Samsung U28D590D 4K vs ASUS RoG Swift PG278Q and 4K displays in general for gaming

[ZKR]

Hey guys

My specs :
Core i7 3770 8MB 3.40 GHz
Asus P8Z77 VLX
EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Classified
GEIL 4GBx2 DDR3 Enhance CORSA DUAL CHANNEL PC3-12800 1600MHz C9

Need a monitor, mostly for gaming (also internet).

Not intending to buy another card for SLI.

I play strategy and FPS (shooters) games.

I have an offer for the Samsung U28D590D 4K, for about half the price of ASUS RoG Swift PG278Q.

Not intending to use more than 2560X1440 resolution, but there are no 2560X 1ms monitors for a good price in my area.

My questions are:

1. I`ve heard that the text in windows OS is very small at 4K, can I set a 4K monitor to 2560X1440 to solve it? with no negative effects (in OS and games)?

2. Can I play old games (early 2000s) on 4K monitors, after reducing the resolution ?

3. Is the 60Hz vs 144Hz difference so important? G-SYNC ? specifications of contrast ? other advantages of the Asus ?

4. Is the Asus really worth extra 500$ (for me in my area) ?

Appreciate your answers.
Thanks

 

[-Lone-]

If you play hardcore/fast action games a lot, I'd go for the Asus Swift as it is already at 1440p and it has 144Hz with 1 ms response time. Also, if you are not planning to SLI at all, 4k is definitely not for you, especially for fps games, with only 1 GPU, you might be lucky and get 20 fps at low settings. So you'll have some pretty awful gaming experience in fps games. But to answer your questions, The texts are pretty small, that's true, I have to set my DPI to 200% just to make it look "normal". You can set the 4k monitor to 1440p, but it'll probably cut off the edges a bit because it is not in it's native resolution, you'd have to do some scaling tweak to fix that. I don't see why you can't older games with the monitor, but the older they are, the less options they have to support higher resolutions. I'm not really sure if 144Hz makes "a lot" of difference, but from what I've heard, it is enough for you to notice a difference, G-Sync certainly helps with eliminating screen tearing, so those two factors will certainly help with fps games. Asus has pretty much made that monitor for the ultimate gaming experience, so if it was me, I'd go for the Swift if I was into fast action games. If you want the best of the best monitor of right now, the extra cash is worth it if you're like a competitive player that doesn't want any lag issues during game play. But then again you said you are not going to SLI, so I wouldn't even recommend the 4k monitor for you, you'll probably need a 2nd GPU to run 1440p very smooth anyways. I hope I've answered your questions, as best as I can, and I hope it helped

 

[TallestJon96]

780 isn't enough for certain games at 4k, but it should be good for 1440p, and g-sync will smooth out any problems anyway, so I'd go with the Swift.

 

[ZKR]

I am disappointed to hear the my (so expensive) 780 is not enough. I can make it SLI in the future, however my Asus P8Z77 VLX has only one PCI-e 3.0 slot, the rest are 2.0 so I can`t use SLI properly, or can I ?

I am moving my further questions to a new post :
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2448909/asus-benq-model-comparisons-choice.html

I must agree that I don`t need the 4K now (unless I can use SLI with different PCI-e speeds).

Thanks for the help Guys.

 

[Lord-BooZe]

I am disappointed to hear the my (so expensive) 780 is not enough. I can make it SLI in the future, however my Asus P8Z77 VLX has only one PCI-e 3.0 slot, the rest are 2.0 so I can`t use SLI properly, or can I ?

I am moving my further questions to a new post :
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2448909/asus-benq-model-comparisons-choice.html

I must agree that I don`t need the 4K now (unless I can use SLI with different PCI-e speeds).

Thanks for the help Guys.

Hey The two different speeds at the PCI-E slots wil not disable the option for SLI, you just end with some speed loss but that is so little that i doubt that you wil notice it

 

[bystander]

I am disappointed to hear the my (so expensive) 780 is not enough. I can make it SLI in the future, however my Asus P8Z77 VLX has only one PCI-e 3.0 slot, the rest are 2.0 so I can`t use SLI properly, or can I ?

I am moving my further questions to a new post :
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2448909/asus-benq-model-comparisons-choice.html

I must agree that I don`t need the 4K now (unless I can use SLI with different PCI-e speeds).

Thanks for the help Guys.

It's not enough if you want to play with Ultra settings on recent games, but it is not as bad as said above. At worst, you'll have to play at medium in games like Crysis 3. Otherwise, high settings are generally playable.
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/11/11/geforce_gtx_780_ti_vs_radeon_r9_290x_4k_gaming/3#.VKA6UABQ

I still prefer G-sync at 1440p.

 

[ZKR]

I am disappointed to hear the my (so expensive) 780 is not enough. I can make it SLI in the future, however my Asus P8Z77 VLX has only one PCI-e 3.0 slot, the rest are 2.0 so I can`t use SLI properly, or can I ?

I am moving my further questions to a new post :
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2448909/asus-benq-model-comparisons-choice.html

I must agree that I don`t need the 4K now (unless I can use SLI with different PCI-e speeds).

Thanks for the help Guys.

It's not enough if you want to play with Ultra settings on recent games, but it is not as bad as said above. At worst, you'll have to play at medium in games like Crysis 3. Otherwise, high settings are generally playable.
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/11/11/geforce_gtx_780_ti_vs_radeon_r9_290x_4k_gaming/3#.VKA6UABQ

I still prefer G-sync at 1440p.

When I bought the 780 (used) we tested it playing Crysis 3, on his AMD 8 cores, connected to a 37" (or larger) TV, with highest settings, as long as I remember. The benchmark software reported 50-60~ FPS when many things were moving on the screen and more, when it was calmer.

So I don`t know how it counts, good / bad, I didn`t suffer playing it this way.

You can also suggest something on my further post :
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2448909/asus-benq-model-comparisons-choice.html

 

[-Lone-]

I have just tried to play BF4 4k@ultra yesterday, forgot I had Crossfire turned off, so my game was freezing at this specific point in the game, and that was with 1x 295x2. So that was my experience there, even 1x 295x2 was not enough, but then again it was on ultra settings. After I turned on Crossfire, it works perfectly, so I'd get up to 4 GPUs to run 4k@ultra for games. I still haven't tries Crysis 3 yet, a bit obsessed with BF4 graphics, lol, but I'll play it later