Do you think 4K is worth it at the moment? Will the next round of GPU's bring 4K gaming to the masses or will we have to wait longer?

I have a 980ti + 28" Samsung 4K monitor, but I wish I had $ 1000 instead.

I originally upgraded expecting the jump to be that of sd to hd, but with experience I can say that the jump is closer to that of dvd to bluray. Videogames aren't able to really push the tech to make it as eye popping as it could be, and movies haven't caught up to round out the experience. I can tell you that watching nature videos at 4K makes you feel like you're looking out a window at the African Sahara, but unless you're Steve Irwin or David Attenburrough that shouldn't be enough to push you to purchase.

I was considering upgrading to 4K, but went with a Vive instead.

@buarpo: I've a co-worker who spent his annual bonus on a 4K tv. When I asked him what content he was watching on it he said the same thing about nature videos. And that was all the content he had. He loved watching them for about a week and after that they only became novel when he had someone around who'd never seen them.

Personally I don't think 4k is worth it right now. There's not nearly enough media/content for it.

I recently purchased a 4k G-sync monitor, and it's wonderful. I love 4k.

The Witcher 3 looks amazaaazing in 4k glory

I'm hoping Nvidia's Pascal will help bring the 4k generation in. Everything I've read seems like its up to 10x more powerful as Maxwell and supports up to 32gb of VRAM. If that can't run a game at 4k then we are doomed.

My next PC monitor will probably we an ultrawide though and my next TV will be 4K that I will output controller friendly games to it.

I don't think 4K is worth it yet. You basically need to SLI some 980s to make it look as good as one 980 driving a 1440p screen.

The big thing is texture resolution. Sure we can force a game to run in 4K resolutions, but the textures will simply be 1080p textures stretched or tiled over more space. Looks good, but not the cost of an extra 980 good. Some games do this right and provide 4K assets, but not many, the install base vs. the time to make them isn't very economically viable.

Personally I value high framerate over high resolution.
Yes, 4k at 144Hz is the ultimate dream, but for now I'd rather have a 1080p display capable of displaying 120+ FPS than a 4k/60Hz display.

Not worth it for me yet. 1080 works great for me considering that I came from 1360x768 just a few months ago and got [back] into PC gaming just over a year ago. My 750Ti pulling it's weight with modern games on high, and I have a comfortable amount of screen real estate for Photoshop and Vegas Pro. So I'll most likely stick with 1080 until a 200 something dollar GTX x50 or x60 card can handle 4K at least as well as my 750Ti handles 1080.

@barthez: I'm the same.

Bought a new monitor about 18 months ago and was faced with 4k vs 144hz. I went 144hz (and then a 980ti last year) and don't regret it.

No, but I 24bit 192kHz.

There just isn't that much 4k content out there right now, and to run games at 4k native with decent settings you need a monster rig, and don't even think about 4k at anything over 60hz yet. It's going to be at least another year or two before 4k really becomes a thing, and more importantly before hardware is fast enough to be able run it at anything above 60 fps. For the time being I would stick to the monitor with the highest refresh rate available and worry about resolution later. There are quite a few monitors popping up with 2560x1440 resolutions and either 120 or 144hz. I would go with one of those before anything 4k unless you need the higher resolution.

The value question depends on how much money you have. Right now you need two 980TIs or Fury Xs to run 4K well (over 60fps) in new games. That's at least $1000, even if you have everything else. I don't think it's worth it right now, but if money is not an issue then 4K will look better than 1440p.

As for the next wave of GPUs, I think we will finally get to the point where one high-end card can give good performance at 4K, but I think it will be another generation or two before we see 4K for most people. Most people buy the mid-range cards like the 960 or 370, not the high-end cards. Even with a node shrink, I don't think the mid-range cards will be viable for 4K. Maybe the 970 successor in the $350-$450 range will do it, but that's still more than most people spend on a GPU.

No. Too demanding and expensive. I'm fine with 2560x1440. Plus, I heard 4K has mouse problems on Windows.

Personally, I haven't ran into any mouse issues in 4K.

Like others have said, you are gonna need a pretty beefy setup, and even with that setup you will get sub 60 FPS in most current-gen games.

There's one saving grace for me though-- the Gsync monitor-- without an FPS counter on-screen I honestly can't tell a difference between 40, or 60 FPS. It makes lower frame-rates completely playable, which is a must when it comes to 4K. I highly recommend one, even if you're gaming on a 1080p setup. In my opinion, Gsync is a game-changer for PC gaming.

You can do 4K, but in another two years it might be more worthwhile for more content. Meh...

I do but only because I wanted to play games sitting close to a big screen (55") without seeing so many pixels. I use 2x980's and that seems to work pretty well for the most part. Games like the Witcher 3, The Witness, MGS5 all run pretty much at 60fps and look amazing. It really is mind-boggling how pretty it is. I think VR will be far better, but this is almost a half-step. I don't really understand 4k in less than 30" but I'm sure it looks amazing. I also use a 27" 1440p display and I can't imagine needing more pixel density than that. Netflix has a few shows in 4k that look fantastic but there isn't a ton of stuff. Really looking forward to the new cards that can run everything in single gpu mode as SLI can be a bit hard to find good support for.

I also haven't had any mouse issues at all with 4k. I often use the whole thing as a monitor, sorta like quad-monitors with no bezel, and it is 100% lag free.

I would rather spend the cash elsewhere until such resolutions are easily and reasonably attainable.

Or, in other words, it costs too fucking much.

