volume, and EQ. The volume buttons on the soundbar itself are independent from the volume on the monitor (which can be adjusted by the included SHIELD remote). It can be frustrating to have two separate volume controls, so I just ended up setting the soundbar volume to its max and using the remote to change the volume being outputted from the monitor.The remote is the same you can get for an external SHIELD unit – black and slim, about 5.5 inches long and 1.5 inches wide. It has a four-way circle around a select button, a home button, a back button, and a voice-control activation button. Along the bottom half is a touch sensor for volume control, although you wouldn’t know it by looking at it. When it’s on any input other than the NVIDIA SHIELD, pushing the select button accesses the monitor’s menu.When using the NVIDIA SHIELD, the only way to get into the monitor’s menu (short of getting up to use the joystick selector on the back of the monitor) is by navigating to the settings menu within SHIELD and selecting On Screen Display. It would have been nice to have a redesigned remote for the Emperium with some source direct buttons instead of the standard SHIELD remote.Testing was done with a Photo Research PR-650 spectroradiometer, a Konica Minolta LS-100 luminance meter, and CalMAN 2018 calibration software. HDR patterns were from Diversified Video Solutions’ UltraHD/HDR-10 Test Pattern Suite. SDR patterns were from the CalMAN client. When evaluating the color and grayscale of a display the term DeltaE is used to indicate how accurate a measurement value is. A value of 1 or lower is considered perfect as any deviation from the color is imperceptible to the human eye. A value of 3 or lower is excellent and difficult to see any difference without scrutiny. Above 3 you can start to see distinct alterations in the intended color and that being displayed by the monitor. When measuring I used the Cinema preset.In all color and grayscale measurements the HP OMEN X Emperium was excellent. The DeltaE averages for color in both SDR and HDR were all under 1.7. Grayscale tracking wasn’t quite as impressive as color. The closer to a 100% white field the Emperium gets the more reddish the image looks, with values 70% and higher going over a DeltaE value of 3, but overall the average DeltaE was 2.6. That’s still pretty good. When looking at the DCI-P3 color points for red, green, and blue, they all have a DeltaE of under 2.0 with red and blue both under 1.5.The peak brightness of the Emperium is listed at 1000 nits, one of the features of "G-Sync HDR." I tested this by measuring a 10% full white window (a white square in the middle of a black screen) with the LS-100 and got 1087 nits. I’ve measured TVs with this much light output – the Vizio P-Series approaches this much and the Samsung Q9FN even exceeds the HP – but there are only a handful of monitors that have just recently started hitting the market. Light output at this level really makes highlights pop out and feel more realistic.To check how all these measurements translated, I turned on my Xbox One X and started Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Having recently finished the storyline on Rise of the Tomb Raider I was eager to get out of Siberia and see what Central and South America had to offer. The forests looked amazingly lush and vibrant. The overgrowth on ancient stonework reminded me fondly of a trip I took to the Peruvian rainforest years ago. The bright flames of torchlight were piercing in the dark without blowing out the image.While on the Xbox I decided to play a few games of Overwatch to see if there was any perceptible input lag. Weapons all fired and abilities all activated quickly and the only thing holding me back was my own reaction time. Using a Leo Bodnar lag tester on the HDMI input I measured a lag of 23.7ms. (Input lag testing was at 1080p.) This is very good in comparison to TVs of this size, but certainly off the pace for the best we've seen in desktop monitors that can be sub-10ms. If you aren't planning on competitive gaming with the HP you'll be fine. It never affected my gaming. The real concern comes if a display's input lag approaches or passes 30ms.Jumping over to my computer I was curious how Destiny 2 would look. HP recommends a minimum of a GTX 1080 Ti, so I was able to grab a Zotac GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and connect it via DisplayPort. With this setup, G-Sync kept the refresh rate between around 70 and 105 fps. Gameplay was smooth with absolutely no tearing. I played around with the seven different response time settings available in the Emperium’s menu. The sweet spot for me was 5 (7 is the fastest). The HDR highlights were excellent here as well, especially in the muzzle flashes that had never wowed me before.Since the HP OMEN X Emperium was the centerpiece of my living room for a couple weeks I did a good deal of movie and TV watching. UHD discs looked fantastic. I put Blade Runner 2049 in to look at the dreary Los Angeles cityscape and ended up being entranced and watching over an hour of the movie. Detail was excellent as was color depth.Thehas an MSRP of $4,999 and comes with the soundbar. It is launching now for pre-order and is the same price online.