PC Gaming in Ultra High Definition explored

Every now and then in the PC gaming segment two rules re-apply; bigger = better and faster = better. PC gamers are the more enthusiast aficionado's and lots of you all start with say a GeForce GTX 760 as bare minimum. Often our reader base is in the Radeon HD 7970 and GTX 770/780 range though. That said, PC gamers want the best in performance and visual quality and set th bar really high. However it has been quiet in the graphics arena, most video cards albeit faster are rather similar and over the past year or so not a lot of new technology has been released.

There is one upcoming trend though, display resolutions are on the rise fast. Most if not all of you guys are at FullHD or something close by now (1920x1080). The high-end community all have been migrating towards 2560x1440 monitors or triple-display solutions. And yeah, then there is that all new HD resolution called UHD, or in short Ultra High Definition. Once we learned about UHD my mind immediately went bazerk, as this we have got to look into PC gaming wise. And then there was that announcement from ASUS back in May 2013, the press release mentioned a PQ321 Monitor with 3840 x 2160 IGZO Display. Bazinga ! That's 4K Ultra HD baby. That announcement was late May 2013 prior to Computex. And to date the availability has been incredibly small. There has been a limited stock available in the USA, but EU allocation is close to NIL and just downright horrible.

The time is near, praise the Lord Hallelujah as we finally have secured a unit. So this article is going to be an introduction into what I consider to be the next big thing in PC Gaming, gaming at UHD 3840 x 2160. I say the next big thing as game companies and software houses have noticed this trend and in the upcoming months we'll be seeing UltraHD texture packs for a handful of games. Yeah, imaging that, gaming at 3840 x 2160 with extremely high texture quality. Not to insert a lame lyric quote here, but god put a smile upon your face.

Today's article is an introduction towards gaming in Ultra High Definition. We'll be looking briefly at the monitor and the stress it will place on graphics cards, we'll setup a SLI and Crossfire configuration, do the little FCAT dance, yeah it's a PC gaming freak-fest.

Now before we begin I like to ask you to do the download this nice .JPG which is the size of 3840 x 2160 pixels. Watch it at 100% in Photoshop and then try to realize how big of a resolution that actually is. Now imaging you graphics cards rendering say 40 to 60 of such images per second. As that's the challenge we are talking about here.

So please do join me, we'll start off with a quick overview of the monitor, then we'll do some regular benchmarking at UHD and then some FCAT results. This article will not be deep in technology, just an easy read and overview of what the new revolution in PC gaming can be.

Oh and 3840x2160 @ 31.5" is big !