4K Gaming requirements

[DeNachtwacht]

Hey guys,
I've got a little bit of an expert question here. I want to upgrade my PC and am wondering if it will be fast enough for gaming @ 4K resolutions. Right now I have:

MSI DKA790GX mainboard
8gb DDR-II 1066
AMD Phenom II 1090T
Kingston 96GB SSD

I'll buy a AMD R9 290 4gb DDR5 for this system and a 4K monitor (Dell / Asus, haven't decided yet). Question is: will this relatively old setup be able to game at 4K resolutions? I know the setup will work fine for 1080p gaming, but was wondering if 4K gaming also would be possible or that I needed more RAM for example.

Thanks for the advice.

 

[ubermachine]

Make sure you have alot of vram for higher resolutions. But in my opinion you will be limited by your quality if playing games at 4k.

 

[bumnut53]

No chance, you will need a complete upgrade and at least 2 of the graphics cards you are considering. Then you will at least have a chance of hitting 30 fps @4K

True 4K gaming is years away, unless you are very rich and have money to burn. If you want higher than 1080p, consider 1440p as it is a huge increase in quality but not too demanding.

 

[DeNachtwacht]

I have found some reviews that say that a lot of games are playable with 35-40 FPS with the Radeon R9 290. I was just wondering if my setup would be enough to do that.

 

[Derza10]

You will need to crossfire/sli to play games at high settings at 4k res. 1 high end card will let you play at medium-high with decent FPS (30+) in most games. I currently can play BF4 on High settings with a gtx 780 Ti playing at a res of 6040x1200 and get 50-80ish FPS (card is OC'd to 1224Mhz)... my res is about 7.25 million pixels 4k res is about 8.3 million pixels, or about 15% more. So with 1 high end card at medium on a 4k res monitor you should be right around 60 fps, a second card should get you to high settings and 60+ fps. But if you decide to go with 2 cards... SLI scales better than crossfire and has a few less issues... The only problem is you can only get 3gb high end Nvidia cards vs 4gb from AMD... Although i have not had an issue with 3gb on my setup even in bf4.

 

[ChrisCarbomb]

^ my gtx680 has 4gb of vram

 

[Derza10]

^ my gtx680 has 4gb of vram

By high end i meant the gtx 780 / gtx 780 ti. both of which are 25-50% faster than the 680.

 

[ChrisCarbomb]

so the titan with 6gb is a low end card as well?

 

[Derza10]

so the titan with 6gb is a low end card as well?

Titan gives less FPS than gtx 780 ti even at 4k res. If you want to throw away $300 for worse performance you can consider that as an option... but that is why I didn't include it.