Gadgetory

excellent hey everyone welcome back to Pauls hardware today I'm very happy to be bringing you part 2 of my 4k video and today's video is all about are we actually ready for 4k right now monitors like this Asus PQ 3 2 1 Q are becoming a little bit more available this one's still quite expensive but I'm starting to see some come in at the sub $1,000 price points but do we actually have the graphics or GPU horsepower to back that up and push that many pixels so that's what today's video is all about I have a bunch of benchmarks I want to share with you guys I want to jump right into that but first we need to establish some criteria what is that what exactly does it mean to be ready for 4k so I have two points that I'm trying to hit one is 30 frames per second and we'll call that playable because I know a lot of folks Steve I'm looking at you would not even accept 30 frames per second as a playable framerate when it comes to PC gaming and then we have 60 frames per second which is good good framerate and if we can achieve more than 60 frames per second it means we can achieve very playable games at 4k resolutions and hopefully we can even do that with all of the eye candy turned up to that end I have a slew of video cards that I've been testing out we have the Radeon r9 290x we also have the GTX 780 Ti and we also have the gtx titan black some really really powerful cards and i'm testing one and two-way configurations with all of those cards so let's jump into the hardware and see what i'm using for today's tests the test bed is one you might be familiar with it's running on an Intel Core i7 249 60 X at 4.5 gigahertz motherboard is an Asus Rampage 4 formula we have 16 gigs of g-scale trying to X 2400 speed memory that's 4 by 4 gigs quad channel we also have a SanDisk Ultra Plus 256 gig SSD rules well Hercules 1600 power supply and Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit and as previously mentioned testing on the Asus PQ 3 2 1 q 30 1.5 inch 4k 3840 by 2160 monitor and I am testing these at 30 Hertz just for the purposes of the benchmarks I know 60 Hertz is available on this monitor but it needs to do multi stream transport mode which means it actually treats it as two separate monitors and to remove that from the equation when you're benchmarking the refresh rate is less important than the actual frame rate but the graphics card able to put out moving on to the video cards I had a decision to make here and I decided to go with overclocking everything because that's what I would do if I was trying around 4k and also if you watch part 1 of this video I use the Krakken G tens from NZXT to water pool my 290 X's to give them some better performance since they seem to deal with some throttling issues here and there but I was able to boost them up to 1550 speed on the memory as well as about 1155 megahertz on the GPU clock with two cards and eleven seventy-five megahertz on the GPU clock with one card the Titan blacks are absolutely beasts when it comes to overclocking out of the box even with the stock cooler we are actually running at 1218 megahertz GPU core clock and also above the memory up to 1850 the GTX 780 Ti is I was able to overclock just a smidge more 12 19 megahertz on the GPU core clock is what they're running at and the memory there again running at 1850 and now I think we can actually just dive in and take a look at the benchmarks and I'll talk you guys through these so we know what's going on first we have 3d mark 2013 the fire strike demos and of course I start a 4k video with non 4k benchmarks but anyway I've had it stuck taking black numbers not overclocked here so you get some comparison numbers these are synthetics but just look how those overclocked 290x cards actually beat out the GTX Titan why at stock pretty impressive 3d mark 11 is next and I guess I'm a completionist so I included this as well excellent performance showing by the 290 X is here and this is the beginning of a trend if you're looking at the Nvidia cards the overclocked GTX 780 Ti is beat the overclocked tanking blacks and this is only when memory is a de factor and more in the just a moment next we have image in heaven 4.0 this is actual 4k of 3840 by 2160 it's humbling to run this type of test with this type of hardware you can see the frame rates are quite low this is at 8x AAA which again is silly at 4k but it really does bring the GPUs to this means and shows just what kind of horsepower you're going to need to run this resolution with Max and eye candy I want to mention that heaven 4.0 does not use more than three gigs of VRAM in these tests which gives you the predictable ordering conceivable results mutagen Valle 1.0 is next also running at 4k look just how close that 290 X is coming to the gtx cards Valley actually will push past the three gigabytes of VRAM usage and it's actually at a specific point in the run when the rain starts to fall and it really chugs on the 780 Ti is with the three gigs of DRAM right there and it crashed the run with them several times hence you can see the low minimum frames per second with the 7080 eyes but these Titan blacks did pull ahead