The 4K at 60fps club

Hmm.
I see.
Thank you for the information.
The max resolution that my monitor can produce is 1920x1080.
However as I have said somewhere else on here -though most will not understand it:
I still prefer to run at 800x600 and no more than 1440x900...but that is only if I can't make out it at the first resolution -I always play in a window -NEVER IN FULL SCREEN.

Size matters, if she's telling you otherwise she's lying

We all have our preferences, what I don't understand is why, in a thread where it's asked who here PC masterrace building PC so powerful it'll make Batman's batcomputer cry from jealousy raise your hands, some people feel compelled to come in and state - I won't but here is what I will be running it on. But whatever, I don't care, whatever keeps the conversation going

Yeah, pretty crazy if you ask me (which you didn't ).  I think some people just like to be first into something.  Me, I love those people because they're the ones underwriting all the fancy next gen tech to make it affordable for us more conservative spenders.  And I have no idea when games are going to be good enough to really give us 4K gaming...since the devil is in the detail.  I run at 2.5K on a 32" computer monitor.  Playing a game like TW3 which is pretty damn good-looking on ultra settings there are some angles in grass and foliage those details break down.  I don't see how spending an extra 1-2 grand to notice even more ugly details is desirable.

I dont know man, maybe the guys who sold me the pc gave me a super computer by mistake ?

Seriously tho, Im playing the game just as I told you with AA and AF. Im not doubting what your saying havox, I'm just saying i got steady 60fps with the settings I previously listed. I can pm you some screenshots later if you want.

I've been wondering about that myself. How big of a subjective/perceptual difference is there between 1080p and 4K? On a computer monitor? On a TV? With and without 4K texture packs?
Is it as stark a contrast as that between 720p and 1080p? Or 480p and below, and 720p?

I've briefly used one of the newer iMacs with the so-called 'retina' displays, though I don't know what the exact resolution was (still lower than 4K I presume); and as someone who spends all day reading & writing stuff on-screen, I was really impressed by the crispness of the text. 

After much research, I have decided to just go with a 2K gaming rig to start.

www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00MSOND8C/ref=ox_sc_act_image_1?smid=A1W7VJMCZRZBUQ&psc=1

I rather play at a 2k resolution at a framrate well above 60fps. Then later this year when the 4k, 144hz, HDR monitors comes out, I will go 4k.

I can only speak from personal highly subjective experiences but 4K is awesome. Obviously it varies per game, here's for example how a 1997 game (TR2) looks, don't open spoiler if you're on a dial-up or something, 1MB jpeg underneath.

Of course a bad looking game won't suddenly look amazing when bumped to a higher res, the textures are what they are, but the picture will be more detailed.

Speaking of monitors vs TVs, and again I speak only from personal experiences, I think the 30" 4K "gaming" monitors are a scam. You would need to sit super close (and have amazing eyesight) to see all the details. I can only recommend 4K starting at 50" and up, a handy chart for reference:

Of course using a TV as a monitor comes with all the usual drawbacks. For me most important would be input lag. 2016 models of LG OLED TVs for example suffer 34ms input lag.
www.rtings.com/tv/tests/inputs/input-lag
some LEDs have aroud 20ms but they're not OLEDs so not as awesome picture quality. Previous years only LG was making OLED TVs, this year at CES Panasonic and Sony also showcased their OLED TVs. Specs are not known at the moment, they'll use LG panels but better image processing can be expected, I'll keep an eye out for those when they reach shops, this summer or some such.

That's the thing, 4K makes everything look crisper but it doesn't actually change the texture quality. You do not magically get more details that weren't there before.
The textures in Witcher 3 are actually much worse than in DAI, at least the flora looks like blurry shit up close. Really low quality vegetation textures. I game at 1440p. Everything is lovely crisp, makes even vanilla Skyrim look ok. All higher screen resolution really does is provide smoothness. The texture details or grass density is something you do in the game settings.


That's the other thing I don't understand about the 60fps craze, personally. Post-processing is what makes a game look great. It's not 4K or even textures themselves, it's the ambient lighting and stuff. Anybody who mods knows what a HUGE difference an ENB makes. Makes everything look a hundred times better, even low quality textures.

I got myself a GTX 1070 too and was SO disappointed how little performance boost I actually get at 1440p compared to a GTX 970. DAI maxed out does not even get you 60fps@2K.
And it's annoying how Geforce Experience "optimizes" games for 60fps. I started Assassin's Creed Syndicate on the recommended settings and was so confused why the game looked like utter crap. Found out that almost all post-processing was turned off. It was still set to high textures (so shouldn't look bad, right?) but it was missing the bling bling that made it look bad. Then I put everything to max and got 24fps, loooool. Yup. Running on a 1070, imagine that! Slightly downgrading MSAA got me above 30fps and that's enough for me. Game looks gorgeous that way.

My personal recommendation remains a 1440p monitor paired with a 1070 (or 1080, but it's not worth the extra money for me), put everything at max (if possible) and enjoy. Will look better than 4K without post-processing.
My two cents, anyway.

And I'd rather play at 1024x768 in 60 fps than anything in 30. I've played (and still play) games from ~1995, their graphics are shit yet I manage. I can't however cope with how my mouse works at 30 fps. The delay is terrible, it's not fluid and feels unresponsive (it feels as if instead of controlling my character I were giving him orders which he executes after delay). I suppose 30 fps is more bearable when you use controller, but I only ever played on kb+mouse so I don't know.

And in some games 30 fps simply doesn't work at all. Fighting games and competitive FPS belong to them. FPS is not overrated at all, even in SP. Try playing Q1 at 30 fps, it's unbearable and strafe jumping is nigh impossible.

The effects of running a game in 4k can vary depending on the game.

I've been playing through Half-Life 2 and sure, on my 4k monitor it's not really gonna look a whole lot better than on a 1440p one. As you say, the only real effect is that it'll be slightly more crisp of an image but if I really wanted to make the game look better I would want to mod in more modern post-processing effects.

The reason is, as you noted, the texture resolution isn't getting any better with a 3840x2160 resolution and there is simply just no extra detail that a 1440p monitor is missing out on. I'm guessing the textures in Half-Life 2 are probably a native 256x256 as the game is from 2004(I could see some of the textures for characters being 512 since they do seem to look better). The other thing is that the number of polygons isn't increasing and that game is from the era where you could still easily see individual polygons in some objects.

Though when a game supports using 4k resolution textures then there can be some extra detail in there. Of course when we get higher resolutions it'll be there as well, but using even 8k right now is pretty much unheard of in games.

In general if you're going for 4k you're probably putting a lot of money into your rig and want to push things to the absolute max as a result, which 4k is good for that. Otherwise, 1440p is still not a huge downgrade even under the best circumstances for 4k.

As for 60 FPS there's another reason that has nothing to do with the visuals of the game: Most game engines tie a lot of things to framerate.

The main one is input from controller/keyboard/mouse is often tied to your framerate, which means that games running at 60 FPS tend to play smoother and feel more responsive than those running at 30 FPS. It's something that's a bigger deal in more fast paced games that require quick reflexes on pushing buttons and split second decisions.

Maybe some of us simply likes the smooth look of 60fps?