At a budget price point, don't expect to be blown away by the HDR experience from any television, but TCL's QM6K is a very respectable performer: OK brightness, excellent colors, a 144Hz max refresh rate with VRR/AMD FreeSync Pro, coupled with excellent pixel response times makes it a win for PC/console gamers on a budget.

In our review, we were very impressed with the QM6K. That sentiment still stands, making the QM6K our definitive pick for Best Budget Gaming TV. Especially impressive was its ability to handle HDR highlights without significant blooming or haloing, given its limited zone count. Color performance is also excellent, helped by the KSF phosphor in its backlight. For watching movies and playing games, we also found off-angle viewing to be great, with limited loss of contrast and color saturation even well off-center.

TCL also has a knack for finely tuning the response time performance of its HVA panels: The QM6K has excellent response times and presents a smooth and judder-free gaming experience at any framerate thanks to its 144Hz max refresh rate and support for VRR, FreeSync Premium Pro, and ALLM. Two full-speed HDMI 2.1 ports allow simultaneous connections for both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles, leaving the other HDMI ports available for lower refresh rate devices.

Below $650, though, concessions have to be made. Fullscreen brightness isn’t particularly good; this is not a TV that will “wow” you with bright highlights. This isn’t helped by TCL’s decision to use a glossy screen coating with no real anti-reflective treatment. If your primary viewing environment is brightly lit, the QM6K might not give the pop you’re looking for. We also found the Google TV interface slow and laggy.

Still, TCL has somehow delivered a very respectable performer with the QM6K, making it our budget gaming TV to beat.

If only Hisense paid a bit more attention to its response time tuning, the U65QF would be the easy choice for budget gamers. Smeary motion lets down an otherwise brilliant, high refresh rate screen: 1,000 nits at entry level, deep, vibrant colors, and well behaved local dimming with 300 zones make HDR really pop.

Let’s get it out of the way: the U65QF would have taken top spot over the QM6K in our budget recommendation if Hisense spent more time cleaning up and tuning the panel’s pixel response times.

Preliminary results from my upcoming review are done, and the measurements indicate that Hisense has all the necessary ingredients for a great HDR gaming display: I measured 1,000-nit highlights over 25% of the screen, 300 backlight zones from a 30x10 array keep blooming and haloing in check while keeping blacks seriously dark, and its KSF enhanced backlight delivers excellent coverage of the DCI-P3 color space. This means it’s both brighter and more colorful than the TCL.

The two sets are otherwise remarkably similar. Both support 4K 144Hz via two primary HDMI 2.1 ports, have VRR and ALLM for stutter free gaming, and have low input lag in their Game modes. They also share similar weaknesses. Their semi-gloss screens don’t do a great job of reducing reflections in bright rooms, and both share limited viewing angles, inherent to VA LCD technology, although we were impressed with the QM6K’s ability to maintain saturation and contrast off-angle.

TestUFO pursuit shots of the Hisense, though, paint a scary picture for gamers. The long trails behind the aliens are the result of very slow gray-to-gray transitions, often in the 20-30ms range. Hisense, unlike TCL, hasn’t implemented any type of overdrive to speed up some of these transitions, so gaming will look a lot like the TestUFO shot above: smeary. It’s such a shame, too, because Hisense is so close to delivering a real budget winner for gamers.

If you’re a stickler for motion performance like I am, the QM6K is the clear winner for the budget gaming category. TCL’s effort and work tuning their pixel overdrive simply makes it the better gaming display. But if you do more than just game, Hisense’s U65QF offers a better HDR experience for TV and movies – one that’s unmatched at this price point. Just be prepared to tolerate a little blur when gaming.

Budget gamers who demand the best motion performance should really take a look at LG's entry level OLED, the B5. While not particularly impressive in bright rooms, in a dedicated (read: dark) gaming room, the B5 simply offers a far better experience than LCD competitors.

I know, $1,000 is a tough pill to swallow for a supposedly “budget” pick, but in spite of Herculean efforts by major LCD manufacturers, the chasm between the pixel response of LCD and OLED has not been overcome and will likely never be; smudging, smearing, trailing, overshoot, and inverse ghosting are all, to some degree or another, part-in-parcel with LCD tech. Not so with OLED. OLEDs are also immune from the distracting loss of contrast and color off-axis typical of VA LCD panels.

OLED is the alternative for those sensitive to these foibles, and LG’s B5 is the lowest priced entry into large format OLED displays, with the 65” version currently on sale for $1,000. But dropping a grand buys you perfect, square wave response times for sample-and-hold limited clarity in games, no matter the frame rate, with the requisite support for G-SYNC/FreeSync VRR. If you haven’t played a 120fps title on an OLED, I really recommend giving it a try.

It also buys you excellent, punchy HDR highlights north of 800 nits. While this isn’t quite as bright as something like Hisense’s U65QF (1,000+ nits), the B5 has far superior local contrast: 8.3 million pixels, “zones” that can be individually controlled. The Hisense has 300. Even TVs with 10x that zone count still aren’t fully immune from bloom and haloing.

Biggest downside (and this is a big one) is fullscreen brightness, where the B5 is particularly weak: 150 nits. To get an idea of just how dim this is, the image above shows the stark difference in a bright room between 780 nits and 250. If your space looks anything like my living room, the B5 is a no-go if you were planning on doing any gaming during the day. LG’s higher tier C5 and G5 models get substantially brighter if you’re willing to pay a premium, but I just wish the B5 wasn’t given such short shrift.

My intention isn’t to be too harsh on the B5; if you can control the lighting in your space, it really does offer a better gaming experience than the other two budget LCD picks. As a gamer, I’m a “convert to the OLED” team. Samsung’s S90F, our best overall gaming TV, convinced me, and I devote a decent portion of that review to explaining why. Yes, the B5 is more expensive than our budget winner, TCL’s QM6K, but if you’re anything like me, the jump to OLED is more than worth it.