Blogs Is 2014 the year that 4K goes mainstream?

Well this was to be expected as 4k is now the next selling arguiment for tv's... even though even bluray offers no content.
Strange how all the quality-lovers suddenly like upscaling.

For the PC it's great though. We've been stuck at 1080 for affordable panels far too long.

 

It's a matter of time even if it isn't this year.

It's faintly ridiculous that high end phones are starting to use 5 inch-ish 1080 displays as standard when that is still pretty much the standard resolution for 24 inch-ish desktop displays and 32 inch+ TVs. Whether it's necessary or beneficial a jump in standard resolution for larger displays has been inevitable for some time now.

As much as they use marketing guff extensively, I did think Apple had a point when they used the term "retina" for their high resolution displays. The ultimate goal of a display should be to be of sufficient resolution that the pixels are effectively invisible to the human eye, not just inconspicuous. Depending on typical distance from the display 200-400ppi seems to be about what is necessary to achieve that goal, and non-4k displays still lag a long way behind that. If technically achievable and affordable a higher resolution would almost always be preferable up to that point.

It would be nice if they integrated some decent up-scaling technology into 4k monitors as a sort of stop gap until mainstream gaming hardware catches up. It would be good if you could game at a lower resolution with the monitor doing a bit of the work to up-scale the signal properly to 4k, without making it look like arse. Some TVs and AV amps do a decent job of it.

 

Whats classed as mainstream?

If they stay priced above £600 then no they will not go mainstream.

1080p did not really take off in tv till they were available dirt cheap. Most people could not afford to buy both a 4k screen and the required hardware to run it.

Crysis 3 would require most likely sli 780tis to get it going on the higher settings. ( Theres a £1000 ) Add in other hardware requirements and you could be easily talking £2k - £3k to build a pc capable of 4k resolution gaming.

And you would be replacing those 780 tis with the next highest performing cards as soon as they launched if you wanted to maintain those settings in newer games.

Once a Single GPU is capable of gaming at that resolution that is affordable like the current 760 is at 1080 you will see it take off in the pc gaming market.

Till that time it will be super niche for the uber rich or uber enthusaist.

 

its all on the way, its early days but mastered in 4k discs are incoming and even the likes of Netflix are to be streaming 4k.

don't mind scaling so long as its good, in fact what ever 4k screen I buy has to prove it can do scaling as I have a number of sources that barely do 1080p (360,PS3, Ps4) these all have to work on the screen with minimal delay, if the 4k screens can't manage that they won't get bought.

I'm itching to buy, just don't know what to buy, but I want bigger personally. ~40 inch would suit, also want 3d capable.

 

Personal Situation : 27" Dell 2560x1440 resolution,
BF4 with AA off looks crappy, was crappy @ 1920*1200, will be crappy @4k
I´m soon to be in the situation that I can test 680sli (at the moment running a single 680)in BF4 but my guesses arent that optimistic that they will give me 60+ fps in ultra settings and 4xAA
That mentoned I´m only talkin about 3.7MP. I don´t want to ask about gaming in 4k resolution with 8MP.
My bet at the moment would be a 780ti sli, but thats 1.2k€ exclusive Waterblocks to run 1440p propper

 

People are underestimating the computational power that 4K requires, heck Dual GTX 780Tis struggle to get 60FPS on recent titles let alone this year and the next. The only way 4K will get any recognition at this point will be when Nvidia's Volta and AMD's equivalent come out due to the bandwidth improvements with stacked DRAM or even the next architecture after that.

 

The driver / SLI profile is quite good for BF4 and you should be able to get that without too much hassle (source: I run SLI 680s)

 

I think it'll be quite a while before it's mainstream, but I would assume it will become far more popular this year certainly.

 

Apparently the UI scaling works better in Win 8.1:
http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/.../15/windows-8-1-dpi-scaling-enhancements.aspx

 

Just to toss in my own two cents here, I'm running approximately 4K resolution with a trio of 24 inch Dells in SurroundVision and vertical config (3900x1920). Now I'm not running the latest and greatest games, but in my experience at that resolution you don't really need to turn on any sort of anti-aliasing, or if you do it's very minimal.

What I've found helps (and this is subjective mind you), is having a very large frame buffer, which my GTX 680 4GB provides, and I've had very enjoyable framerates along with the visuals at having a display that size.