thanks to their six gigs of VRAM Metro last light is next and this is an actual real game excellent all of the single card solutions actually hit playable 30 frames per second plus frame rates on this test and we're still looking to break the 60 though metro always has low minimum frame rates I don't know why BioShock Infinite is next in here I want to point out that the 14 series beta drivers from AMD that I'm using do have some throttling problems still the propped up pretty bad in the BioShock Infinite test so you can see that performance there's not as great but excellent showing by the Nvidia cards easily held over 60 frames per second here moving on to Crysis 3 you'll note I added another set of benchmarks because I was wondering what turning down some settings might do and aliasing is probably number one choice since it has less impact for fail I want to point out I did notice a difference going from anti-aliasing to not anti-aliasing so test take Crysis 3 at 4x a a as well as 0 a a got a nice boost from turning off anti-aliasing but you would still need a two way configuration with all of these cards in order to hit playable and that's just goes CryEngine it meaning far cry 3 is another game that's saw significant throttling with the r9 290x cards hence the fourth performance by those also this is a game that used more than three gigabytes of vram when running at 4k hence the really low minimum frames per second on the 780ti s and the titan black speeding these 780ti is in this test turning off anti-aliasing also put the two-way nvidia cards into the acceptable 60 frames per second range so next win their battlefield 4 is next I saved this one for last because it's a popular game for benchmarking and I am impressed that all of these single parts in these tests hit 30 frames per second or more all the 2-way configurations hit 60 frames per second or more the 290x cards still trailed the Nvidia cards in these tests so I made kind of a last-minute decision to do some mantel testing so we're going to throw that into the mix in the next set of benchmarks now quick note here about benchmarking with mantle fraps uses DirectX 11 so you can't use fraps contestant Mansell I use the thing called a frame latency analyzer calculator a bit of software that I come I'll put the link to this in the description if you guys are interested it's from a Czech Lipsyte so Google Translate as you print but I use this to parse the frame time log from battlefield port and it provides a comparable frame rate for comparison so it adjusts your actual frame rate for things like stuttering and scene variability and gives you a copper bowl frame rate output stuttering was negligible here with the single cards the two way configurations of 4k still produce stuttering according to these tests mantle definitely makes a difference so although it's not as significant as in some systems some test you might have seen online of a more CPU bound it still gave the 290x cards less stuttering and enough of a post to win out over the Nvidia cards it's hard to say if this is impactful in the bigger picture though when you're talking about mantle unless you really really really like playing battlefield 4 and be almost exclusive so now let's do some post benchmark analysis and let's start off by talking about vram because I have the 780 eyes with 3 gigabytes the 290 X's with 4 gigabytes and the Titan blacks that have 6 gigabytes basically I saw a big improvement going from 3 gigabytes to 4 gigabytes since you can definitely go past 3 gigabytes with a lot of these tests so going with something that has four or more definitely will lead to a better experience with 4k gaming also why did I choose this particular hardware these particular cards from AMD and NVIDIA well I wanted to choose the cards that gave the best performance possible from team red and team green I also wanted to choose a configuration that was at least somewhat reasonable when it comes to cost the three-way and forward configurations just tend to throw money at the problem and I know this is still very expensive solution but going from a single card to 2-way configuration made the most sense to me because that's where you get the biggest boost after 3 & 4 white cards tend to drop off when it comes to performance a little bit more there's also quite a few variables that go into testing of this nature and there's definitely other things I could have done first off for the 290x cards with the NZXT Cragen's i could have put some VRM heatsinks on those and actually tried to kind of make some of my own by chopping up some aluminum heat sinks from some old video cards decided not to go with those basically because the 290 X's are loners and I need to bring them back to work and I would have needed to use some more permanent thermal adhesive on those to get them to stick so if you are going with that solution definitely get some VRM vrm heat sinks because the 290x VRMs we're hitting 90 to 95 degrees Celsius even with not extensively long benchmark runs and long term you would want to keep those cooled also temperatures I didn't talk about too much so I guess I can