Blogs AMD and Nvidia need to step up to the 4K challenge

Those of you thinking 1080p is a suitable resolution for a productivity desktop clearly aren't doing the production that demands a higher resolution or more working space.

That's fine, but there are plenty of others who can gain serious benefit from higher resolution screens.

 

Being one of those people, I understand there's a huge variety of productive tasks. As was brought to my attention earlier, graphics and CAD are great reasons to want UHD displays. If you're a security guard and need to check multiple cameras, I'm sure it's great there too. There ARE practical uses for every niche.

I was thinking more along the lines of things largely involving text and the poor graphical scalability of most modern software. In the case of software that does happen to scale properly, very often the only benefit of a higher resolution is just simply getting a smoother image, such as 3D modeling. I wouldn't consider a 4K screen to be worth the price so an un-rendered model looks a little less jagged. If I wanted to see the finer details, I can freely move the camera however I want. 4K screens have a very specific set of practical purposes. Everywhere else it just becomes a luxury and in some scenarios, an inconvenience.

All that being said, I have nothing against the proliferation of 4K+ screens, but I think people are making a bigger fuss out of it than it needs to be. We live in a society where more=better, and sometimes we don't stop to think that better is relative and there is more than 1 way to improve something.

 

I was using 1080p on 13" screen for programming. I don't think 2160p on 28-32" is that much different. Especially considering laptops are usually viewed from 40-50cm distance, monitors from ~60-70cm distance.

 

I'll concede this may be true. But does that extra overhead account for the disparity between the cost of an x80 and the same gen Titan?

 

more= better, please don't dissuade people, People purchasing loads of electronic gear they don't really need pays my bills

 

I wish I could get a huge high res screen at work, but management disagrees, so I'll be trapped forever in bezel hell of multiple screens.

 

I may be crazy and a little late to this (been busy) but I'm running damn near 4K resolution at home (3900x1920) playing Eve Online and several other more modern games at max settings and no framerate problems. And I'm doing this with a 680 4GB card.

Either I'm missing something, or something fishy is going on...

 

Sure, I've no issue with that. I'm a SQL developer, and I certainly appreciate the benefit of having a high desktop resolution (you wouldn't believe the depths I had to go to in work to justify a 1080p monitor). But running a bunch of Windows applications in 4K and running games in 4K are vastly different workloads. Hell, my GTX 760 could manage running a bunch of desktop applications in 4K (4096 * 2160).

 

You are not alone, it is a size issue for me too. I have had an Xbox 360 for a number of years but, have hardly used it because the controller is much to small and awkward to use and yet there is no alternative available from Microsoft. For PC use I was able, after much research, to find the perfect mouse and keyboard for me. If Microsoft made the controller in small/medium/large sizes, I might have bought many games, instead of just one.

Take note Microsoft and Sony, not all gamers have medium sized hands. I can press Q and # at the same time with one hand and I'm not exceptionally big (6' 1" tall) but, your controllers are too small to use. My Qpad MK-85 keyboard and Func MS-3 Rev2 mouse are just right though so, no Xbox games, PC games only for me.

 

And with said words millions of 'gamers' playing at 1080 admit they are not worthy to compare themselves against your greatness... they all start crying in one sobbing global voice... and you can feel lovely and smug.

 

I couldn't care less.

BTW, my eyesight doesn't support high pixel density display use. The same applies to many older, but not just older, gamers who's eyes are not as good as they once were.

 

Why are you people still feeding this troll?

He's fine with you ignoring him, you know. You'd actually be doing him a solid favour, because there's no wifi under his bridge and the poor bugger has to drag his fat ass up out of the ditch to get a signal more often, if you're going to give him regular attention. Have a heart.

 

I've never actually seen him respond to the responses to his trolls, he just drops in, makes himself feel better for having a tiny real life penis, and then disappears for a few weeks - reappearing only to repeat the act in another thread.

 

FFS, I told you already - no wifi.

The banks of that ditch are f***in steep, dude!

 

I don't think people realize how difficult it is to push out more and more advanced technology. With the impending lack of node shrinkages due to the physical difficulty of making transistors work with such a dense proposition.

Sure, Nvidia/AMD could probably release more and more chips, but I still find it frankly amazing there still are advances being made in terms of performance. Not to mention that 2560x1440 and 2560x1600 are beginning to be proliferated at an increasingly rapid pace. It's actually amazing given the relative pixel densities of higher resolutions.

At any rate, I don't think there's any need for a rush. 4K displays still can't have content transmitted in an efficient way through normal broadcast. Hell, most cable broadcasts are still 1080i with some exclusive broadcasts (costing significantly more) displaying in 1080p. If anything, until broadcast technology reaches a point where 1080p is the standard or 1440p->1600p is a standard, 4K as a standard format will take a while.

That said, 4K will be useful since now content may begin to be made in 1440 or 1600p as a stopgap. But again, production costs.

 

I think 1440 and 1600p will remain niche at best. So much focus has been put on 4K that the guy in the street has heard of it. He might not fully understand it, but he's aware of it; just like 1080p

I tell people my monitor is 1600p and I get blank looks, they understand that it ends in p and is a bigger number than 1080, but they've never heard of it. Good luck asking them what WQXGA is.

I think there are already more WQXGA tablets than there have been monitors.

It is a shame, because a harder push for 1440p would have driven down production costs long ago and made it a consumer standard resolution.

 

They sure got you troll

 

You're probably right to be honest.

The problem with 4K as of right now is that it's prohibitively expensive to store as a format. As in, the data constraints are still a problem in terms of transmitting it reliably and stably over any medium. While one could ostensibly use Blu-Ray as a medium, I'm not convinced that it will be adequate for providing quality 4K content. The awkward thing is that 1600p or 1440p as a stopgap in larger format panels could scale well past 55". Which seems to be the cutoff for 1080 in my eyes.

That said, right now processing power and a viable medium is really what's stopping mass proliferation of 4K. Hell even 1600p video is no joke in terms of space taken.

 

making something is 4k capable, in the gpu market is silly if they cant output it at the hz their consumers want.

until connectivity is improved to support 4k connectivity at a 200hz refresh rate then its not worth the gpu manufactures time.

What I don't understand is, why don't they just make trunked HDMI?