 

Nah it will be years yet I have some old custom pc's where the buzz word was HD it was a long time before 1080p or 720p become just the norm in peoples homes.

I'm not talking about gamers or tech heads but just your average joe.

 

Can't see it going mainstream yet, number of reasons:
1) Right now to get 4k they have to compromise everything else (refresh rate, blur, etc). That's not a trade off that's worth it. Most TV's out now can only accept a 30hz 4K input.
2) Normal TV's drive the screen production and they won't go 4K for ages as there's no content, and I bet most non-geek people would tell you they can't see the difference between 1920p and 4K anyway.
3) Hardware requirements for gamers are stupid so they won't be in a hurry to update - next step for most of them is 25*16, even that requires display port if you want > 60hz.

 

The home computer market has been evolving over the past few years, away from desktop style PC's to a mobile platform - be that tablets, laptops, even phones.

For 4K to become mainstream will rely on, I think, the TV market.
This I suspect will take some time, look at HD as an example. That took several years to be classed as mainstream.

For 4K to really take off it will rely on plentiful awesome Hi Def content, TV's at a more palatable pricepoint, and a noticeable difference from standard HD.

Both Sky and Virgin have been trialling 4k, but to roll out properly it will need massive investment, new camera's and new set top boxes.

Key will be content, and the price to consume.

 

+1

Also of course the fact that streaming 4k will either not be possible for most people or just have a really low bitrate so won't look much better than 1080p, at least in the UK I would assume.

 

720p on bbc iplayer requires a Internet connection faster than the average joe can aquire. 1080 streaming is even higher. Uk and USA do not have the best internet in the world.

Streaming 4k is going to need a lot of bandwidth that most do not have.

HD has only really became a big thing in the last few years now. 4k will take just as much work to get to mainstream.

Content and price will be a key factor for most.

4k for just pcs that don't game is already pretty afordable if you need the pixels. Dells screen is cheap enough for photo enthusiasts and movie editors alike.

 

Average Joe? Sorry, but really? I called BT and got a line that syncs at 76/16mbit without any effort, and manages to stream 1080p films from iTunes, BBC iPlayer's HD and YouTube 1080p without problem. Whilst I agree that 4K streaming isn't happening any time soon, we're finally at the point where you can generally obtain a connection capable of HD streams across a lot of the UK. Of course there are blackspots, but they're smaller than they used to be.

4K screens won't sell to gamers, at least not for a few years. As rollo says, it's going to be creative professionals/enthusiasts to start with.

 

~£1200 for a pair of 4K, 24" monitors, plus another ~£1200-1600 for a pair of GFX cards to drive them; you can take your 4K tech and stick it where the sun don't shine- I'm happy with my single GFX card & dual 24" 1080p monitors cheers...

 

My guess for true mainstream: nope, not this year, not next.

I can only ever see it being useful for photo/video editing and the like (with > 28" screens)

If I'm gaming, I generally generally want a smaller screen (22-24") to keep the entire screen in the sweet spot of my vision (racing or flight sim, I might go eyefinity).

If I need to get lots of work done, I've found my ideal setup to be a 24" 1080p with a 22" 1680x1050 monitor on each side.

 

I am not completely sold on 4K, at least not for gaming, or for the desktop. Till the Oculus Rift lands I don't think anything comes close to a triple monitor setup. Gaming is great (when it works), but productivity-wise I find it much more usable than the equivalent giant screen.

Of course, on giant TV (60" and over) 4K content looks jaw-dropping, and I am going to guess that standard definition will look even crappier than it looks today. Coupled with the fact that I can't see myself, nor the general public, embracing yet another physical format, we will need to leapfrog 2-3 generations of broadband speeds to make use of this.

So I don't quite buy the "going mainstream" in 2014. Unless, as with 3D, nearly all new TVs have it by default, like it or not.

 

Maybe this has been covered but it didn't seem so as I scanned the comments above but... what is the fuss about when there is no, or very little content in 4k? Admittedly some games on the PC can be cranked up to these settings but not many and the vast majority of games are not developed for the PC demographic with even the new consoles not running at true 1080p. Then there is the movie and TV industries, which have only just embraced 1080p so surely with larger 4k screens the content just gets scaled up and once again looks fuzzy the larger you get?
I can see the benefits from a professional aspect but as an entertainment device I fail to see the benefits... So please feel free to explain how and why content looks better on the higher res screens.