TR Forums

Hello All,
I'd like to see a TR article, or forum post, related to gaming at a 4K resolution. I currently game at 1920 x 1080 on a 27" monitor. It looks like 4K, 27" monitors are becoming affordable but I am unsure what the experience is like. Some of the things I'd like to see are:

Screenshots and Performance Numbers @ 1920x1080 NoAA, FXAA, MSAA 2X, 4X, 8X
Screenshots and Performance Numbers @ 3840x2160 NoAA, FXAA, MSAA 2X, 4X, 8X

The AA options for 4K are probably overkill; the few screenshots I've seen are gorgeous but it would be nice to know which, if any, AA methods are preferable to further eliminate jaggies.

I don't think TR's covered it yet, but I think a shortbread or daily news article linked to another site that tested gaming about 12 months ago at 4K. I vagueley remember that you could juuuuust about get 60fps in Crysis3 with 4x 680's in SLI, so it's possible that even a Titan-Z would struggle, and it's not as if Crysis3 is a brand new game, it's been around for a while now.....

Since Crysis3 uses postprocess AA (FXAA I think) I don't think AA has a big impact on the framerates - the problem is that rendering at 4K is pretty much exactly four times the amount of work as rendering at 1080p, so if you were getting 60fps with your 1080p setup you'll get 15fps at 4K. Think of your graphics card(s) as having a "Megapixels/second" throughput: the more megapixels you render per frame, the fewer frames you'll get per second. Once you get into high resolutions, the correlation between resolution and framerate is pretty linear, which is why 1080p is the sweet spot with today's midrange GPUs and you need either multiple cards or a high-end card to push 1440p and above at max settings in some games now.

The benchmarks in the R9 295 X2 review were done at 4K resolution.

... with a two-tile monitor rather than a single tile display.

I honestly believe 2xMSAA + FXAA is all you'll need for 4K. Maybe Temporal SMAA, but I haven't tried that yet, since Watch Dogs and Ubisoft depress me too much.

Crysis 3 looks absolutely perfect to me at 1440p + 4xSMAA, which I believe is 2xMSAA + SMAA.

jessterman21 wrote:

I honestly believe 2xMSAA + FXAA is all you'll need for 4K. Maybe Temporal SMAA, but I haven't tried that yet, since Watch Dogs and Ubisoft depress me too much.

Crysis 3 looks absolutely perfect to me at 1440p + 4xSMAA, which I believe is 2xMSAA + SMAA.

I wouldn't throw various AA modes at a wall just to see what sticks- what's really needed is a DPI-aware shader-based AA scheme that can perform the AA needed at the shader level as well as highlight 'zones' for hardware (SSAA, MSAA) AA processing.

But yeah, 2xMSAA + FXAA usually works; I believe that this is what I use for BF4 at 2560x1600, and I'm only running a single GTX670 2GB at the moment. It's not perfect, and I'm not running top settings, but it does still generally look great and play great.