Your TV Is Making Your Games Look Worse. Fix These Settings First.

Here is a fun fact nobody tells you at the store. Your TV left the factory tuned to survive a showroom, not to play games. Bright, loud colors, every “enhancer” cranked up, brightness sensors doing their own thing. Then you plug in a PS5 or an Xbox, sit down for a session, and something feels off. The picture looks a little grey. The blacks look like dark blue soup. Your aim feels a half second late. You blame the console. Almost every time, it is the TV.

I went through this myself, and the fix cost me zero dollars and about fifteen minutes. So before GTA 6 lands on November 19 and we all lose our minds, let us sort your TV out. Do these in order. Each step builds on the one before it, and at the end I will tell you exactly what to check to know it worked.

One thing to know before we start: most TVs save picture settings per input, and often separately for SDR and HDR. So do this whole list once while a game is running on the input your console uses. If you play in HDR, run an HDR game while you set the HDR side of things.

1. Turn on Game Mode. This one is not optional.

Every modern TV has a Game Mode, and it exists for one reason: input lag. Outside of Game Mode, your TV runs the picture through a pile of processing before showing it to you. That processing takes time, sometimes a lot of time. Game Mode switches most of it off, so what you press is what you see, fast.

Where it lives depends on the brand:

LG: the picture mode is called Game Optimizer on recent models. Older sets just call it Game.
Samsung: Settings, then Connection (General on older models), then Game Mode Settings. Set Game Mode to On, or leave it on Auto if you want ALLM to handle it.
Sony: pick the Game picture mode. If your set has Auto Picture Mode and your console sends ALLM, the TV can jump into Game by itself.
TCL and Hisense: look for a Game picture mode, and on many models a separate Game Mode or Game Master toggle in the picture or system settings. The name varies by model and region, so if you do not see it in Picture, check the input settings for that HDMI port.

Both consoles can ask for Game Mode automatically through ALLM (Auto Low Latency Mode). On PS5 it is basically always on. On Xbox, the checkbox is “Allow auto low latency mode” in Video modes. Use it, but do not trust it blindly. Open your TV info bar, confirm the Game mode is actually active on that input, and then do the rest of this list inside that mode.

2. Pick the right HDMI port, then unlock its full bandwidth

Ports are not equal, and this trips up more people than any setting on this page. On many TVs only some HDMI ports are full HDMI 2.1, the kind that carries 4K at 120Hz with VRR. On some Sonys it is ports 3 and 4. On many Samsungs it is one marked port, often HDMI 4, sometimes shown with a little game controller icon. LG’s OLEDs usually give you 2.1 on all four. Check the tiny print next to the ports on the back of your TV, or the manual. If your console is in a 2.0 port, you are leaving picture quality and features on the table.

Then, and this is the part everyone misses, most TVs ship with each port in a low bandwidth compatibility mode until you switch it over. The switch has a different name everywhere:

LG: Settings, All Settings, General, External Devices, HDMI Settings, then set HDMI Deep Color to 4K for your console’s port. Rtings notes HDR from external devices usually will not even work right without this.
Samsung: Settings, All Settings, Connection, External Device Manager, then Input Signal Plus. Turn it on for your console’s port. Samsung’s own manual is blunt about it: with Input Signal Plus off, the TV cannot properly receive HDR signals from the device.
Sony: Settings, Watching TV or Channels & Inputs, External Inputs, HDMI signal format, then set your port to Enhanced format.
TCL and Hisense: look in the input or channel settings for an HDMI mode or format option for that port and set it to the enhanced option. The exact name changes between Roku TV, Google TV and VIDAA models, so hunt a little.

While you are behind the TV, check the cable too. For 4K at 120Hz you want the Ultra High Speed cable that came in the console box, or another certified one. That random cable from 2016 is not it.

3. Kill the motion smoothing

Motion smoothing invents fake frames between the real ones. It is the thing that makes movies look like soap operas, and in games it is worse: it adds input lag, and it smears and breaks up around fast camera pans and crosshairs. Game Mode usually disables it, but “usually” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, so check.

Every brand renamed it, of course:

LG: TruMotion. Set it to Off. You will find it under Picture, Advanced Settings, Clarity.
Samsung: Auto Motion Plus, and on newer sets it sits inside Picture Clarity Settings under Expert Settings. Set it to Off. If your Samsung has a separate Game Motion Plus inside the game settings, keep that off too if you care about lag.
Sony: Motionflow, under Picture settings, Motion. Off.
TCL: on Roku TV models it is Action Smoothing, in Advanced Picture Settings. Set it to Off.
Hisense: Motion Enhancement. Off.

If a game ever looks weirdly smooth and artificial, like it is running on fast forward, this is why.

4. Turn off Eco mode and the light sensors

This one explains the classic complaint: “my TV looks great at noon and sad at night.” Eco features dim the panel to save power. Some use a light sensor to guess your room brightness, and they guess wrong a lot. In a game that means brightness drifting up and down while you play, and HDR highlights that never reach full power.

