Gadgetory

his 4k gaming actually dumb and full disclosure I don't play my PC games in 4k I play one in 1440p we'll talk about why here in a second but I wanted to make this video in direct response to one of Lana's tech tips that was uploaded back in November of 2018 and received a lot of mixed feedback due in large part to its conclusion that 4k gaming was in fact dumb I mean the title kind of says it all so here is our own testing and our own response privacy calm is the easy way to shop securely online by creating virtual debit cards tied securely to your bank account you can even download the browser extension and let it autofill card information with a single click get started for free and earn a five dollar credit by clicking the link below today so does 4k gaming make sense linus starts out by mentioning the level of detail human eye can discern and that's roughly one sixtieth of an arcsecond at least that's the general consensus and there's an equation for this just plug and chug a bunch of simple variables and boom outcomes your result so the closest you could sit in theory to a 24 inch 1080p panel without seeing individual pixels is about 3 feet or 91 centimeters you can test this yourself that metrics pretty spot-on for me I've linked the website down below by the way in case you want to play around with it a bit now let's bump the resolution to a 4k and keep screen size the same by the way 4k is 3840 by 2160 in this case the closes you can now sit is roughly 1.4 feet again pretty spot-on for me but there's a problem with these figures you see they don't take into account other perceived aspects of a quality image things like sharpness and contrast and they do play a huge role so at this point lettuce jumps into anti-aliasing this technology takes neighboring pixels and kind of blends them together and it can make a display seem like it's higher resolution than it actually is we've got a dedicated video on what that is and how it works right here but in a nutshell AAA works by blurring edges and smoothing out rough and angled or curved surfaces depicted by square pixels check out these side by sides of the GT a benchmark in 1080p the left has absolutely no AAA at all the right has a a maxed out at times 8 both runs are locked to 60 Hertz by the way see a difference so a a really matters when pixels are noticeable and in theory if we had an infinite number of them packed into a display AAA would be redundant since all images would appear perfectly shaped the problem is we use square pixels and when those pixels are perceived as very large chunks of light and that's when you start noticing rough edges to test this we grabbed three gaming monitors with the major sixteen by nine resolutions and with each of them locked to sick he hurts with anti-aliasing turned on in our games we want to see if our test subjects can tell the difference Linus's argument is that anti-aliasing makes a big enough difference in games to justify a lower resolution and proves this by sampling the opinion of three other members of his team they could for the most part discern the 4k panel from the lower res counterparts even from three or so feet away which technically violates the equation we referenced earlier and that's because perceived sharpness is still a thing but linus at this point shifts the argument entirely to refresh rate stating that all three panels were around $500 and that the 1080p in 1440p units packed 240 and 144 Hertz refresh rates respectively and I've been a longtime believer that refresh rate makes a way bigger difference to the gaming experience than resolution so we're gonna get doom running on all three of these and see what people prefer to play on in a fast-paced shooter so it was sort of a bait-and-switch here the basis of his argument was that the one sixtieth of an arc second metric he mentioned at the beginning of the video is kind of out the door we're talking about refresh rates and not resolution that's those two have nothing really to do with each other although they are nice to have both in the same package and I think that that was lysis intention all along I think we can agree that people have different levels of acceptable visual clarity and just because some equation says things have to be a certain way that doesn't actually mean they work out that way in real life ask anyone who's used a 4k panel and that will tell you that going back down to a 1080p panel is no bueno I mean even if that person sits 3 feet away at which point you technically couldn't even tell the difference between 1080p and 1440p that same person will notice when the panels resolution changes especially when the image displayed is static but Linus is right about gaming the fast-paced nature of most scenes is enough to draw the human eye more to the smoothness aspect rather than the resolution that was the point of his video after all was 4k and gaming whether or not those two were viable now refresh rates above 60 Hertz are not possible to depict by a youtube I could in theory slow down clips at the point where a 240 FPS clip still looks great at 60fps compared to 15 fps at 25% playback speed but this would be an unrealistic comparison so this isn't an argument defend on this channel though high refresh rate gamers already know exactly what I'm talking about so instead I'll stick with the visual argument and try to defend it as best I can so here's what I did I stuck with GTA 5 to keep things consistent and ran to different