Gaming At 3840x2160: Is Your PC Ready For A 4K Display?

[aberkae]

I would like to see 2 gtx 770s with 4 gigs of ram versions a $900 value in 4k resolution with and without anti aliasing. Im pretty sure the results will be playable.

 

[LonelyMan]

I do not even have the money (yet) for 2560x1600, and now they talking about this, with monitors costing 3000 at least, plus 2 high-end gpus at least for pushing this resolution? Maybe in 6-8 years.

 

[aberkae]

I do not even have the money (yet) for 2560x1600, and now they talking about this, with monitors costing 3000 at least, plus 2 high-end gpus at least for pushing this resolution? Maybe in 6-8 years.

I think sooner than that. Volta gpu is 3 years away which probably can handle 4k with one flagship gpu.
Plus sony came out with cheaper 55 inch 4k tvs for $3500, that's a $1500 drop in 6 months from 4k availability. At that rate we probably are going to see $2000 4k tvs in a year or so, which would reflect the prices for 4k monitors as well.

 

[C12Friedman]

Interesting piece of hardware. I'm not ready for it (at least my wallet isn't) but cool eye-candy none the less

 

[Grandmastersexsay]

I can't see any pixels on my current displays. Chances are you can't either.

For 4k displays to make sense, I would have to get a display twice as large as I have now and sit just as close to it. Even if I could ever afford a 50"+ 4k monitor, I wouldn't want to put it on my desk two feet from my face. Now if I actually had to lower the refresh rate to 30 fps, games would look worse at any distance.

4k makes sense for advertising companies and display manufactures and that's about it.

Quick test: type out 'lt' or 'ix' or 'ly' in a response box on your screen. Chances are the letters are touching each other causing annoyance to writers and code monkeys around the world. But then go to a nice high resolution cell phone and type it in. *bam* there is a blank pixel between the letters allowing proper separation between characters, much easier reading even though the characters are physically smaller, and even if you hold the device further from your face. More pixels means you can introduce scaling, which means you can more properly vectorize things like text so that it is always clean and crisp no matter how small it may be.

Or another test: Take a normal 1080p screen and display an 8MP image on it and then print the same image out on a regular 8.5x11 sheet of paper with a laser printer. A 1080p screen only has about 2MP of resolution, while a laser printer can print at much higher densities. Hold the print out up next to your computer screen and look at how much more detail is visible on the paper compared to the crap image that is displayed on the screen. There is a HUGE difference in clarity and detail between the two. 4K may not get rid of this entirely, but it will bring a much more 'print like' clarity and detail to the screen, much like high resolution screens do for cell phones.

Last is my greatest annoyance ever. Take a good quality 1080p bluray of a good old film from before the 1970s and watch it critically on a good quality 1080p monitor (not a TV because they blur crap on purpose to hide this issue). If you are paying attention you will notice 2 types of conflicting grain on the image. One is the film grain from the film stock that they used... but then there is another inconsistent grain from the digitization process! It is an issue of fine gradients of color where the digitizing cannot pick an exact color. This is highly prevalent in dark scenes, or scenes with a lot of grey. In 4K this still happens, but the digital grain becomes so small that your eye cannot differentiate individual pixels, and smooths out the image for you. That's right, not being able to differentiate individual pixels is a GOOD thing, and not a waste.

And another thing; You would not want a 50" 4K monitor 2' from your face as that would offer no greater clarity than a standard monitor. At 2' away you should be looking at a ~35-42" monitor in 4K, which is large to be sure, but should still be within your field of vision while offering higher pixel density and clarity.

And above all else: If you think it is a waste, then don't buy one. But claiming that it is not an improvement over the crap that we are forced to deal with every day and have grown accustomed to only shows your own literal and figurative blindness. It is going to be a good 5 years or so before I will be able to afford/justify buying one, but it is definitely a step forward, and not something to put off once it becomes readily available.

Your comparison of a screen to a photograph is actually a perfect illustration of what is wrong with 4k displays. Increasing resolution is the cheapest to produce and easiest to market way for display manufactures to improve upon their displays. Unfortunately, it is also probably one of the least effective methods to actually improve image quality. It is a lot harder for display manufactures to improve upon qualities like contrast ratio and color saturation. It is even harder to market such qualities.

But who am I to criticize you for following the rest of the tech sheep and their marketing drums.

99.9% of people can not notice any resolution based distortion, end of discussion.

 

[BigMack70]

My wife can tell the difference between 1080p and 1440p.... and that is much less of a difference than 1080p and 4k. I don't know how anyone can think higher resolution is unimportant.


