Why is everyone obsessed with 4K?

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[PrincessFrosty]

However, *most* textures aren't detailed enough to make use of 1440p. In other words, I can see the pixel blocks in many of the textures even if they are blurred by AA.

So another way of saying what you stated, is that most games can't make use of 4K resolution because they're designed for 1080p or 720p.

I would add though that while most textures aren't high enough quality to be displayed exactly parallel with your view point in game and see a benefit in 4k, we have to acknowledge that with rasterization textures can be displayed at acute angles with respect to your view point, for example a flat landscape that stretches out loses quality over distance because that same lower quality texture occupies smaller areas of your display (in raw number of pixels) the more it stretches away from you.

Typically we use mip maps and Anisotropic filtering to help improve the image quality at acute angles, and this is something where a higher native resolution is very important for increasing image quality, even on very old and lower quality art assets.

And again the benefit when it comes to jaggies is always there, higher pixel density helps hide aliasing both with and without AA.

@scalesdni and Princess
Exactly my point people keep picking g only the cases 4k won't run games to go "see look your setup can't run 4k in this game so therefore it's not viable". Tons of games can't be run well at even 1080p with too many settings cranked. It's a trade off of settings for resolution.

On a single high end GPU which is at least what I've been discussing, there's not tons of games that can't be maxed out, but there is some, and this is an important distinction, can we use extreme examples of some very graphically intensive games to deny that a certain video card (say high end 970/980/titan range) is unsuitable for certain types of gaming?

To be fair and to be consistent we decide a standard via some objective criteria, if that standard is that we have to be able to run all currently released games at say 60fps with max settings then 1080p is no more viable than 4k because there's no cards out there that can provide this kind of performance in top end games like GTAV when you truly turn up all settings.

This has been ignored so far because it serves the agenda of people putting down 4k, and when you look at the numbers of games which are unsuitable in 4k with a high end GPU vs the same standard for 1080p as a total percentage of all games, or all popular games, you find that both those percentages are tiny and more importantly they're very close to each other, both way less than 1%.

 

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[ultimatebob]

New tech I guess.

Pretty much, yeah. It will probably be a few more years until 4k content is readily available to watch, and reasonably priced video cards can handle games at that resolution.

Hell, at this point it's still pretty much impossible to get 1080p content that isn't compressed all to hell from most Cable and IPTV providers.

 

[Sheep221]

I think Full HD is something like SDTV in the past - it will last many years.

 

[palladium]

I definitely feel the difference when trading and looking at PACS with my new Dell UP2715K. For gaming, I fall back to my U2711, or drop the settings on my Dell 5K . Waiting for Pascal or successor to Fiji for a massive upgrade (CPU and GPU wise).

 

[Madpacket]

Yea I waited too long to replace my 46" Panasonic Plasma with a 60" Panny and now they're mostly gone or prices are jacked. I refuse to buy a standard LED LCD screen 4K or not. To me they all have weird judder and contrast issues that turn me off. Everything looks fake or washed out. Plus as a home theater system what sort of 4K content are you really playing back?

My next TV will likely be a 1080P 55" OLED (I wish they came in 60") likely during Black Friday or Boxing day (Canadian thing) this year. I just hope input latency isn't much of an issue like some TV's. I usually play with a controller from the couch for casual gaming so it's not the biggest issue.