Samsung’s Odyssey G9 is the most extreme ultrawide gaming monitor

Samsung’s Odyssey G9 gaming monitor is an incredible thing to behold in person. It’s on the show floor at CES 2020, and pretty much everyone who sat in front of the 49-inch 1440p display was dazzled.

You’re going to have an impossible challenge trying to find a rig that can push the latest PC games at 240Hz. But if you’re a competitive e-sports player who specializes in older titles, this display could be a dream. Those not running it at 240Hz can still take advantage of its sharp resolution and that immersive 1000R curvature that pretty much envelops your whole field of vision.

The back is very sci-fi, with a clear cutout in the center that reveals a round LED that shifts colors. It looks like Iron Man’s arc reactor. Does anyone need that in a monitor? Nope. Does it look cool, especially for the crowd the G9 is marketed toward? Oh, most definitely.

Listening to the crowd of onlookers here in Las Vegas, I heard some confess that the Odyssey G9 is too much monitor for them and that they’d have a hard time following along with everything happening on-screen in Fortnite. To me, there’s really no such thing as too much monitor. Give me two of these things side by side. Surround me with like five or six of them, even.

With a 1ms response time and support for both AMD FreeSync 2 and Nvidia’s G-Sync, the G9 is likely to come with a very hefty price tag when it ships later this year. It’s easy to quibble over whether it’s worth the cost compared to other ultrawide or 1440p monitors on the market.

Photography by Chris Welch / The Verge