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Thoughts on 4K...

Charlie22911

Charlie22911

Senior member
I’m visiting my sister for the holidays and brought my HTPC along to demo some VR on the HTC Vive, which everyone loves.

But more to the topic of this thread, she also has a 4K Samsung TV. The 1080ti handles it fine, but something I’ve noticed is that games subjectively look worse at 4K than in 1080p and to a point 1440p in almost every game I’ve tried.
Sure things are sharper in 4K, but that clarity raises an issue: draw distance.
Pop-in is very noticeable and things just look sparse in more open world games.

Are there examples of games that truely shine in 4K?
 
Charlie22911 said:
...I’ve noticed is that games subjectively look worse at 4K than in 1080p and to a point 1440p in almost every game I’ve tried.
Are there examples of games that truely shine in 4K?
Click to expand...
How about you list every game you tried and the settings that you used (medium, ultra, etc.) and they we can all try to help you out.
 
A non native resolution on a 2160p display will always look worse.

I can't really fathom how it can look better.
 
I’ve tried so far, max settings:

Rise of the Tomb Raider
Forza Horizons
GTA V
The Witcher 3 (this looks fine IMO)
Just Cause 3

I should also add that by 1080p and 1440p I mean naitive.
 
So are you comparing the 4k display to a separate 1080p display and a 1440p display?

Or are you lowering the resolution on the 4k tv below 3840x2160?
 
No, my HTPC is connected to a 1080p Panasonic plasma and my main PC is connected to a 1440p Acer Predator.
Lowering the resolution on TV just takes me to blur town.

I see people giving 4K praise left and right for gaming, as well as general PC usage. My experience so far is that Windows scaling is pretty lackluster and gaming at 4K makes pop-in and limited draw distance far more evident.

I’m mainly wandering what others thoughts on 4K are and what software and games they use.
 
I wonder if what you are seeing is that with the higher resolution, you feel like you should be able to see further, but the game engine is stopping that from happening. @1080 there is only so far that you can see before detail would be sub pixel, but with 4k that detail could be seen.

This is interesting though.
 
realibrad said:
I wonder if what you are seeing is that with the higher resolution, you feel like you should be able to see further, but the game engine is stopping that from happening. @1080 there is only so far that you can see before detail would be sub pixel, but with 4k that detail could be seen.

This is interesting though.
Click to expand...

I tend to be a bit inarticulate, but this is exactly what I suspect is happening.
 
I would try to compare your 1440p monitor to a similar 4k monitor. It really comes down to viewing distance. My 4k monitor looks far sharper than my friend's 1440p side by side, and it makes my 1080p monitor look like trash.

But I still find my 1680x1050 laptop display to look quite good.

I cannot go back at this point to a lower resolution, but that's just me.
 
Charlie22911 said:
I tend to be a bit inarticulate, but this is exactly what I suspect is happening.
Click to expand...

Try and find a point and measure what it is that you can clearly see and what you can, and then see how it is on the different resolutions. Then, see what is popping in on the different resolutions based on where you stand. I bet that the higher resolution is giving you clarity that you would otherwise not have and its allowing you to see what is going on much further.

I noticed this with xbox vs PC borderlands. Draw distance was so great that I could see things I could not on the xbox version and once I realized I was really seeing more I felt different.
 
What size was that 4K screen and the size of your 1080p and 1440p screens? To me, it sounds more like the size of the 4k screen makes the game feel empty, as it's just too big for you. I'm not sure this is a 4K vs 1080p issue, or an issue with huge screen vs small screen.
 
The 4K and 1080p screens are both 55”, 1440p is 34”.

As realibrad so eloquently said, in lower resolutions details would be subpixel past a certain draw distance so they aren’t normally rendered. But at 4K this becomes a problem since you now can resolve those details.

I’m not looking for a fix, just wondering what others thoughts on 4K are and if there are any games that seem to shine at that resolution since my experience doesn’t jive with popular opinion it seems.
 
I see what you mean OP. Yes, once you're at 4k, game imperfections become far more evident. When playing the witcher 2, at 1080p it's ok. At anything higher, I needed to use the draw distance mod as texture pop in KILLED me.

At higher resolutions, you notice the other game imperfections a TON more.

I find that unless a game is modded or built robustly, 4k will be fun still, but it's definitely more enjoyable when you have it built around being able to let that high resolution shine.

What mods did you use with GTA 5?

I'm also on a side note jealous of your unraid server, and really upset amd doesn't have GPU passthrough working reliably enough for me to have that CPU and some GPUs in there to boot. I'm just putting the finishing touches on my new unraid server home!
 
tential said:
I see what you mean OP. Yes, once you're at 4k, game imperfections become far more evident. When playing the witcher 2, at 1080p it's ok. At anything higher, I needed to use the draw distance mod as texture pop in KILLED me.

At higher resolutions, you notice the other game imperfections a TON more.

I find that unless a game is modded or built robustly, 4k will be fun still, but it's definitely more enjoyable when you have it built around being able to let that high resolution shine.

What mods did you use with GTA 5?

