PC requirements for watching 4K movies

[aceashutosh]

Hi,
I need help finding the best way forward. I use my desktop to watch movies only(no gaming). Most content is offline but I stream as well. The hardware is as follows:
Asus m4a-88t mle motherboard with 8gb ddr 3 ram and nvidia gtx730 graphics card. I hook this up on hdmi to my Samsung 65” uhd series 9 tv. While some 4K Movies play well, others lag and don’t play well. What should I look at upgrading to be future proof on the Movies front? Should I just look at a higher graphics card or the switch to intel board and cpu with integrated graphics?

 

[BFG-9000]

Most DDR3 model GT 730 are VDPAU Feature Set C so cannot hardware accelerate 4k videos. So any 4k decoding is done in software on your poor CPU, and if it hits 100% CPU usage will begin to drop frames.

nVidia Feature Set D can hardware decode 4k only in H.264, F added VP9 decoding in 4k, and the current H in Pascal can do H.265 in 8k.

AMD cards require UVD 5 on 3rd gen GCN cards to decode 4k in H.264, and UVD 6 for H.265 (RX series, and Carrizo/Bristol Ridge APUs).

Intel doesn't seem to specify which can do 4k.

 

[kevin.callaghan.us]

Don't know what may be proper future proofing but currently, to watch Netflix 4K programming, you need either a 7th gen Intel CPU or a Nvidia GTX 10__ graphics card.