While contrast ratio is pretty important and noticeable, color accuracy is irrelevant past a certain point for anyone not a graphics professional.

 

[cypeq]

first person gaming is superior on widescreen do to higher fov... i have no desire to go back to 5:4 or 4:3

Uh no. A 1920x1536 (5:4) and 1920x1080 (16:9) display gives you identical fov on the x-axis i.e. horizontal image information is the same, but the 5:4 display also gives you more vertical image information (y-axis) so you can also spot enemies dropping in from the sky or shoot down choppers and the like much more easily.

Also, the absolute image space is also larger with 5:4 for any given monitor size, e.g. a 20" 5:4 display will have a larger surface area for viewing than a 20" 16:9 display.

You are a moron aren't you ? Just had to say it... screen width resolution does not equal viewing angle it's only a variable in the equation. Your typical game engine would keep vertical view angle constant to avoid stretching of the image and modify horizontal FOV accordingly.where wider display would get higher fov to keep image proportional.

In the old games when monitors were predominantly 4:3 both FOV values were constant, launching game like that (try starcraft as an example) would get you streaching vertical in 5:4 and horizontal in 16:9.

Very little games would allow you to tamper with both H-FOV and V-FOV leaving your 5:4 screen at heavy disadvantage when playing for example fps games. Giving you smaller H-FOV than on regular 4:3 screen by default.

Uh, no again. I was talking geometry and suddenly you bring up game engine limitations. The two are mutually exclusive. The fact remains that a 5:4 display given the same horizontal resolution (in pixels) as a 16:9 display will give you more image information. See this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_%28image%29#Visual_comparisons
Look at the last comparison. The image on the right is what you get when you play current games on 16:9 displays, whereas the image on the left is what you COULD be getting if you had a 5:4 display with the same horizontal pixel count as the 16:9 monitor.

Any properly made game today takes into account both fullscreen and widescreen displays, so there would never be any squeezing or stretching, only cropping. Image data can be lost but not distorted. But on the matter of distortions, it is far more likely for a game to be designed for fullscreen and not widescreen, than vice versa. Far fewer games would be squeezed on fullscreen monitors than they would be stretched on widescreen monitors, hence this is a win for 5:4. Any distortions from 4:3 to 5:4 would be almost inconsequential compared to the distortions of going from 4:3 to 16:9.

You also ignored my second point on absolute area of 5:4 vs 16:9 per given diagonal, which is what all monitors are measured for. The panel area for a 20" 16:9 is mathematically smaller than the panel area for a 20" 5:4.
Smaller area = less image information available given the same ppi. Manufacturers prefer widescreen because it takes less material to reach a given diagonal and is therefore cheaper, but the end result is you get a smaller display.

What are you trying to do here is not have a discussion but to just bash wide screen because you are apparently owner of 5:4 screen.
I have explained to you fov mechanics that are now in place but you have decided to not listen, your screen has lowest fov in games out of all aspect ratios (this is independent of resolution).
Yes 5:4 gives you more viewable area, great for work, great for gaming when not playing FOV locked FPP (otherwise it feels like way back CRT)
16:9 - biggest production (best value) good for movies, good for all FPP games.
16:10- <- all go back to making this the best proportion for gaming screens.

 

[gwolfman]

In addition to the numbers you report for frame pacing, you should report the maximum time. Remember the whole 4k write SSD debacle? If you simply looked at the 95% of all IO access times, things looked great. It was the seldom long delay that made the SSD felt like it was at a crawl. Granted, with the benefit of graphics if we skip a frame (i.e., hitting the max delay as the entire frame was dropped) we can still continue. In other words, we don't have to wait for a graphics frame like we have to wait for data to be committed to an SSD, but having the metric is very important in comparing results/implementations.

 

[traumadisaster]

Been playing at 4k since the Spring as an early adopter experiment and I love it. Even at 30hz I would never play at 1080 again. With 1 titan and the 50 inch Seiki at 4 feet away 2 AA I look at old games and cant believe it. Tried 1080 at 120hz and looked like 1300x700.

 

[jessterman21]

Been playing at 4k since the Spring as an early adopter experiment and I love it. Even at 30hz I would never play at 1080 again. With 1 titan and the 50 inch Seiki at 4 feet away 2 AA I look at old games and cant believe it. Tried 1080 at 120hz and looked like 1300x700.

Haha, right? I just found out my 1440x900 monitor can push up to a custom res of 2160x1350, and I tried Crysis Warhead: 35fps, but I vastly prefer it to my native res even with 16xQ AA and 45+fps.

 

[PCgamer81]

My 6970s would crumble at that resolution.

 

[RedJaron]

Is it really necessary to use Anti Alaising at this resolution? If anything it would only hurt average FPS without really giving much of a visual increase.

