Which GPU Actually Drives 4K at 240Hz

A 27-inch 4K 240Hz QD-OLED sold for $699.99 in Newegg’s August feed. The panel is no longer the expensive part of this decision. The card is.

And the card cannot do it. No graphics card on sale renders a modern AAA game at 4K and 240 fps. Tom’s Hardware’s June 2026 GPU benchmarks hierarchy puts the RTX 5090 — the fastest consumer GPU that exists — at a 110.8 fps geometric mean across eleven raster games at native 4K ultra, and 64.1 fps across its ray-traced suite, on a Ryzen 7 9800X3D testbed with no upscaling or frame generation.

240 is more than double that. So this is not a shopping question about which card is fast enough. It is a question about which card feeds frame generation properly, and about a cable spec most articles get backwards.

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The cable question is already settled

Start here, because it is the part people spend money on unnecessarily.

4K at 240Hz is a lot of pixels per second. Run it through our DisplayPort and HDMI bandwidth calculator, which derives timing from VESA CVT reduced-blanking v2, and 3840×2160 at 240Hz clocks 2.29 billion pixels per second — about 15% above the raw active-pixel count, because blanking overhead grows with refresh rate rather than staying a flat share.

Now the links, at their effective rates after encoding overhead:

Read the two columns together and the conclusion is blunt. Exactly one interface carries 4K 240Hz uncompressed, and every other one carries it with DSC — including DisplayPort 1.4, with nearly 30% of its bandwidth still unused. Even 8-bit SDR does not rescue UHBR13.5, which lands 2.6 Gbps short.

The vendors say the same thing in their own specifications. NVIDIA’s RTX 4090 page — a DisplayPort 1.4a card, two generations old — lists a maximum of “4K at 240Hz or 8K at 60Hz with DSC, HDR”. NVIDIA’s RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 pages both list DisplayPort 2.1b with UHBR20 and a maximum of “4K at 480Hz or 8K at 165Hz with DSC” — note that even the newest, widest link on the market reaches its headline number with compression on.

And the monitors agree. Tom’s Hardware’s Alienware AW2725Q review lists the panel as 3840×2160 at 240 Hz, 10-bit, with a single “1x DisplayPort 1.4 w/DSC” and two HDMI 2.1 ports. That is a shipping 4K 240Hz 10-bit monitor whose only DisplayPort input is the old standard.

If you are shopping for a GPU because you think your DisplayPort version cannot feed a 240Hz 4K panel, stop. It can.

What DSC actually costs you, which is the part everyone skips

DSC is not free, but the cost is not where buyers expect.

On image quality, VESA publishes DSC as a fixed 8 bits-per-pixel target — “3:1 (8 bpp)” at 24-bit color and “3.75:1 (8 bpp)” at 30-bit — with “visually lossless compression performance verified by subjective testing”. Almost nobody sees it. Treat that as closed.

The cost is behavioural. Reviewing a 27-inch 4K 240Hz panel with a full-speed DisplayPort 2.1 input, TFTCentral’s Simon Baker listed what UHBR20 lets you avoid in his January 2025 ROG Swift PG27UCDM review: “long delays and black screens when Alt-tabbing out of games, limitations when using multiple displays and daisy chaining, and missing support for features like NVIDIA DSR and DLDSR.”

That last one has a precise rule behind it. NVIDIA told TFTCentral, in a statement Tom’s Hardware reported, that “NVIDIA DSR, NVIDIA DLDSR, and NVIDIA Image Scaling are supported when DSC mode is enabled if the pixel rate needed to drive the display mode does not exceed the GPU’s single head limit. If GPU uses two or more internal heads to drive the display, NVIDIA DSR, NVIDIA DLDSR, and NVIDIA Image Scaling are not supported.” So DSC does not disable downsampling by itself — a mode heavy enough to consume two display heads does.

That is the whole case for UHBR20, and it is a display-behaviour case, not a performance one. ASUS states the PG27UCDM runs “4K at 240Hz or 8K at 60Hz visuals without compression” over DisplayPort 2.1a UHBR20 at 80 Gbps. If alt-tab black screens or a daisy chain matter to you, buy the panel with UHBR20 and pair it with an RTX 50 card. If they do not, DSC is the correct answer and it always was.

One real limit: AMD does not have UHBR20 in the consumer stack. Club386’s report of AMD’s confirmed RX 9070 series specifications lists “HDMI 2.1b DP 2.1a UHBR13.5”, and Sapphire’s Nitro+ RX 9070 XT page confirms DisplayPort 2.1a. RDNA 4 drives 4K 240Hz over DSC like everything else; it cannot drive it uncompressed.

The real gate is frames, and the number to check is not the one you think

Since the link is solved, the whole decision is rendering.

