Gaming on 4K TVs....anybody doing it???

[Xan]

In any case, these sync technologies will have no effect at all on the way 30 fps looks-- it will look exactly as it does on a 60 Hz CRT or plasma-- your eyes can discern 30fps motion, G-Sync wont help that. What it will help though, is what 31-59 Hz look like on a 60 or 120hz monitor-- ie uneven multiples of a (currently) locked refresh rate. The stutter you see would be gone...

Should have perhaps written it as ~30 FPS, as in my experiences PC games simply don't run at an exact 30 FPS (or whatever other arbritary value is set), even with limiters in place; it usually seems to fluctuate around ±1 of said value. I've had some pretty bad cases of tearing even when using these frame limiters, even though in theory the mismatch might be smaller than without them, so the comparison to G-Sync seems very valid here (with a potent enough graphics card to stay in that 30-144 FPS range of course).

[Ed Oscuro]

There's been a lot of discussion over the years about how to get actual 60Hz out of Valve games like GoldSrc or Source engine based games with console settings. In short, without adaptive sync, you need to pay attention to getting the maximum FPS value exactly right. To add insult to this injury, when playing on a VGA connection, I find that tweaking this value with absurd precision (like 61.84 instead of 61.85, or even more digits of precision) notably changes flicker patterns on the display. Moving to a better display technology can cure these problems, but adaptive sync lets you use a wider range of display types while eliminating these problems.

[Xan]

Funny that you mention it, in GoldSrc games I really had the biggest issues with tearing. I was playing them fine on my then current PC a few years ago, but after an upgrade the GPU was simply putting out too many frames and for some reason this engine handles it worse than others. Capping to 59 or 61 FPS especially caused solid moving tearing lines across the screen.

The gist is really that if it was possible to get an exact 30 or 60 FPS output to match the display refresh rate, we wouldn't have had a need for G-Sync or Freesync in the first place...

[Josh128]

Likewise, Josh's argument that AMD getting performance parity is just around the corner seems hard to believe. With all the recent layoffs, where's the development coming from? Later last year, their CEO promised to stop cuts in that area, but I think they really need to turn it around and increase R&D. Any products coming from AMD will be bumping up against a new generation of cheap second-gen Maxwell parts. I'm happy to wait for a deal, but being first to market counts in padding your war chest for R&D. Those expensive G-SYNC monitor modules and expensive GTX 9X0 series graphics cards? nVidia (and its partners) have been raking in cash hand over fist with those. AMD has gotten nothing; a lot of early adopters already bought at the highest margins, while it's not clear those left will be swayed towards AMD's FreeSync. While suppliers have been scrambling to bring down adaptive sync monitor prices, GTX cards have only risen in price, slightly, since their release. Meanwhile, AMD has been forced to slash the price of its GPUs across the board. I don't know what kind of margins they were working on before the "maximum Maxwell" cards but this can't have helped.

When I said parity, I meant it in a "close enough" sense-- when the R9 290X was revealed, it was as good as a Titan for half the price-- that was just a little over a year ago. For the past 10 years, AMD and Nvidia have leapfrogged each other or at least equalled each other with each new release. You cant say that vs. Intel. AMD's GPU division is by far their biggest strength, but yes, they are under serious pressure to perform at the moment.

Theres no doubt they are in deep trouble right now, but that has way more to do with Intel than NVidia. In order to survive as a company, they need to either produce at least a semi-competitive CPU or greatly reduce their size and possibly spin off their x86 CPU division, as there seems to just be too much overhead for the revenue they are taking in.

[Josh128]

I love plasmas, and it makes me very sad that they have now ceased production without something to really take their place. The PQ they offer for the price is at this point still untouchable. OLED is coming...

Plasmas were a great solution at a certain price point with some lovely colours. But they were never fit for purpose when you talk about high grade picture quality.

OLED showed early promise, but the early let-downs in this area has still left me very cautious unless your instead looking at something best suited for mobile/exhibition/temporary displays... But we'll see - I'd love to be wrong since it (and it's related fields of fabrication) are fantastic areas to explore.

Not sure what to make of this but you should be aware that the best plasmas are FAR superior to the best LCDs in most all of the most important areas of picture quality-- contrast, color reproduction, off angle viewing (this is a HUGE one), screen uniformity, and motion. This is no secret, almost any videophile will admit this.

As far as the phosphors resulting in a soft image, thats simply not true. It is true that affordable technology to bring them to 4K is just not there.

OLED is really the only display tech on the horizon with the potential to really best plasma. Problem is, it suffers from as bad or worse IR and really poor panel brightness half-life, especially of the blue subpixels.

[Ed Oscuro]

When I said parity, I meant it in a "close enough" sense-- when the R9 290X was revealed, it was as good as a Titan for half the price-- that was just a little over a year ago.

We'll have to say that the reviews will show who's right on this one soon enough. Again, I would like to be wrong here.

The 290X - Titan comparison is pretty interesting. Titan was aimed at compute from the start and commanded a price premium. I don't recall any reviews from the time suggesting that it was the go-to choice for gamers, instead I recall that sites emphasized SLI solutions and other cards due to that price issue. Again, time to market is letting nVidia build a war chest while AMD competes on price arguments much later than they would truthfully like. Compared to the Titan, the R9 290X performed at mostly the same level - and it didn't have much overclocking headroom as the "Uber" mode showed. But most importantly, there was a big gap from February to October where the Titan was unopposed. The opening of this article recaps the story. As for the rest of the line, you'll notice the article link to the 2014 lineup consisting of rebrands of 2012 parts.