LG: Settings, General, Energy Saving, then set Energy Saving Step to Off. Some models also have an Auto Power Save picture mode. If your picture mode says anything like that, change it.
Samsung: Settings, General & Privacy (General on older sets), Power and Energy Saving. Turn off Brightness Optimization and Energy Saving. Older models group this under Eco Solution.
Sony: look for Power Saving in the picture or power settings and set it to Off, and turn the Light Sensor off too. On Google TV models, check Settings, System, Power & Energy, Energy Saver.
Hisense (Google TV): same Power & Energy area, and also make sure you are not sitting in the Energy Saving picture mode, plus disable the Light Sensor in the picture settings.
TCL: the naming varies the most here. Look for power saving and ambient or automatic brightness options in system or picture settings and turn them off for your gaming input.

Your electricity bill will survive. We are talking about a few watts for a picture that finally stays put.

5. Turn off the fake “enhancers”

TVs love sliders that promise to improve the picture and mostly just crush it. Dynamic contrast is the big one. It stretches bright and dark parts of the image scene by scene, which sounds smart and in practice deletes detail: shadows turn to black holes, bright skies turn to white blobs, and the look changes from room to room in the same game.

LG: Auto Dynamic Contrast (called Dynamic Contrast on some models). Off.
Samsung: Contrast Enhancer, in Expert Settings. Off.
Sony: Adv. contrast enhancer and its sibling Black adjust. Off for both.
TCL: Dynamic Contrast. Off.
Hisense: Active Contrast. Off.

Same story for noise reduction and edge enhancement. Your console is sending a clean digital signal. There is no noise to reduce. Set noise reduction off everywhere, and keep Sharpness low, around 0 on LG and Sony scales, and near the bottom on Samsung and TCL too. High sharpness does not add detail, it draws fake white outlines around things and makes HUD text shimmer.

6. Match the black level, or live in grey soup

This is the trap that causes the famous washed out look, and it is a simple misunderstanding between two devices.

Your console can send black in two ranges. Think of it as two languages: one counts black to white on a scale of 0 to 255, the other on a smaller scale where black starts at 16. If the console speaks one language and the TV listens in the other, you get one of two disasters. Blacks turn grey and everything looks like it was filmed through fog, or shadows crush into a single black blob and night scenes become radio.

The easy fix is to let both sides auto negotiate, and then leave them alone:

PS5: Settings, Screen and Video, Video Output, RGB Range. Set it to Automatic.
Xbox: Settings, General, TV & display options, Video fidelity & overscan, Color space. Set it to Standard (Recommended) for a TV. PC RGB is for monitors.
LG: the picture setting is called Black Level. Leave it on Auto.
Samsung: HDMI Black Level, in External Device Manager. Leave it on Auto.
Sony: HDMI video range, in the picture Video options. Leave it on Auto.
TCL and Hisense: if your set shows a black level or HDMI range option, Auto is the answer there too. If there is no Auto and you have to pick, match the console by hand: Limited on the TV pairs with the console’s standard setting.

Quick test to know you got it right: load a dark scene in a game. You should see detail in the shadows, a jacket’s folds, a dark hallway’s corners, while true black areas still look black and not flashlight grey.

7. HGiG versus Dynamic Tone Mapping, in plain English

HDR games arrive mastered way brighter than your TV can actually get. Something has to squeeze that brightness down to fit your panel. That squeeze is called tone mapping, and who does the squeeze is the whole game here.

Dynamic Tone Mapping means the TV does it, live, guessing scene by scene. LG literally offers it as a switch under HDR Tone Mapping, with options for On, Off and HGiG. On makes the picture brighter and punchier at first glance. The problem: your console also did calibration math assuming it controls the squeeze. When the TV re-squeezes on top, highlights clip, mid tones lift, and the image drifts away from what the game intended. Two cooks, one soup.

HGiG is the truce. It stands for HDR Gaming Interest Group, a standard backed by the console makers themselves. With HGiG on, the TV steps back and maps exactly to its real peak brightness, and the console’s own calibration does the talking. Result: highlights keep their detail, and the sun in the sky stops being a white hole.

What to do, brand by brand:

LG: in your HDR Game picture mode, go to Advanced Settings, Brightness, HDR Tone Mapping, and pick HGiG.
Samsung: inside Game Mode Settings there is a toggle called Game HDR. Samsung’s manual confirms this is its HGiG mode. Turn it on. Some Samsung models also offer an HDR Tone Mapping choice between Static and Active; Static is the one that behaves.
TCL: on models with a Game Bar, the HGiG option lives in there. Turn off the TV’s own Dynamic Tone Mapping if you use it.
Sony: most Bravia sets do not give you an HGiG switch for gaming. Do not go hunting for one. Leave the TV’s hands off and lean on the console calibration, which brings us to the order of operations.

