4k tv as monitor is hazy when displaying PC at 1080p

[Donbaloo]

So I have a bit of an abnormal setup. My PC is attached to my living room tv, so that tv pulls double duty as monitor and main viewing tv. I just recently bought a new 40" 4k tv (Samsung MU6300) because I mainly just wanted to upgrade from our old 32". The 4k was on sale at a decent price so I went with it knowing it was a better looking tv so surely everything would look better on it. And it mostly does. Except for the PC.

I can't really run the PC at 4k for games due to GPU limitations and never intended to but figured it'd surely upscale nicely and look as good as the old 1080 panel I had. But man, everything on the pc looks pretty bad hazy on the new tv. When I first switched it I thought, hmmm, is it my imagination or is that not as crisp as the old tv. So I played for a bit just to get the feel for it. Then switched back to the old tv just to check and man, the old native 1080p panel is so much crisper than the 4k for the PC.

Is this just the nature of the beast, upscaling problems and all that? I just figured surely by now 1080 content could be upscaled nicely. And everything else appears to do so, BluRay and Netflix included. But the PC display is just not very good. I'm hoping I'm overlooking some setting somewhere. Anyone else have any experience in this domain I'd love to hear from you. Thanks!

 

[DookieDraws]

Yes, videos and such will look nice on the TV. Webpages and text, not so much. Maybe the info in this article can help you a little https://www.howtogeek.com/285277/how-to-avoid-washed-out-colors-when-using-hdmi-on-your-pc/

 

[QwerkyPengwen]

To clarify you are connecting your PC to your TV and running a game at 1080p and using the TV's built in 4K upscale option to try and upscale it to a 4K like experience? If so then just try switching that off and running at 1080p with no upscale. If that doesn't help then it might be an issue with the desktop resolution being in 4K (assuming you have your desktop resolution set to 4K because the TV is 4K) and just change your desktop resolution to 1080p and adjust scaling for icons and such and then run a game at 1080p with no upscale settings. If everything goes good with that then try to upscale using the TV's upscale function while keeping everything at 1080p.

 

[Donbaloo]

Yes, videos and such will look nice on the TV. Webpages and text, not so much. Maybe the info in this article can help you a little https://www.howtogeek.com/285277/how-to-avoid-washed-out-colors-when-using-hdmi-on-your-pc/

That is a good tip and I made the change but it isn't getting at exactly what my problem is. Thanks for the link tip though!

 

[Donbaloo]

To clarify you are connecting your PC to your TV and running a game at 1080p and using the TV's built in 4K upscale option to try and upscale it to a 4K like experience? If so then just try switching that off and running at 1080p with no upscale. If that doesn't help then it might be an issue with the desktop resolution being in 4K (assuming you have your desktop resolution set to 4K because the TV is 4K) and just change your desktop resolution to 1080p and adjust scaling for icons and such and then run a game at 1080p with no upscale settings. If everything goes good with that then try to upscale using the TV's upscale function while keeping everything at 1080p.

Yes, PC to tv via HDMI 2 connection. I've tried various Windows resolutions. Setting res to 4k looks wonderful after scaling icon sizes up etc. And games of course look great but I don't have the hardware to really play at 4k. So I have to run them at 1080p. With Windows res at 4k and games at 1080p the games are hazy. But desktop looks fine!

With Windows set to 1080p...everything is pretty blah. Windows icons and text, web page text, and games are all hazy. Looks like a bad upscaling job, which I guess it is. I've tweaked and tweaked but can't seem to find a setting that clears up the PCs 1080 resolution. Maybe there's not a fix but I'm hoping there's still a setting I'm overlooking. And to be clear, I"m not trying to make 1080 look 4k...I just want it to look as good as 1080.

 

[QwerkyPengwen]

Ok. I'm going to sound like a broken record but you haven't answered one of my questions. you run your game at 1080p but do you have the upscale option on your TV turned on? (where the TV takes content that is below 4K res. and upscales it to 4K) Because if so then that could be causing an issue with how the image looks.

 

[Donbaloo]

Ok. I'm going to sound like a broken record but you haven't answered one of my questions. you run your game at 1080p but do you have the upscale option on your TV turned on? (where the TV takes content that is below 4K res. and upscales it to 4K) Because if so then that could be causing an issue with how the image looks.

Sorry about that! I'm not really sure what setting that would be. I mean the tv has to upscale otherwise I'd be looking at an image that's 1/4 the screen. I have turned most if not all of the other image processes off though. Actually I've tried pretty much all combinations of tv settings. I'm hoping there's a windows setting that will help.

 

[QwerkyPengwen]

No. The upscaling would just increase the resolution of the image to try and make it look sharper. It would still display the 1080p content like normal. What is your brand/model of tv?

 

[Donbaloo]

No. The upscaling would just increase the resolution of the image to try and make it look sharper. It would still display the 1080p content like normal. What is your brand/model of tv?

I just mean that, a 1080 signal fed into 4k without any scaling (just pixel to pixel) has to show up as an image thats 1/4 of the screen size because theres going to be a lot of leftover pixels. And I can make it happen via nVidia control panel. Indeed I get a small display in the center of my screen with lots of black space around it. That's an unscaled 1080p resolution. But I'm probably just not understanding what you're saying though, my apologies.

TV is Samsung UN40MU6300.

 

[QwerkyPengwen]

So what you're saying is that you can switch the tv settings to get a smaller image in the center of your tv? If so then that is upscaling bring turned off at which point you need to change your picture setting from normal to zoom to make the image fill the space

 

[Donbaloo]

So what you're saying is that you can switch the tv settings to get a smaller image in the center of your tv? If so then that is upscaling bring turned off at which point you need to change your picture setting from normal to zoom to make the image fill the space

As far as I can tell that's only achievable through nVidia control panel. That's the only way I've been able to make it happen. Let me look back over my tv menu options though and see if I can find something there.

 

[QwerkyPengwen]

It could also just be a button in your remote

 

[Donbaloo]

It could also just be a button in your remote

Thought we might be on to something but turned out no. I can choose through nVidia whether to have the tv do the upscaling or the GPU to do it. Default is having the the tv do it and it actually does a little better job than the GPU. In order to stop all scaling I have to set it to GPU scaling and then tell GPU to do no scaling. That gives me the pure 1080 image in the center quarter of the tv. At that point there's no setting I can find to zoom in on that image. And even if there were I think that's exactly what is natively happening through the display anyway, I'm just doing it manually. I think the result would be the same blurry 1080 I get by letting display upscale it.