07 Feb 4K? 60Hz? How to (hopefully) get your TV working correctly

I've always had computer monitors, but I never owned a TV before in my life. Recently, I became the owner of a 43" 4K TV. Since I don't usually watch cable television, I connected it to my computer as an extended display, primarily using it for gaming. I couldn't get the TV's native 4K resolution to render in 60Hz though. After looking through the display adapter's settings, I concluded that my HDMI cable didn't have enough bandwidth to support 4K60. In effect, I was probably using a [HDMI 1.4](https://www.hdmi.org/spec/hdmi1_4b) cable. I later found there is [no way to determine](https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/is-there-anyway-to-detect-what-version-of-hdmi-cable-my-cable-is.3167678/post-19601026) what kind of cable is being used, since there's nothing in the spec that requires a version number to be printed. So I continued using the TV at 1080p 60Hz since I figured that was easier on my GPU anyway. After a while though, I decided to dig deeper since running 1080p on a 4K TV...feels kind of weird. I found a nice [tool](https://glenwing.github.io/adapters/?output=HDMI&input=DP) that helped me find out that I'd probably need an active DisplayPort to HDMI adapter to get 4K60 support. After purchasing one and connecting it from my computer, I found that the refresh rate was still stuck at 30Hz. I looked through the TV settings to see if there was any option to change the HDMI version from 1.4 to 2.0. There was nothing. I checked if the HDMI port supported 4K60. All ports supported 4K60. I saw an option for [EDID](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Display_Identification_Data) buried deep in the TV settings. There were two options: 1.4 and 2.0. I didn't know what EDID was, but the numbers seemed to make sense. So I changed it to 2.0, and suddenly 60Hz was unlocked. After playing with the settings, I decided to use 2K resolution instead to match my primary monitor. I then noticed the display only took up half of the TV's screen. It took a while but I found out that [display scaling](https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/what-is-gpu-scaling/) should be enabled on the TV since it's rendering at non-native resolution. Most people probably already have their TV set up properly at native resolution and some crazy high refresh rate. But if you were also stuck on these beginning steps, hopefully this guide helps you get the most out of your TV.

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