While UK subscription broadcaster Sky’s innovative Glass TVs have many striking and unique features, there has always been one area where they’ve literally been off the pace: Gaming. Despite the phenomenal rise in the popularity of console and PC gaming over the past decade or so, the Glass launched without a dedicated Game picture mode, leaving gamers hamstrung by one of the highest minimum input lag times in today’s TV world.
Having tried gaming on a Glass myself, the starkest and most frustrating limitations of its current lag levels occur with first person shooters and platform games. Inmy typical kill to death ratio took an absolute pounding when gaming on a Glass compared with gaming on a recent Samsung TV that features a Game mode lag time of under 10ms.
Since the reduced HDMI latency is achieved purely in software, all any Glass-owning gamers will need to do to experience this boost in their gaming experience is wait for it to be delivered by the new Entertainment OS 1.3 upgrade that’s set to start rolling out to Glass TVs over the internet in May. I should stress that the lag reduction and ALLM features coming to Sky Glass TVs soon won’t resolve all of Sky Glass’s gaming limitations. Limitations in the both the TVs’ HDMI bandwidth and 60Hz panel mean there’s no possibility of support for either variable refresh rates or the 4K graphics at 120Hz refresh rates that both the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 are now capable of.