passes first up was 4k medium settings for the most part no anti-aliasing no advanced graphics it's what you're seeing here things look pretty great but the in-game detail had to be dropped in order to maintain an acceptable frame rate by the way the computer running these tests is sporting in RTX 2070 in a core I nine ninety nine hundred K so it's definitely no lightweight my second test however was run in 1440p at this point I could turn on just a bit of AAA and bump remaining settings across the board in-game detail was definitely improved across the board but again at a lower resolution overall side by side you've got more pixels to the right and thus more visual detail ignoring the fact that this entire video was exported in 4k but you've got more in-game detail to the left so my thinking in this is why bumped your gaming resolution to 4k if all you're gonna be doing in the long run is either a significantly lowering your in-game framerate or be lowering in settings to compensate at which point away increased resolution at all if all you're gonna be doing is adding more detail to a game that suddenly looks crappy er now keep in mind that if you're viewing this video in a resolution much lower than 1080p let's say 360p you probably can't play along here but if you're viewing this an especially 4k I'd now like you to pick the side of the screen that was running the benchmark natively in 4k can you tell which is which even if your screen only supports 1080p bump the video to 4k and just for this test to remove any issues with image quality and bitrate can you tell a difference this is the 4k screen shot and this is the 1440p screen shot different angle here actually all in game settings are identical everything's maxed out across the board except anti-aliasing on the 4k side note AAA is on but on the 1440p side for time anti-aliasing is on so back to Linus's point anti-aliasing does make a noticeable difference even in game it doesn't make it forward entirely but it definitely narrows the gap almost enough to the point where a 4k panel it's presumably locked at 60 Hertz is a bit to use his word dum now I'd like to close with a bit of talk and just how taxing 4k can be on your hardware using a peep a pixel per inch calculator we can determine just how many pixels fit into an inch of screen real estate so if our 4k panel is 27 diagonal inches and in the 16 by 9 aspect then the screen has a ppi of 163 but in all honesty I mean that means nothing unless we compared with other resolution so let's do 1080p now our PPI has dropped to eighty one point five and that makes sense 4k is literally for 1080 to be panels stacked around each other and by the way for the sticklers out there we're talking about 3840 by 2160 again when we reference for K not cinematic 4k at 4096 pixels across just thought I'd clear that up because there are always a few wise guys in the comments ready to ruin everything so when we double the horizontal pixel count and condense it into the same space PPI doubles that makes sense right but even 1440 peak is a large step down from 4k if you zoomed in on individual pixels this is what 1440p would look like and this is what 4k would look like two very different pixel densities and two very different loads for your graphics card to process 4k definitely looks great in person but when gaming I'd take the higher refresh rate any day of the week and still bump in game settings for a better overall experience subjective yeah to an extent but no one can deny the fact that in order to maintain the same frame rate you have to lower in game settings when stepping up to 4k why add more pixels to an image that suddenly looks worse I mean you could probably make the argument if you were running like a risin three twelve hundred with an RT X twenty atti maybe at that point bumping the resolution would actually give you a better frame rate I'm not too sure having tested that but in most cases if you have a balanced or semi balanced system any time you up the resolution right from 1080p to 1440p or from 1440p to 4k your frame rate will drop as a result and the problem is that you can't have both every display interface has a limit to how many pixels it can push per second which is why up until very recently every 4k monitor has been capped at 60 Hertz making for an inferior gaming experience outside of some edge cases so my view it doesn't make sense to add more pixels to an image that suddenly looks worse assuming you're gonna drop in game settings when it gets to the point that you really need to sacrificing detail for the sake of resolution I think you've gone too far case in point here's a 4k screen shot with medium tessellation right medium settings it's okay here's the same screen shot though in 1440p with tessellation now set to high it just seems a bit ironic and counterintuitive to increase screen detail only to see worse quality in-game a bit like adding more gross food to your plate at a buffet wouldn't you rather cut back a bit and enjoy something tasty that's 1440p gaming for me III may not have the same screen detail as a 4k gamer but I can still enjoy higher in-game detail and a higher refresh rate for a more balanced workload what do you think let me know what resolution refresh rate you game in and be sure to recommend future topics as well in the comment section below yes movies video thumbs up thumbs cool dislike the de clèves are feeling or if you 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