This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of utilise.

Minecraft-16K

For nearly of u.s.a., game resolutions increase fairly slowly, one periodic monitor purchase at a time. Ten years ago, 1080p was the new hotness; I was personally using a 22-inch Acer with a 1680×1050 resolution, and wondering what all the fuss was nearly with 1080p compared with 720p. At present, 4K displays are condign more than mutual, with additional back up for features like HDR, upcoming support for FreeSync, and even a whisper of a promise OLED engineering science might finally go mainstream in such panels (though to date, no OLED panel we're enlightened of has qualified for the Rec. 2022 standard).

In short, it's not just game resolutions that are improving. We're seeing measurable improvements in display engineering besides. OLED, FreeSync, 4K, and HDR? Sign us upwards.

Merely for those of you who prefer to game on sheer resolution alone, Linus Tech Tips has put together an astonishing video of how they managed to build a 16K game rig with $10,000 in GPUs and xvi 4K displays built from 16 27-inch Acer Predator panels, in a massive 108-inch diagonal blueprint (not counting bezels). The GPUs were powered past a four Quadro P5000s with 16GB of RAM each and based on the GTX 1080, but with additional RAM resource, which are kind of required to make this kind of matter functional.

This feat of technology and power consumption–only the monitors eat 1100W of wall power–is an impressive await at what may exist possible in the futurity, and the sheer chutzpah of building a rig this enormous is impressive in and of itself. At the same fourth dimension, nevertheless, the results demonstrate just how hard it is to push the envelope in this fashion. Downright ancient games, like Half Life 2 and Minecraft, were able to play in the 40fps range, but even a game as contempo as Civilization Five bogs down at 20fps. Modern games, like Rising of the Tomb Raider, are stuck in the 2-3fps range.

The problem hither, I doubtable, is two-fold. Showtime, and most obvious, the aforementioned brandish technology that keeps all of the Quadro cards synchronized and the 16 4K panels stitched together means the entire game's working set has to fit within the 16GB of RAM aboard each GPU. The problem with increasing resolution is you're slamming the gas pedal on how much information must be stored in retentiveness when rendering over 5 billion pixels per 2nd, with all the textures, lighting, shading, and detail that goes into the process. Given 16K is 16x more data than 4K, and 64x more memory than 1080p, 15260×8640 is a monster resolution for even the most aggressive GPUs.

When Volition Nosotros See 16K on the Desktop?

Ideally? Never. And no, I'm not just existence a sourpuss. The lesser line is this: The human eye is simply capable of resolving and so much item at any given distance. There's a literal, biological limit to the minimum feature sizes we can resolve at any given distance. Typically, the very, very best of united states hit around 20/8, meaning the hawkeye-eyed among us can run into at xx anxiety what the rest of united states tin distinguish at viii anxiety. Our maximum resolvable feature detail increases as objects get closer to us, which is why college resolutions are still useful for VR, even when they tin can't be seen at longer range.

4K viewing distances

The benefits of 4K resolution are largely a office of screen size and how far you sit down from it, but the larger your screen is, the further back you need to sit down to encounter it properly. A 16K system with a 109-inch diagonal isn't going to exist visible from a viewing altitude of 2-4 feet, and that's how far back you'd typically exist sitting. That's not to say a huge wall-computer isn't awesome, but you don't need it to be 16K to be similarly wowed.

This chart shows the distance of televisions and screen sizes every bit a role for whether college resolutions are actually useful. Typically we've used it for 4K, but there'south no reason you lot tin can't deploy information technology for monitors likewise–but assume vastly shorter viewing distances than the typical 6-8 anxiety. And fifty-fifty at such high resolutions, in that location'due south only not going to be much use for them–and that assumes GPUs tin can manage to drive the hardware at all. If it takes 1100W to brandish the 16K image, you lot tin imagine what the GPUs and system are consuming.

The effective end of conventional Moore'south Law scaling ways the chances we'll come across 16K resolutions, fifty-fifty in VR, exceptionally unlikely. That doesn't mean video engineering science can't keep to accelerate. We've seen a number of impressive technologies come to market place, from OLEDs to HDR to FreeSync/G-Sync, none of which put huge burdens on the GPU and all of which amend the experience of gaming. GPU frame rates and RAM buffers will go on to increment. But I expect the largest gains over the next few years to be from improvements to color fidelity, ghosting, larger color gamuts, and game play smoothness, not just relentless focus on higher pixel counts.