Dumb question - can you play videos on youtube on higher quality than your monitor ?

[nisemono]

Asking for a buddy, he bought a new system, has a 1070 Ti but is stuck, for now, at 900p. Can he play videos in 4k on that monitor ? I know they can't be displayed in 4k, but with a GPU that powerful, I was thinking if they could get compacted, thus still having a higher fidelity/bitrate than 1080p.

His main concern is does it put any stress on the monitor whatsoever ? Cause if it has the possibility to break his 10+ year old monitor, then that is a risk he's not financially able to take just yet.

What about running benchmarks in 4k ?

 

[Joey2oo9]

Yip you're right it is a dumb question, of course you can't.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Yes. 4k videos can be played on 900p screen. They will get resized to fit. Playing videos doesn't put any extra stress to monitor.

About benchmarks. You can set up DSR (Dynamic Super Resolution) settings in nvidia control panel. This forces to render games in higher resolution and then downscale image to fit the screen.

 

[nisemono]

Yes. 4k videos can be played on 900p screen. They will get resized to fit. Playing videos doesn't put any extra stress to monitor.

About benchmarks. You can set up DSR (Dynamic Super Resolution) settings in nvidia control panel. This forces to render games in higher resolution and then downscale image to fit the screen.

Your answer is perfect, thank you so much sir, I learned something new and useful today, can't wait to tell my friend to put it in practice and test it on his new PC (when the RAM comes back from RMA).

 

[Joey2oo9]

Once it's resized it's a 900p video not 4k.

 

[SkyNetRising]

It is still 4k video, just downscaled. It will still use same cpu/gpu resources as playing 4k video on 4k screen.

 

[jaslion]

Once it's resized it's a 900p video not 4k.

Imagine folding an A4 paper in half. It now looks like an A5 piece of paper but still is a regular A4 paper you just only see half of it.

Downscaling works the same way. You just see a more compressed version of the image which can lead to some extra sharpness.

 

[Joey2oo9]

All the extra processing in the world can't change that fact that the video will play at 900p. The monitor can't display any more pixels than it physically has. So the while the source may have been 4k you'll be watching it at 900p

 

[Joey2oo9]

Once it's resized it's a 900p video not 4k.

Imagine folding an A4 paper in half. It now looks like an A5 piece of paper but still is a regular A4 paper you just only see half of it.

Downscaling works the same way. You just see a more compressed version of the image which can lead to some extra sharpness.

I understand the concept but at the end of day you're still not watching actual 4K

 

[nisemono]

All the extra processing in the world can't change that fact that the video will play at 900p. The monitor can't display any more pixels than it physically has. So the while the source may have been 4k you'll be watching it at 900p

I get it, 4k downscaled isn't 4k but isn't 4k downscaled to 900p better than 900p native ? That's half of my question after all. I don't care if it's not native 4k, I care if I can squeeze a better quality image with hardware that is frankly overkill for 900p.

 

[ElectrO_90]

Since 4k has to be altered and compressed again, (unless the 900p is a crap compression) in theory it could be better quality. But the res would still not be more.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Yes - you're watching it at 900p(because screen is 900p), but it's still 4k video.
All the video decoding necessary to show it, takes 4k video cpu/gpu processing power plus additional downscaling.
Playing native 900p video would use significantly less cpu/gpu resources.

It's the same as resizing window of windows media player. When you resize it to a smaller size, video quality doesn't change because of this.

 

[nisemono]

Since 4k has to be altered and compressed again, (unless the 900p is a crap compression) in theory it could be better quality. But the res would still not be more.

When the RAM comes from RMA we'll know for sure, but I'm still 99.999% sure 4k should look better than 1080p at 900p, on one half because it's higher compression, on the other half because Youtube compression sucks, same with Twitch, lower quality looks far worse than it should be because bandwidth is saved by reducing bitrate. One major factory in video quality is bitrate, and you can increase that drastically by watching 4k, at least I think you should be able to.

Yes - you're watching it at 900p(because screen is 900p), but it's still 4k video.
All the video decoding necessary to show it, takes 4k video cpu/gpu processing power plus additional downscaling.
Playing native 900p video would use significantly less cpu/gpu resources.

It's the same as resizing window of windows media player. When you resize it to a smaller size, video quality doesn't change because of this.

I think the most obvious way to check the truth in your answer is to watch 480p on the mini player and compare it with fullscreen. Huge difference in quality there, the miniplayer almost makes 480p look decent.

 

[jaslion]

Once it's resized it's a 900p video not 4k.

Imagine folding an A4 paper in half. It now looks like an A5 piece of paper but still is a regular A4 paper you just only see half of it.

Downscaling works the same way. You just see a more compressed version of the image which can lead to some extra sharpness.

I understand the concept but at the end of day you're still not watching actual 4K

You are still watching a 4k video but you only see it at 900p.

 

[Glenwing]

Your screen has 1600 horizontal pixels and 900 vertical pixels, that is part of its physical construction and can be counted with a microscope if you want. This doesn't change no matter what you are watching. If you put a video full screen, then what you are physically seeing with your eyes is an image composed of a grid of 1600×900 individual pixels. Your screen will never show you anything beyond what is possible with 1600×900 pixels.

However, that doesn't mean the image will be identical. If you are watching YouTube, using a higher resolution video option will use a higher bitrate, which means less compression. This will improve the video quality. You will still be seeing a 1600×900 image, but it will be a closer approximation of the original.

There are also benefits in games, if you use something like DSR, rendering at higher resolutions internally and then downscaling to 1600×900 can often give a slightly better approximation of the desired image compared to rendering at 1600×900 directly. This is effectively what some forms of anti-aliasing do anyway though.