@jamesfargoth: I also have a 55 inch and 2 980's.I can't get a solid 60 fps on the Witcher without lowering the settings significantly though. I play it at a locked 30 fps with all settings maxed out (except for hairworks AA). What settings are you on?

@bdead: Been a while so I had to check. Everything ultra except SSAO (not HBAO+), AA off, Hairworks off, Shadows and Foliage distance set to High. Hairworks is nice, but not worth the fps hit.

I think the real benefit is getting rid of Jaggies/aliasing as far as gaming goes. Thats my only real gripe with gaming at 1080p, not sure how much 1440p helps though.

Yup so so worth it although my 980 struggles with street fighter V but hot damn does it look good. Tomb raider anther example just looks stunning to me anyway.

Don't know if 1080p looks worse on a 4K monitor because going back is like a massive drop in quality.

You have to be careful with your expectations. If you read the fine print, Nvidia claims that 10x number is "performance per watt." technically an ARM processer gets more performance per watt than any Nvidia pc-GPU ever produced but I wouldn't trust my cell phone to power a 4K PC game.

For most non-crazy people it's just not worth it. Games look stunning in 4k, but it's a real struggle to get newer games running anything higher than 40fps on a single 980 Ti.

However, if you are playing older games or there is one title that you play all the time that is relatively light on the GPU, it may be worth it. I personally invested in my 4k and 980 Ti just for playing Elite Dangerous, and I couldn't be happier with that purchase (but I'm crazy).

Btw, it's surprising to see so many people talking about using 1080p in this thread... it feels like the new 1024x768 to me. 1920x1200 should be the minimum, but I think the sweet spot would be 2560x1440.

I've been running 1440p on a 980ti, and while it looks great, even that resolution is a struggle for some games. 4k looks cool, but like many above have said, there aren't really any games that take advantage of it.

I'd stick with 1080p, you can always use DSR wtih Nvidia (or AMD's similar option) to fake upscale to 4k. It isn't the same, but still looks really nice.

I have a 4k monitor but I still mostly play at 1080p. I really value framerates more than ultra-high resolutions or totally eliminating any jaggies in geometry. A 970 and a new Skylake processor makes everything run pretty great at mostly max settings at that resolution. We'll see how things shake out the next time I feel like upgrading my video card, though!

Im barely even interested in 1440p for the time being. Refresh rate is the number one thing for me right now - I'm already sacrificing visuals to make sure everything always runs at 120+ fps. So 4k seems out of the question for a good long while.

I recently bought an asus 28" 4k monitor and have been enjoying playing some stuff at 4k. That being said I find my self lowering the resolution on many games from 4k to 2k or 1080p because even with my 980ti some games have extremely low framrates at 4k for me. My other issue is that not every game has UI that scales well in 4k and a lot of the time I end up with UI that's really tiny (especially the steam overlay) and practically none of the games out there have an option to adjust UI size. Even with those issues I don't regret buying my monitor and will just hope that future video cards will be able to run more games maxed out at 4k and that dev's finally wise up and either decide to make sure their UI scales with resolutions or there's options to enlarge UIs.

Riding 1080p till the wheels fall off. I don't sit close enough to my television for me to worry about my pc outputting 4k. My advice is to work towards smooth gameplay rather then ultra high rez. You will save money and also be able to play a bigger selection of games at higher settings.

I bought a cheap 50in yesterday waiting on a new hdmi cord tomorrow. So far it looks good but not that good (could be lakck of 4:4:4 with this cord). 1080p looks a lil better too and HOPEFULLY when i get this cord i can try a higher refresh rate at 1080 and 1440p (which wont output past 30hz for whatever reason even though 4k gets 60). Either way its better than the last one i used so far.

Is that drugs?

OP you missed a golden opportunity to have the title be: "Do you 4Kare?"

And no I really don't.

I bought a 4K monitor primarily for art reasons, it works a treat with photoshop. The occasional 4K game is a nice bonus, but most of the time, depending on the game, 2-3k is as high as I can go with max settings without getting slowdown. When it works it does look reeeal purdy, but personally it's not worth the investment for gaming alone, mainly because I just don't play that many PC games.

4K is higher settings. Even with a 1080p TV/monitor. Due to a lack of decent anti-aliasing, pushing the internally rendered resolution as high as is reasonable provides a significant improvement in visual quality (especially temporally where aliasing issues will cause strobing and flickering artefacts due to the nature* of real-time rendering). Trying to recover fine (and edge) detail via post-processing (looking for shapes that are associated with aliasing and smoothing them) is fraught at best in most games (FXAA/MLAA/SMAA) even if we're starting to see more complex approaches with temporal sampling (see the Division for recovering significantly more than a simple 1080p resolve from this process but also see Project Cars and the ghosting issue it shipped with for how this is also really hard to do well).

4K downsampled to 1080p (via DSR or similar branded names for that process) isn't quite as detailed as 4K native (for really making the most of those really high res textures) but it's sure a lot better than 1080p native without anti-aliasing in terms of visual quality of the final scene. Higher res, beyond that of your output screen, is a higher quality setting in itself as it tries to emulate the spacial integration of a sensor cell via multiple samples.

* When you point a video camera at something, the sensor element is exposed to 1/48th of a second of light (for a 24Hz cinematic presentation using a standard 180 degree shutter - even if emulated by a permanently open digital sensor) integrating over both axes of the cell (ie the total area that it maps out to in the scene it captures is where that light comes from and is summed by the sensor). When you engage in modern real-time rendering then you're taking a single instant in time and looking at the colour of the centre of the pixel and what is behind that (MSAA looks at several samples in the pixel but most modern games don't use MSAA as it's hard to do with deferred rendering).