High End Graphics Cards Tested At 4K Resolutions 201
Vigile writes "One of the drawbacks to high end graphics has been the lack of low cost and massively-available displays with a resolution higher than 1920x1080. Yes, 25x16/25x14 panels are coming down in price, but it might be the influx of 4K monitors that makes a splash. PC Perspective purchased a 4K TV for under $1500 recently and set to benchmarking high end graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA at 3840x2160. For under $500, the Radeon HD 7970 provided the best experience, though the GTX Titan was the most powerful single GPU option. At the $1000 price point the GeForce GTX 690 appears to be the card to beat with AMD's continuing problems on CrossFire scaling. PC Perspective has also included YouTube and downloadable 4K video files (~100 mbps) as well as screenshots, in addition to a full suite of benchmarks."
Meh (Score:0, Interesting)
For about as far as I sit from my monitor and all the better my eyesight really is this is just overkill.
The whole resolution thing is starting to look like a Monster Cable dick wagging contest. Does it matter? Yeah. Does it matter to a human with normal eyesight? Probably not... It reminds me of when video card makers use to brag about 17.6 million colors. Too bad their users could only see about 100k of them.
Re:Now where's the cheap monitors? (Score:2, Interesting)
A 9.7" retina display costs 55$ off the shelf for horsiest. That's about 40$ BoM or lower. Quintuple\Sextuple that for a 23" 4K and add a thick margin and you end up in the 300-350$ range without taking into account how this production will scale to make it all cheaper.
As for your 27-30" 3840x2160 desire, it's actually quite easily doable now since it's really not that dense when you consider stuff like 5" devices having 1920x1080.
I would imagine a small OEM could make an order for these right from an existing Chinese line as long as the order are in the thousands. I don't even think over 20,000 will be necessary considering it's really just taking the same piece and *not* cutting it up as much. Maybe an Alienwere \ Nvidia co-venture to produce console killers with their own x86 console targeting these yet to be seen screens... Oh, we can dream...