okay so the theoretical benefits of 4k
are pretty clear pardon the pun all you have to do is
consult the product page for any 4k monitor and you'll be treated to the
same stock imagery that has been used to sell higher resolution displays for the
last handful of decades except for one small problem a human
being with 20 20 vision can discern about 1 60th of an arc second so that's
about 3 600 increments per degree of
their field of view that means that you would need to be two and a half to three
and a half feet away from a typical monitor before the pixels become
indistinguishable from each other apple brands this as retina now with a 4k
display you could get as close as 1.7
feet for a 27-inch model but how far do people actually sit from
their monitors is any of this even a benefit
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would you would you game at this distance i came like this it's like 17
inches see it's about 22 to the laptop
would you lean back that far while you're gaming for gaming probably like
this oh 21. what the hell is going on what is
this ah am i okay well we'll get back to you on
that okay so as of right now it's
looking like basically everyone in our office would experience a noticeable
difference between 1080p and 1440p
and about half of the people in our office would experience a difference
between 1440p and 4k
however there is something that we're missing here and that is anti-aliasing this
technology takes neighboring pixels and kind of blends them together and it can
make a display seem like it's higher resolution than it actually is now
physically increasing the pixel count is
naturally better but good a a especially
in games can take things like power lines from being a blocky stay her kc
mess to a smooth arc and one of the easiest ways to see the effects of aa is
with Windows text so here we have a 1080p monitor and by
default in Windows 10 there will be anti-aliasing on the text although if we
turn it off you can see that
that's bad let's go ahead and turn that back on there we go that's better but
it's not even close to our 4k display
over here you heard it here first folks higher resolution displays are
indisputably better for creating and consuming text content
but games aren't a bunch of small static
black lines sitting on a white background they have motion and your
eyes are often moving around as well so
how much of a difference does that extra sharpness
actually make to test this we grabbed three gaming
monitors with the major 16x9 resolutions
and with each of them locked to 60 hertz
with anti-aliasing turned on in our games we want to see if our test
subjects can tell the difference go ahead test subjects
now we know that our 1080p monitor is only a 24-incher and there's a reason
for that that we'll get to later it's still much lower pixel density than
either of the others so it's fine for the purposes of our test
this one these are drunk that one's clear yeah this one just uh
yo this one doesn't look very good yep this one looks terrible this one looks
like it's a lower res than this one but high anti-aliasing which makes
everything a bit blurrier this one looks like native reds with some
anti-aliasing i i do think that one still looks better
to me but switching back and forth to these this one looks
really good as well the difference between these two is harder
this one's higher res though so that was pretty much what we expected but here's
the thing all three of these gaming monitors cost
around 500 and that is where we finally get into
the main point we're trying to make in this video
it would have been easy for us to demonstrate that 4k doesn't make sense
if you don't have a lot of money it's expensive
end of story but we're saying that even if you could
afford the gaming horsepower to run 4k
60 hertz and a 4k monitor that's a predator monitors a gaming monitor
you would be better off buying something else
because there is so much more to the gaming experience than the pixel count
so these 1440p and 1080p monitors cost so much because
our 4k display is running at 60 hertz 60
refreshes per second then these two run at 144 hertz and a stonking
240 hertz respectively and i've been a
long time believer that refresh rate makes a way bigger difference to the
gaming experience than resolution so we're gonna get doom running on all
three of these and see what people prefer to play on in a
fast-paced shooter this feels good
uh you know it's a game it's looking good uh
oh i died got it nailed it okay hold on
here hold on hold on okay
this seems smoother i like this better than that perfect
got the glory kill bro um i feel like that one
feels better than this one
i don't feel like this is significantly different from the other machine
same it's the same they're all the same
what fascinating
dennis what are you firing at there's nothing i can find okay that's that's
cool i might not be the best person to ask but to me to be honest
i wouldn't care that much i think this one you show it shows more
detail i don't know they are the same by this
wait is motion blur on can you tell me if the resolutions are
the same between the two can't tell you a goddamn thing the frame rate's not keeping up on this
one well we could tell you the frame rate's about
180 FPS on here yeah
and what is going on
you're running on a 60 hertz monitor ah
okay if i were going to game on something it
would definitely be this just because it is a lot smoother the
far left one
actually is really sweet but the clarity is not that great
overall image quality is worse on this one
but does it really matter when things are exploding and you're just aiming at
blobs so basically
if you're gaming in an even remotely competitive way
higher refresh rate at least to a point is hands down the way to go those extra
pixels are just not worth the response time reduction
and the problem is that you can't have both every display interface has a limit
to how many pixels it can push per second which is why up until very
recently every 4k monitor has been capped at 60
hertz making for an inferior gaming experience
outside of some edge cases like the argument could be
made for gamers who aren't frame rate snobs that
that's a more pleasing experience or for certain types of games that are more
about the cinematics and visuals whether it's a red dead redemption 2 or a grand
theft auto 5 where you're not competing against anyone
you could make an argument there for my part
i wouldn't touch that as long as that is an option
which i guess kind of leads into a side rant here in the quest to have more
boxes checked off on the marketing materials
page many laptop makers have even
equipped their gaming models with 4k 60hz panels either as an option or even
by default and while a higher refresh rate
can actually make you a better gamer
if the benefit of more pixels is minimal
on a 27 inch display even our experienced gamer test subjects
hesitated being able to tell the difference it's going to be way less
than that on a 15 inch or a 17 inch one even if you do tend to sit a bit closer
to your laptop now i'm sure there are some of you wondering well what if i had so much
money that i could wear a brand new pair of yeezys every day
could i have my cake and eat it too well
there are 4k high refresh rate monitors
like this one from ASUS it runs at 120
hertz or 144 overclocked it's got 4k
resolution and the HDR support is practically a cherry on top by that
point i mean it's amazing and it's
better in every way than the 1440p monitor that we were just looking at
but it still has a problem obtaining a computer to put next to it
that can actually deliver all of those frames so this right here is pretty much
what you would want for greater than 60 FPS gaming at 4k and even it struggles
to get close to 144 hertz in the latest
most demanding titles it's got a core i9
9900k two rtx 2080 ti's running an sli and a
bunch of other baller components like it's freaking sick this is the best
gaming experience that i've ever had but
as much as i'd love to recommend that everyone go and grab this setup
it doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless you really do
money for the tower and the monitor you're looking at around
six thousand dollars worth of electronics enough for you to have an
excellent 1440p gaming setup with a gtx 1070 and then grab two more for your
friends so they can have sick gaming setups too
so i guess this is the bottom line for competitive play the higher the
refresh rate the better and for the affluent enthusiast the sweet spot is
still 1440p 144 hertz since you are still getting
the high refresh rate advantages real competitive advantages along with a nice
clarity bump over 1080p
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