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synthtel2 wrote:

Pancake wrote:

If you wanna game at all, you wanna game with da fruits. The quality levels dialled up all nice and high. Otherwise why bother?

Because the eye candy isn't actually why I'm here. If it isn't still fun without the eye candy, it isn't actually a good game.

Of course. But it's not either or.

Me, I buy a new graphics card for truly epic games. I bought a 6950 for Tomb Raider (TressFX!!!). Then a GTX 970 for Grand Theft Auto V (the greatest game ever in the history of mankind). And now I don't game cos there's nothing worth playing after GTA V.

Pancake wrote:

If you wanna game at all, you wanna game with da fruits. The quality levels dialled up all nice and high. Otherwise why bother? Sorry, your GTX780 is decidedly low-spec for modern games.

I guess we can agree to disagree here. Some of my favorite games are quite ugly in terms of graphics quality. The gameplay is what matters. Visual fidelity is nice, but not a requirement.

And yes - I know it's low-spec. It's a machine I rarely use for gaming, and when I get that itch, it serves its purpose beautifully.

I game on my laptop with a weak MX150 in it as well. Modern titles, 1080p, details turned down till it's smooth. The games are still fun even when they're not as pretty as they can be. I grew up on 386s and DOS, everything these days is pretty.

Certainly, having a ton of graphics power beats not having a ton of graphics power. Discussions like this just inevitably contain a lot of statements like "4K is pointless without a 1080 Ti", at which point I've got to wonder what's being smoked.

synthtel2 wrote:

Certainly, having a ton of graphics power beats not having a ton of graphics power. Discussions like this just inevitably contain a lot of statements like "4K is pointless without a 1080 Ti", at which point I've got to wonder what's being smoked.

Indeed.

It's nice, but not a requirement.

I've had more fun with Factorio, Puyo Puyo Tetris, and Jamestown than a lot of 3d high-fidelity games. There are a lot of modern low-spec games. Consider Clicker Heroes 2, you don't need much specs and yet its a $30 bestseller on Steam right now.

A gamer needs to ensure that they get a GPU good enough for the games they play. But if they stick with 2d platformers (and yes: good modern ones exist, like Cuphead) or other simple-graphics games, then they simply don't need to spend more than $200 on a GPU.

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There's certainly something to be said about hyper-realistic games, especially good ones like "The Witcher". But even in the great scheme of things, the games that have a lot of personality (ie: Grand Theft Auto 5) never really needed high specs to run well. And as far as I can tell, the entire point of GTA 5 is to find crazy issues with the physics engine, install stupid mods, and laugh at the results.

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Anyway, highly visual games and story-based games aren't really my cup of tea. So I generally am able to avoid the latest-and-greatest graphical packages. But some people do dream about Star Citizen with 8k textures running on dual 4k monitors or something crazy... if for nothing else but accomplishing something that few others have done. I certainly know more than a few people who view gaming as a way to push their system to the limits... and then just run a low-spec game like Overwatch right afterwards.

Something I've always wondered about is how 1080p looks on a 4K screen? e.g. If I boot up the game with the newest coolest graphics and run it at 1080p on my 4K monitor, will it look the same as it would have on a native 1080p screen? The 4K (3840x2160) is exactly 1080p * 2, so there should just be 4 pixels in place of 1 right? Or are there problems with this?

dragontamer5788 wrote:

I've had more fun with Factorio

Oh man, that one was addictive.
I think I racked up 100hrs in a week of vacation time. Total time played 416hrs.

TurtlePerson2 wrote:

Something I've always wondered about is how 1080p looks on a 4K screen? e.g. If I boot up the game with the newest coolest graphics and run it at 1080p on my 4K monitor, will it look the same as it would have on a native 1080p screen? The 4K (3840x2160) is exactly 1080p * 2, so there should just be 4 pixels in place of 1 right? Or are there problems with this?

1080p will look less sharp than it would look on a native display.
You can try it out with older games that support low res on any LCD by halving the resolution.

For 1080p that would be 960x540.

if the 4K screen is 32" or lager, 1080 will look horrible.

Waco wrote:

Turn settings down and breathe easy. Honestly, the obsession with "MAX ULTRA KILLAH SETTINGS" is somewhat pointless and a great way to spend a lot of money.

This. Keep in mind that most benchmark settings are targeting two things: 1) Stressing the video cards, or 2) Stressing the CPUs.

For real-life use, you can do one of three things:
1) Get a 4K monitor and run with no AA (really, there aren't any noticeable jaggies on a 4k display, that's kind of the whole point),
2) Get a 4K monitor that downsamples properly 4->1 and run games at 1080p/1K full-screen, or
3) Get a native 1080p/1K 144Hz monitor and enjoy high framerates while also saving money.

Vhalidictes wrote:

1) Get a 4K monitor and run with no AA (really, there aren't any noticeable jaggies on a 4k display, that's kind of the whole point)

Antialiasing is more than just jaggies. Its also about correcting Moire Patterns.

