Gaming in 4K - Upgrade or Buy New?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,183 words · ~5 min read
0:00
4k display pricing is dropping so rapidly like it's only 250 to 350 bucks
0:07
for an ultra HD monitor or TV these days
0:10
but it takes a lot of graphics power to
0:14
drive them so how should you do it the
0:18
xbox 1x is being built by Microsoft as true 4k gaming Sony is calling their
0:25
experienced native 4k land pro and
0:28
NVIDIA shocked us by reaching out about doing
0:33
their first ever sponsored video with us about their flavor of 4k gaming which
0:39
they're calling ultimate 4k let's find
0:42
out what they mean by that
0:52
okay so why should you trust an NVIDIA
0:57
sponsored video about their 4k gaming
1:00
solution because they have absolutely no
1:03
reason to be su no matter which team you bat for there are a couple of things
1:08
that any objective person can agree on about the gtx 1080 TI one it's kind of
1:15
pricey and two it's the fastest 4k
1:19
gaming card on the market and these are both things that would be stupid to try
1:24
to lie about because they can be measured objectively we'll be looking at
1:28
four games on five different platforms the fastest console today the Xbox one X
1:34
a modern gaming PC equipped with a GTX
1:37
1080 Ti and three more older gaming PC's
1:42
equipped with the GPU ghosts of Black Friday's past let's start by getting the
1:47
image quality comparisons out of the way they're an important consideration but
1:52
they are also kind of apples to oranges since the Xbox one X costs less than a
1:58
gtx 1080i by itself let's start with
2:02
forza this game runs smoothly at 60
2:05
frames per second on the xbox 1x thanks to its use of dynamic quality controls
2:10
that actually adjust image quality as you whip around on the track it's a
2:16
really impressive optimization technique that is actually enabled by default on
2:20
the PC as well but if you have the horsepower you can turn it off and it
2:25
will reveal some extras that would otherwise be absent like Tufts of grass
2:30
rather than texture work and higher resolution textures like you can see
2:34
here at the edges of the track shadow of war meanwhile shows that while the Xbox
2:39
port does once again a really good job
2:43
of delivering solid visual clarity at 4k the PC version unsurprisingly has the
2:49
capability of showing more detail and using higher resolution textures and as
2:55
we'll see shortly it can do this while maintaining a much smoother frame rate
3:00
okay neat then but I think that a lot of
3:03
people would agree that at this kind of
3:06
total system price difference more detailed grass is a pretty tuft cell and
3:14
that would be fair but NVIDIA actually doesn't make any money if you buy a new
3:18
CPU and motherboard or whatever they only sell graphics cards so why don't we
3:23
look at it a different way what if you upgraded your old PC with one of these
3:28
to answer that question first we need to
3:31
see how exactly your old rig is holding up right now so we tested our games at
3:36
1080p high 4k low and 4k high noting any
3:42
adjustments that we made to the presets this way you can decide for yourself
3:46
whether the difference between Full HD and 4k or low details versus high
3:52
details is worth it for you right away we see a huge advantage in Forza 7 for
3:59
our current generation 1080 TI system with our 4k low 97th percentile minimum
4:05
actually above the previous flagship 980
4:09
TI is average at 4k Ultra it actually
4:13
manages up to a hundred and twenty frames per second meaning that on next
4:18
generation high refresh rate 4k displays you could see even more smoothness
4:23
Middle Earth shadow of war shows us another huge gain for the 1080 TI over
4:29
its predecessors even on our older systems with 4k ultra winding up at just
4:35
shy of 60 FPS on average and a very
4:38
playable especially with the g-sync display 97th percentile low of just over
4:44
40 on - Pub G we've got a closer race
4:47
here at 1080p as the bottleneck is mainly down to poor CPU optimization
4:52
moving on to 4k we've got great performance at low and then when we look
4:57
at high details still great performance that is some
5:02
weak CPU optimization destiny - shows a
5:06
pretty familiar looking graph with 1080p performance predictably better but when
5:11
we step things up to 4k we find that this is the second game of the day to
5:16
not only average higher than 60 frames per second but claimed a 97th percentile
5:22
of 60 as well solid now let's upgrade
5:26
those old systems if you're a 1080p high
5:30
detail gamer the CPU bottlenecking is real here though you should bear in mind
5:35
that we didn't overclock any of these older systems and you could expect
5:39
significant performance improvements in some cases as for our 4k results well
5:45
this is where NVIDIA's story here gets pretty interesting since you're
5:50
generally GPU bound when you run at high resolution and high details our last
5:56
generation 4790k performs basically on
6:00
par with our 7700 K which is architectural II very similar to the
6:05
vaporware six core 8700 K and then even
6:08
more impressively going all the way back to a core i5
6:13
2500 K this was a 200 ish dollar CPU
6:17
from 2011 we saw performance drops as
6:21
small as 5 to 10 percent when upgrading
6:24
to a brand new top-of-the-line card so
6:27
what this means is that our gaming experience is very similar whether we
6:33
buy a brand new system or retrofit an
6:36
old PC bringing the 1080 TI's higher 4k
6:40
image quality and performance much closer in price to a 4k gaming console
6:46
so there you have it the path to 4k have
6:50
been laid out before you what do you guys think would you pony up for a brand
6:54
new machine would you dumpster dive for
6:58
a secondary box or upgrade your existing one with a shiny new graphics card or is
7:02
a new game console at the top of your wish list this year let us know in the
7:07
comments below so thanks for watching if you guys
7:11
dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get
7:14
subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at
7:18
the link in the video description and while you're down there you can check out our merch store which has cool
7:22
shirts like this one as well as our community
7:25
honestly man this video was like
7:29
we spent so much time on the screen cap
7:32
and on measuring the frame rates because even though NVIDIA does almost no
7:39
sponsored stuff with us we knew that if we got even like one thing wrong you
7:42
guys were going to tear us apart and so huh glad that's over