This is something I am curious about as well. Anandtech did a neat review a few months ago and in it they compared the different AA settings and found that while there was a noticeable improvement at 2x, things quickly became unnecessary after that... but that is on a 31" screen. I don't know about others, but I am hoping to (eventually) replace my monitor with a 4K TV in the 42-50" range, and I wonder with the larger pixels if a higher AA would be needed or not for a screen that size compared to the smaller screens (though I sit quite a bit further from my screen than most people do, so maybe it would be a wash?).

"4k" gaming with aa??? is this site serius......its barely useful for low ress monitors, get it into your head aa its not a quality setting..

I agree on that the anti-aliasing option becomes academic once you hit 4K resolutions. Even at 5760x1080, I usually turn it off or put it on a minimal 2x on most games since I enjoy more a sharper image over a blended one.

To everyone asking why AA on such a high display, yes a 2xAA makes a difference. AA isn't just about easing the "jaggies" it's also about smoothing heavy contrast lines from overlapping polys and textures. Some alpha blending, shading, and transparency effects also are notably better with light AA. Going above 2x is mostly overkill on higher res screens.

My dream monitor is still a 5:4 display which is exactly double my current 1280x1024 monitor, so a 2560x2048 display, at about 30". Sadly, most video cards max out at 2560x1600 per single panel, but that will change soon once 4K gets going. I'm really hoping 5:4 makes a big comeback.

I still have two 5:4 screens and would love to see a comeback as well.

 

[nikoli707]

waiting for the hdtv segment to get real actual calibrated 99%rgb color ah-ips monitors that have a true refresh of 120hz

 

[dpoverlord]

Reading this makes me think, that it makes no sense....

I can take 3 30" Dell monitors in Surround 1600p 7680 x 1600 landscape or 4800 x2560 which is still better than 1 4k. With Bezel correction the bezels are not bad at all.

 

[Raheel Hasan]

Reading this makes me think, that it makes no sense....

I can take 3 30" Dell monitors in Surround 1600p 7680 x 1600 landscape or 4800 x2560 which is still better than 1 4k. With Bezel correction the bezels are not bad at all.

Pixel density is the main thing.

 

[f-14]

dvi or lightpeak!
display port and hdmi are for consoles using 1080p only.

damn sony and their @#$% blu ray we should have been at 108" monitors playing global thermalnuclear war with HAL by now and looking forward to directing a system battle with cortana against the covenant on living room wall sized monitors in 2014.

 

[LordHaHa]

I suppose if I wanted to be flippant I would have suggested that you could have just written "no" instead of writing a long article. *grins*

I think the big thing though, on a more serious note, will be support for higher refresh rates (120Hz and higher) at these resolutions. Sharper images are excellent, but I've found that reverting to lower resolutions (if necessary) is less irritating than running at 60Hz now that I've "seen the elephant" in that regard.

 

[basekid]

I think the future will be oculus rift like devices. A lot cheaper than those kind of displays, and the graphical experience is 10000x more immersive.

 

[Sam Hain]

Waste o' money out of the gate... But, if you've got $3K-$5K that is just burnin' and itchin' for you to throw around, I guess you can go for it at 60Hz, WOW!

 

[SilverWolf9000]

I feel as if they are focusing on size rather than quality and productivity... Compensating for something? 4K seems over the top and ridiculous IMO. I would much rather prefer the comfort of a 27" 1440p monitor suitable for gaming and videos with amazing color.... at a fraction of the cost.

 

[Bondfc11]

I feel as if they are focusing on size rather than quality and productivity... Compensating for something? 4K seems over the top and ridiculous IMO. I would much rather prefer the comfort of a 27" 1440p monitor suitable for gaming and videos with amazing color.... at a fraction of the cost.

Completely agree. The problem is gaming on these 4K panels now is a bit "off." I have played an hour or so with one and while I agree it looks great with no movement on the screen, 30FPS is garbage once things start going. I started to get a little headache from blur. I will stick with my 120hz Overlord Tempest at 1440. That for me, right now and for the next year or so, is the sweet spot for serious gamers.

 

[cypeq]

4k is good for everyone in the industry... beside end user pockets.

 

[bobback]

That's why i decided to not be an early adopter.

 

[daekar]

I couldn't care less about 4K television, but 5-10 years from now when this technology gets much cheaper I'll definitely be onboard. With resolution that high, you would never need AA again unless you game wearing a pair of magnifying glasses. Ah the miracles of technology...

 

[pantera989]

Yo, these are UHD, not 4k monitors:4k: 4096x2160UHD: 3840x2160