A more practical example is this image:

.

The Moire Pattern on the left is not-realistic and fake looking. The blurriness of the right gets rid of the pattern and more fundamentally tricks the brain into seeing the pattern extend out to infinity.

TurtlePerson2 wrote:

Something I've always wondered about is how 1080p looks on a 4K screen? e.g. If I boot up the game with the newest coolest graphics and run it at 1080p on my 4K monitor, will it look the same as it would have on a native 1080p screen? The 4K (3840x2160) is exactly 1080p * 2, so there should just be 4 pixels in place of 1 right? Or are there problems with this?

It looks exactly like a 1080p monitor at that point - pixel doubling is incredibly easy. Anyone who says it looks blurry has their monitor/tv/graphics card set incorrectly and somewhere in the chain something is doing interpolation. That said, interpolation, if it doesn't add much latency, can look good for certain types of games.

Short answer - it looks exactly like a 1080p screen of the same size if you configure things properly, and can look better (subjectively) if you choose to enable interpolation.


EDIT: As for AA at 4K - you do want it, but you can generally get away with the weaker types since individual pixels tend to be smaller. I run TXAA/FXAA when I can since it covers most simple moire patterns nicely.

I'd be curious to know how you turn off interpolation.

I've used dozens of GPUs and screens and never found a way to disable interpolation. I even started at whinge thread about it on here at some point....

The only time I've seen the option to do pure pixel doubling without interpolation blurring was on an old (beige old) Toshiba laptop.

Chrispy_ wrote:

I'd be curious to know how you turn off interpolation.

I've used dozens of GPUs and screens and never found a way to disable interpolation. I even started at whinge thread about it on here at some point....

The only time I've seen the option to do pure pixel doubling without interpolation blurring was on an old (beige old) Toshiba laptop.

All GPUs have scalers which you can use instead of the monitor's scaler, but I have no idea whether you can actually tune it to remove interpolation. There is an option to enable GPU scaling in the AMD drivers, for example, but I haven't actually tried it.

ptsant wrote:

Chrispy_ wrote:

I'd be curious to know how you turn off interpolation.

I've used dozens of GPUs and screens and never found a way to disable interpolation. I even started at whinge thread about it on here at some point....

The only time I've seen the option to do pure pixel doubling without interpolation blurring was on an old (beige old) Toshiba laptop.

All GPUs have scalers which you can use instead of the monitor's scaler, but I have no idea whether you can actually tune it to remove interpolation. There is an option to enable GPU scaling in the AMD drivers, for example, but I haven't actually tried it.

I've used GPU scaling in preference to display scaling for as long as the graphics drivers have offered that option for one, absolutely critical reason; Unlike the display's scaler, the GPU scaler does not add input lag.

I've never seen any options to disable the filtering; not on AMD nor on Nvidia. At non-integer scaling values, obviously you want the filtering but at 720p on 4K (3:1), 720p on 1440p (2:1) and 1080p on 4K (2:1) I would love to get unfiltered pixel doubling. Waco seems to imply its easy but I'm either missing a trick or he's mistaken. I'm hoping he's not mistaken since pixel doubling without interpolation filtering would be awesome!

I guess I oversimplified a bit (I was tired and in a bad mood before) - I lucked out with my TV/monitor because it scales a 1080p "PC" input without any interpolation. I just set my native output to 1920x1080 on my desktop and the monitor doesn't do any interpolation. I thought this was pretty common but it seems to not be after digging a little bit. Sorry for being abrasive.

So yes - I overstated a bit, I'm happy to admit fault there. I wish you could choose the scaling type / disable filtering in drivers, it seems to damn simple to do. I wonder if they haven't done it because the scaler is a hardware component...

auxy wrote:

I used to play stuff at >100 FPS in 4K reso on a 4K60 monitor, and also in 3840x2160 @ 120Hz using Nvidia DSR on a 1920x1080 @ 144Hz monitor, which is MORE demanding than native 4K. That was with a GTX1080Ti. Now I have an RX 580 8GB and it actually plays tons of games just fine in 4K resolution. Lately I've been playing a lot of 20XX with RAGEPRO in co-op, and I play at 120 FPS using Radeon Enhanced Sync in 4K resolution using AMD VSR.

Kretschmer wrote:

I also own a 1080Ti and your performance numbers don't add up to my own experiences (or every site's benchmarking) unless you're turning your settings wayyyyy down - let alone a 580@4K resolutionLOL. Most people think it's "dumb" to up the resolution while turning off all the features, dialing down the textures, etc. Sure you can "run" titles at 4K, but most people are trying to optimize the subjective quality while maintaining a smooth frame rate.

You don't have to turn everything down. You hardly have to turn anything down. Have you even tried? I mean, what do you want? Do you want me to make a video with my RX 580 playing Warframe in 4K? How about Dark Souls III? What would satisfy you?