talk about that here even with the Nvidia cards being overclocked and set the temperature target to 90 or 95 degrees Celsius they were still only hitting 75 to 80 the 290 X's were also only hitting about 45 to 50 with the water so definitely a lot better cooling performance there and led to some increased overclocking although the geforce cards were overclocking just fine even with these stock heat sinks there is tons of other sightings I could have used I could have gone with mid or her high settings instead of ultra I could have gone with various different anti-aliasing or other post-processing effects basically just comes down to time I did not have time to test every possible variable but hopefully the anti-aliasing on and off tests gave you guys a little bit better idea and with any of these tests you can always take your game adjust your settings down until you hit a playable framerate with whatever configuration you happen to be using there was some other hardware I could have used the one I really would have wanted to have tested out would be the AMD r9 290 because it's very reasonably priced card compared to these other ones and definitely could also be a bit more of a budget solution budget quote unquote if you're looking for 4k monitor solutions so hopefully maybe we can get some 290s in the future we don't have any too 90s at the office right now so I wasn't able to test those now the one other thing that I was really almost going to do I just ran at a time and I wanted to get this video up this weekend was when testing the AMD cards I was using the 14.3 betas I could have gone back to the 13 dot X X the wickel certified drivers which don't seem to have as much throttling issues I really just ran out of time there as well but I tried to point out to you guys when throttling was occurring or at least when it seemed to be affecting the benchmarks a lot so hopefully that is sufficient there but again with the 14 dot whatever drivers once they are wickles certified hopefully that will be cleared up and maybe we can see even a bit more performance out of the 290 X's and now at last I've rambled long enough so let's talk verdicts are we ready for 4k right now no okay I'll say no if you're adhering to the PC gamer standard which is 60 frames per second or higher and everything turned up to max all of the eye candy that's generally what a lot of people like to go for when it talks when you're talking about PC gaming and high-end gaming configurations if you're looking for that you're really not going to be able to get at least with the triple-a titles that are using a lot of graphics horsepower it's just not there yet I think we're going to need to wait till next generation of graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA and then possible other solutions like maybe more mantle support in some games or perhaps other solutions that might somehow give us increased frame rates basically hardware we're looking for increased hardware performance but I'll say yes we are ready for 4k gaming one is if you're ok with 30 Hertz which heck consoles gamers use it that's that's that's ok 2 is if you're okay with sacrificing some of the eye candy some of the post-processing effects anti-aliasing and that type of thing to bring your frame rate up to an achievable reasonable amount so that you can turn vsync on and play it 60 frames per second or at 30 frames per second so if you're ok with that then yeah you can 4k game right now also I have to point out again these are expensive configurations so you need to have some some cash on hand right now it's definitely not a budget option but again hopefully as a hardware is released this year more monitors more GPUs from from the GPU makers we might see increased performance and more accessibility trickling down for now 1080 is still fantastic to play at so if you don't quite have the scratch to get together a 4k setup just go for 1080 I think you'll be you'll be just fine but lastly I wanted to point out a quick warning and that is that if you are going for 4k check the monitor that you're using because 30 Hertz and 60 Hertz monitors are both available there's a lot more 30 Hertz ones that are currently out there if you want 60 Hertz natively it's got to have DisplayPort 1.2 it's got to have a video controller that can actually push a 4k signal at 60 Hertz rather than what's in the Asus for example it uses two separate controllers and simulates two screens and definitely DisplayPort 1.2 or HDMI 2.0 once that becomes more widely available but that's gonna wrap it up for this video guys I really hope you've enjoyed it I spent a lot of time getting all this stuff together so I'm edifying content I surely hope that you guys have learned something and maybe gotten a better idea of whether or not you're ready to jump into 4k right now or maybe put it off another year it's up to you but let me know in the comments what you think what I could have done differently what I could have done better love to hear that of course leave me some feedback maybe a thumbs up if you really enjoyed this video and we'll see you all next time I'm Paul's hardware