Gadgetory

4k display pricing is dropping so rapidly like it's only 250 to 350 bucks for an ultra HD monitor or TV these days but it takes a lot of graphics power to drive them so how should you do it the Xbox one X is being built by Microsoft as true 4k gaming Sony is calling their experienced native 4k land pro and NVIDIA shocked us by reaching out about doing their first-ever sponsored video with us about their flavor of 4k gaming which they're calling ultimate 4k let's find out what they mean by that okay so why should you trust an nvidia sponsored video about their 4k gaming solution because they have absolutely no reason to be su no matter which team you bat for there are a couple of things that any objective person can agree on about the gtx 1080 TI one it's kind of pricey and two it's the fastest 4k gaming card on the market and these are both things that would be stupid to try to lie about because they can be measured objectively we'll be looking at four games on five different platforms the fastest console today the Xbox one X a modern gaming PC equipped with a GTX 1080 Ti and three more older gaming PC's equipped with the GPU ghosts of Black Friday's past let's start by getting the image quality comparisons out of the way they're an important consideration but they are also kind of apples to oranges since the Xbox one X costs less than a gtx 1080i by itself let's start with forza this game runs smoothly at 60 frames per second on the xbox 1x thanks to its use of dynamic quality controls that actually adjust image quality as you whip around on the track it's a really impressive optimization technique that is actually enabled by default on the PC as well but if you have the horsepower you can turn it off and it will reveal some extras that would otherwise be absent like Tufts of grass rather than texture work and higher resolution textures like you can see here at the edges of the track shadow of war meanwhile shows that while the Xbox port does once again a really good job of delivering solid visual clarity at 4k the PC version unsurprisingly has the capability of showing more detail and using higher resolution textures and as we'll see shortly it can do this while maintaining a much smoother frame rate okay neat then but I think that a lot of people would agree that at this kind of total system price difference more detailed grass is a pretty tuft cell and that would be fair but Nvidia actually doesn't make any money if you buy a new CPU and motherboard or whatever they only sell graphics cards so why don't we look at it a different way what if you upgraded your old PC with one of these to answer that question first we need to see how exactly your old rig is holding up right now so we tested our games at 1080p high 4k low and 4k high noting any adjustments that we made to the presets this way you can decide for yourself whether the difference between Full HD and 4k or low details versus high details is worth it for you right away we see a huge advantage in Forza 7 for our current generation 1080 TI system with our 4k low 97th percentile minimum actually above the previous flagship 980 TI is average at 4k Ultra it actually manages up to a hundred and twenty frames per second meaning that on next generation high refresh rate 4k displays you could see even more smoothness Middle Earth shadow of war shows us another huge gain for the 1080 TI over its predecessors even on our older systems with 4k ultra winding up at just shy of 60 FPS on average and a very playable especially with the g-sync display 97th percentile low of just over 40 on two pub G we've got a closer race here at 1080p as the bottleneck is mainly down to poor CPU optimization moving on to 4k we've got great performance at low and then when we look at high details still great performance that is some weak CPU optimization destiny 2 shows a pretty familiar looking graph with 1080p performance predictably better but when we step things up to 4k we find that this is the second game of the day to not only average higher than 60 frames per second but claimed a 97th percentile of 60 as well solid now let's upgrade those old systems if you're a 1080p high detail gamer the CPU bottlenecking is real here though you should bear in mind that we didn't overclock any of these older systems and you could expect significant performance improvements in some cases as for our 4k results well this is where Nvidia's story here gets pretty interesting since you're generally GPU bound when you run at high resolution and high details our last generation 4790k performs basically on par with our 7700 K which is architectural II very similar to the vaporware six core 8700 K and then even more impressively going all the way back to a core i5 2500 K this was a 200 ish dollar CPU from 2011 we saw performance drops as small as 5 to 10 percent when upgrading to a brand new top-of-the-line card so what this means is that our gaming experience is very similar whether we buy a brand new system or retrofit an old PC bringing the 1080 TI's higher 4k image quality and performance much closer in price to a 4k gaming console so there you have it the path to 4k have been laid out before you what do you guys think would you pony up for a brand new machine would you dumpster dive for a secondary box or upgrade your existing one with a shiny new graphics card or is a new game console at the top of your wish list this year let us know in the comments below so thanks for watching if you guys dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description and while you're down there you can check out our merch store which has cool shirts like this one as well as our community honestly man this video was like we spent so much time on the screen cap and on measuring the frame rates because even though Nvidia does almost no sponsored stuff with us we knew that if we got even like one thing wrong you guys were going to tear us apart and so huh glad that's over