Native 4K is nowhere near 240. TechSpot’s 17-game RTX 5090 suite on a 9800X3D — Steven Walton’s January 2025 review — recorded 195 fps in God of War Ragnarök, 160 fps in Delta Force and 71 fps in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 at 4K. The card’s fastest 4K numbers in that suite came from lighter titles — 212 fps in Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, well over 300 in War Thunder — not from the heavy end of it. The card that costs $4,829.99 does not reach 240 natively at 4K in a current AAA game. Nothing does.

So 240 arrives through Multi Frame Generation, and MFG has an entry requirement. PCWorld’s Brad Chacos, relaying what his testers reported in the January 2025 RTX 5090 review he co-bylined with Adam Patrick Murray, put it plainly: “you’ll want native in-game frame rates to hit close to 50- to 60fps before turning on MFG, or the latency can start to feel a little weird.” PC Gamer’s Dave James said the same thing about NVIDIA’s DLSS 4.5 announcement — you need “an RTX 50-series GPU capable enough of delivering at 60 fps in your chosen path-traced game” before the higher frame-gen multipliers do anything but inflate a counter.

The number that decides your purchase is therefore the input rate, not the output rate. And the input rate at 4K with DLSS Quality is not the native-4K figure — DLSS Quality renders internally at roughly 2560×1440 and upscales. Tom’s Hardware’s 1440p column is the closest published stand-in for it. Reading both columns together:

Geometric means from Tom’s Hardware’s June 2026 hierarchy — 11 raster games, 8 ray-traced, Ryzen 7 9800X3D, no upscaling. The right-hand column is my derivation, not their measurement: it uses their 1440p ray-tracing result as a proxy for the internal render rate of 4K DLSS Quality, which ignores DLSS’s own overhead and is therefore slightly optimistic.

Read that column against the 60 fps floor and the field sorts itself. The RTX 5090, 4090, 5080 and 5070 Ti clear it. The RX 9070 XT falls short at 55.5, and the RTX 5070 is further back still at 51.5.

What each expectation actually buys

Esports and older titles, natively. Counter-Strike 2, Apex Legends, Fortnite and Marvel Rivals sit inside that eleven-game mean alongside Alan Wake II and Black Myth Wukong, which is why the mean lands at 110.8 rather than at either extreme. Competitive shooters are the class of game where a 4K 240Hz panel earns its refresh rate on the card already in the machine — here the display is the constraint and the GPU is not.

AAA raster at 240. Upscaling plus 2× or 4× frame generation, and the input rate is comfortable from the RTX 5070 Ti up (116.8 fps at 1440p raster). This is the largest slice of the real library and it does not need the top of the stack.

Path-traced AAA at 240. The hardest case, and the one the marketing is built on. PCWorld measured Cyberpunk 2077 on the RT Overdrive preset with 1.7× DLSS scaling at 4K on an RTX 5090: 71 fps without frame generation, 249 fps with DLSS 4 MFG. NVIDIA’s own CES 2026 demo, reported by PC Gamer, showed Black Myth Wukong at 246 fps at 4K with path tracing on an RTX 5090 using 6× MFG, at 53 ms of PC latency — that one is a vendor figure from a vendor demo, not an independent measurement. Either way this tier is a 5090 job, or a 5080 with DLSS Quality doing the input work.

Buy the RTX 5080

$1,599.99 for the cheapest card that has margin instead of just enough.

At 4K with DLSS Quality it works out to a 74.0 fps input rate in ray-traced games, clear of the 60 fps floor MFG needs with room left over. The 5070 Ti’s 66.2 is on the line rather than above it. And the 5080’s 77.4 fps native 4K raster average means a large part of what you play never touches frame generation at all.

Buy the RTX 5070 Ti at $979.99 instead if you play raster games and ray tracing is not the point. 116.8 fps at 1440p raster is more input than frame generation needs, and $420 is a monitor.

Do not buy the RTX 5090 for this. $4,829.99 against $1,599.99 — three times the money — for 43% more raster frames and 52% more ray-traced frames. That ratio is defensible if you need native 4K speed or 32GB of VRAM for work. It is not defensible when the target is a refresh rate that frame generation reaches from the 5080.

And do not buy anything at all for the port. If you already own an RTX 40-series card, NVIDIA’s own specification page says it drives 4K at 240Hz over DisplayPort 1.4a with DSC. Buy the monitor, keep the card, and upgrade when the frame rate bothers you rather than when the spec sheet does.

Two things that would change this. If you want an uncompressed signal — because alt-tab blackouts or a daisy chain have burned you before — you need both a UHBR20 monitor and an RTX 50 card, and that combination has a price. And if ray tracing is off the table entirely, the RX 9070 XT is the value play at 65.8 fps native 4K raster, with the caveat that its ray-traced input rate does not clear the frame-generation floor.

Prices are from the August 17, 2026 Newegg feed and graphics cards are moving weekly under the memory shortage. Check the live page before you order.

Where each card sits across every resolution: the GPU hierarchy 2026 tier list. What frame generation is doing to those numbers: frame generation explained. Whether your exact resolution, refresh and color depth fits a given cable: the DisplayPort and HDMI bandwidth calculator.