I'm also on a side note jealous of your unraid server, and really upset amd doesn't have GPU passthrough working reliably enough for me to have that CPU and some GPUs in there to boot. I'm just putting the finishing touches on my new unraid server home!
Click to expand...

I’ve been very timid about attempting to mod GTA V for fear of an online ban. Everything so far has been vanilla unmodded.
The second unrelated to gaming thing I’ve been curious about is how on earth people are using these as day to day displays. 4K at 55” appears to be about the same ppl as a 27in 1080p panel, windows scaling is pretty bad; I can’t imagine how small things are on a PC monitor at 100% scaling.

And yes, the betaness of Ryzen/Threadripper in Linux very frustrating. It’s a beast with Plex for sure though!
 
Charlie22911 said:
I’ve been very timid about attempting to mod GTA V for fear of an online ban. Everything so far has been vanilla unmodded.
The second unrelated to gaming thing I’ve been curious about is how on earth people are using these as day to day displays. 4K at 55” appears to be about the same ppl as a 27in 1080p panel, windows scaling is pretty bad; I can’t imagine how small things are on a PC monitor at 100% scaling.

And yes, the betaness of Ryzen/Threadripper in Linux very frustrating. It’s a beast with Plex for sure though!
Click to expand...
Ya, I'm shopping unlimited dataplans and using that with plex/encoding of threadripper would be great. I'll definitely keep that in mind actually.
Windows scaling for me works perfect on my monitor actually.
But it was TERRIBLE on the laptop I used.

GTA 5 modded at 4K is my dream. If you need some inspiration, I use ThirtyIRs Youtube channel to get excited about the super high res games.

https://www.youtube.com/user/ThirtyIR/videos

This is the GTA 5 mod that is pretty popular GTA 5 redux.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEu8R2Fkus8

Different mod at 8k though as that video only maxed out at 1440p.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d-zx6OqpeE

Look for games that can be completely remodded/overhauled and look for people who do it. I think that's what allows the high end setups to really shine. Like Fallout, Skyrim, GTA, and yes as I think about it more and more the drawdistance at high resolution is just so critical (Which of course kills your GPU which means you need an even STRONGER gpu lol)

Also what are the 4K TV specs? Could that factor into things? I imagine the response/motion blur of the pixels could change your opinion of things in motion right? My roommate just picked up a 4K samsung TV, it's worse spec wise than the TCL that's recommended online.

You might feel differently using a 4K monitor or some other 4K display device.
 
You may genuinely be getting more pop in! If you are rendering at 4K, that means that all of your render targets are 4 times as large as at 4K- leaving less VRAM for your assets. The game's streaming engine may be pulling in the draw distance/mipmap distance to compensate for reduced available memory.
 
If I game at 8k on my 1070, I immediately run out of VRAM and all textures look very poor.
 
Pretty much all of my games look better at 4k coming from 1920 x 1200 a few months ago. The exceptions are much older games, but anything from DOOM to Defense Grid to Portal is so much better I'll not go back to 1080p regardless of refresh rate. I've not noticed the "draw" issue you've described perhaps it is a function of the game itself?

Now my 2560 x 1080 widescreen on my secondary gamer really makes older games like Call of Duty and Quake 3 look odd, almost unplayable.
 
ZGR said:
If I game at 8k on my 1070, I immediately run out of VRAM and all textures look very poor.
Click to expand...
4x Titan Xp seems to do pretty well for ThirtyIR. I can't tell of course completely since it's a youtube video.

8k is a massive stretch. But I still think it's critical to render in 8k. I know it sounds insane, but everytime I see a higher resolution screen/image of a game it's truly impressive.
Bioshock Infinite 8k shots were coming out back when Vega was being teased.
I think we're a few years out from where the displays really don't limit us at all.
4k 144hz will be the first entrypoint I think into a realm where the Display isn't a limiting factor.
 
NTMBK said:
You may genuinely be getting more pop in! If you are rendering at 4K, that means that all of your render targets are 4 times as large as at 4K- leaving less VRAM for your assets. The game's streaming engine may be pulling in the draw distance/mipmap distance to compensate for reduced available memory.
Click to expand...

This was done on a 1080ti, I don’t think any of those games were pegging it’s 11GBs of vram. Granted I also didn’t monitor vram usage.
 
Not sure what to tell ya, OP. I game on 2 4k monitors at home, one Freesync and one Gsync. They are so lovely to game on.

I also use my buddy's 4096x2160 OLED LG smart TV which looks even better, but has awful input lag. So bad, that I can't really enjoy it.
 
Input lag drives me absolutely batty and is a major negative to console gaming IMO since it is a metric that is almost never advertised and one that the majority of consumers are clueless of; the majority of TVs out there have at least several frames of lag. Even game mode does little to fix it.
That’s why my Panasonic Plasma will have to be pryed from my cold dead hands.
 
Relevant: in case you aren’t following CES (unlikely), looks like gaming 4K displays with native 120hz refresh are in the works:

https://youtu.be/19MuphJzuSc

I’ll likely wait for a refresh of these to finally ditch my Panasonic Plasma as my living room TV.
 
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