That order matters more than the toggle itself: set the TV’s tone mapping first, then run the console’s HDR calibration, and never touch the TV side afterward. On PS5 the calibration is Settings, Screen and Video, Video Output, Adjust HDR. On Xbox it is Settings, General, TV & display options, Calibrate HDR for games. Follow the screens honestly, adjust until the test pattern is just barely visible, the way the instructions say. If you change tone mapping later, you just invalidated the calibration, so run it again.

8. Local dimming: High for HDR, if your TV has zones

If your TV is an LED or Mini LED with local dimming, this is the feature that dims the backlight in zones so dark scenes stay dark while a bright light in the same frame still pops. It is half of what makes HDR look like HDR on these sets, and it often ships set too low.

LG (LED models): LED Local Dimming. Set it to High for HDR gaming.
Samsung: Local Dimming, in Expert Settings. High.
Sony: Auto Local Dimming. High.
TCL: this one hides under the name Local Contrast on many models, and Rtings found High is where it actually does its job. Some TCL models call it Local Dimming instead. Either way, High.
Hisense: Local Dimming, in the picture Brightness section. High. Set Peak Brightness to High while you are there, so the panel is allowed to actually peak.

OLED owners, skip this step and feel smug. Your pixels dim themselves, all eight million of them, no zones required.

One honest tradeoff: on sets with few zones, High can bloom, meaning a soft halo around bright objects on black screens, like subtitles or a moon. If blooming bothers you more than grey blacks do, Medium is a fair compromise. Your eyes, your call.

9. Rename the input to PC or Game Console

Last trick, and it sounds like superstition until you try it. On several TVs, the label you give an HDMI input changes how the TV treats the signal. The PC label in particular tells the TV to show the full, unedited signal, pixel for pixel, with full color resolution (the technical term is 4:4:4 chroma). Textures barely change, but fine detail does: HUD text, minimaps, menus and distant signs get visibly crisper.

Rtings spells it out for LG: for proper 4:4:4 support, set the input icon to PC for the port your device uses, from the Home Dashboard, and keep HDMI Deep Color set to 4K. On Samsung, editing the input’s label to PC similarly forces a cleaner, lower processing path.

Two small warnings. First, on some TVs the PC label locks a few picture options out, which is fine, because you turned most of them off anyway. Second, this matters most for Xbox and PC. The PS5 already negotiates a clean output in Game mode on most sets, so if your PS5 input looks sharp, do not fix what is not broken. And whichever label you pick, Game Mode from step 1 stays on.

The five minute check, after you change everything

Do not trust the menus. Trust a game. Load something you know well and look at these five things:

The dark test. A cave, a night street, a dark menu background. Shadow detail visible, blacks still black, no grey fog. If it is foggy, revisit step 6. If it is crushed, same step, other direction.
The sky test. Look at the sun or a bright sky in HDR. You should see gradient and cloud detail around the bright spot, not a flat white card. If it is a white card, revisit step 7 and re-run the console calibration.
The text test. Read the HUD and the minimap from your couch. Mushy text means step 2 or step 9 needs another look.
The feel test. Flick the camera in circles. The response should feel glued to your thumb. Any floaty delay means Game Mode is not actually active on that input, step 1.
The night test. Play after dark with the room lights low. Brightness should sit still. If the picture breathes up and down, an Eco sensor survived, step 4.

That is the whole job. No calibration disc, no service menu, no guy with a colorimeter charging you by the hour. Just a TV that finally does what the box promised, ready for launch day.

Sources

Rtings, LG UQ8000 calibration settings (HDMI Deep Color set to 4K for HDR inputs; PC input icon for chroma 4:4:4 support), rtings.com
Rtings, TCL 5 Series (S535) calibration settings (Local Contrast controls local dimming, High recommended), rtings.com
Samsung Support, “Discover the available picture settings for your Samsung TV” (Local Dimming and Contrast Enhancer in Expert Settings), samsung.com
Samsung TV user manuals, QN800D and Q60C series (Input Signal Plus, HDMI Black Level, Game HDR as the HGiG standard), samsung.com
Sony Help Guide, TV advanced settings (Auto local dimming, Adv. contrast enhancer, Black adjust, HDMI video range, Motionflow), sony.net
Pocket-lint, “Your TV is hiding its best picture quality from you” (LG Energy Saving Step, Samsung Eco Solution and Power and Energy Saving paths, Google TV Energy Saver), pocket-lint.com
Tom’s Guide, “5 Hisense TV settings you should adjust right after setup” (Local Dimming, Peak Brightness, Light Sensor), tomsguide.com
Tom’s Guide, “5 free ways to upgrade your smart TV right now” (TruMotion, Motionflow and Auto Motion Plus naming), tomsguide.com
FlatpanelsHD, “Guide: How to set up Xbox Series X for 4K, 120Hz, HDMI 2.1, VRR & HDR” (Calibrate HDR for games, set TV tone mapping to HGiG first), flatpanelshd.com
PlayStation Support, PS5 Screen and Video settings (HDR options, RGB Range, Adjust HDR), playstation.com