There's no evidence this situation has improved. Assuming AMD does bring out something that reaches parity with the GTX 9X0 cards, nVidia hasn't been sleeping; those new cards will likely be met by budget releases like the GTX 960, so AMD may well be denied the move to the lower end as they often have relied on - long in CPUs and now in GPUs.

In other news, AMD's planning a move to the 28nm process node. Wow! Intel is already on 14nm and has a variety of process advantages to boot. That's not an AMD-nVidia point of course but it does show how AMD is unfortunately getting hammered on both fronts.

The OLED IR issue looks like a thing of the past. It's explained here.

[spadgy]

This weekend I headed off to get a 1080p HD TV. My old one is knackered and was always a bit hideous.

Then as I was talking to the guy at the store, a customer returned a 4K TV... they clearly had too little time and plenty of money... they'd accidentally bought completely the wrong model. It was returned having never been used... the TV was still in its internal packaging and untouched, but the box (and the bags containing the remotes and such) had been torn to pieces.

This model already had £600 off, and they offered another £400 off for the trashed packaging, so an insanely good deal, taking most of the RRP of the price. Now, I love a Cave/AMI cardboard box, but I don't give two hoots about a TV's box.

I did a little research and the Sony TV (with the Triluminous display and such) has a fantastic reputation for upscaling 1080p content for it's 4K screen. Apparently rather than just linearly scale, it apparently uses some 'database interpolation' to upscale images.

So I took it.

So, compared to my crappy old HD TV, console gaming (PS4/Xbox One) does look tremendous on this TV. Sunset Overdrive in particular looks bloody glorious in the thick of the action... but it's really the screen vibrancy and such I'm taking benefit of, and good upscaling, rather than 4K. But certainly, I'm very impressed by how well it handles 1080p console content.

In terms of films, which we bought it for, Blu-ray content looks lovely, and the limited 4K content I have access to is bloody insane. My wife works in TV/video/film, and has seen much camera/processing/broadcasting technology and hardware in the industry move to 4K, so it seems like it's coming.

Tonight I will try throwing retro gaming through it (original hardware direct into the component/composite/Scart ports, and an HDMI Retron5, and old stuff including Jamma PCBs via a scanline generator) and let you all know. I'll also through my PS3 and 360 through it.

I'm not too techy with this kind of stuff, but I'll report in my perspective.

It will always be second to my Sony PVM, of course, which is my prime retro gaming TV.

And if 4K doesn't stick, my set seems to do 1080p tremendously, and I paid what you'd normally pay for a low-to-mid range 1080p HD TV.

[gray117]

^ Well that sound like one hell of a deal... there's no doubt there's some nice screens but nothing I'd spend extra for gaming on... though if you're spadgy you apparently more or less get them handed to you

Not sure what to make of this but you should be aware that the best plasmas are FAR superior to the best LCDs in most all of the most important areas of picture quality-- contrast, color reproduction, off angle viewing (this is a HUGE one), screen uniformity, and motion. This is no secret, almost any videophile will admit this.

As far as the phosphors resulting in a soft image, thats simply not true. It is true that affordable technology to bring them to 4K is just not there.

Don't get me wrong I still even have a plasma, and I'm one who sees the flicker (light images) and colour flashes/shadows (high contrast+fast moving images)... 144hz or many sets - same thing - I believe it's because image is lit sequentially in plasmas (different to phosphor trails which usually disappear with use)... if you're unlucky you see it - it seems almost perceptual, some see mostly blue, some mostly green, some inbetween with a yellowy, sometimes different between makes/models, more pronounced for some, less so for others... for myself it's usually a green and it's a bit like when you get ghosting from a camera flash - only doesn't last and I only see it occassionally.

Here's a likely exaggerated (old model) example of how plasmas seem to make their image:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMlpl7AmvNo

As opposed to his example of an oled display refreashing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54E3uUEryZM


It has great depth and colour, but every display type has some compromise. Dithering/dot crawl and image retention, accuracy/flaring with large bright images vary across plasma models, but these issues with these have never been eliminated from plasmas, even if their effect is negligible - especially for most film-like content in a darkened environment.

In general a slightly softer image certainly seems true imho (and I'm not talking about picture enhancement after the fact) - it's not a huge concern at the typical sizes/distance of plasma screens but don't seem to hold up to the kind of performance you get from some other displays when you're up closer or on anything smaller than 50 inch ...

... Now this might have just been down to relative dot pitch sizes and may compare less/more favorably depending on what lcd you compare this too. And this might be fixable, but that development/manufacturing has never been acheived, perhaps simply due to prohibitive costs (and as a result not worth it at all for larger screens), and it has now reached critical levels with 4k/retina like resolutions... especially if you were to even consider smaller screens...

It's sad it sounds like even 1080p plasmas will disappear, but there you have the shortcomings of plasma when you look to further strides in picture quality - certainly a consumer best by most measures right now, but not for all, and was hampered in some areas.

[Seraphic]

Speaking of 4k in relation to gaming and depending on the scaler, how would upscaling 480p/720p (maybe even 1080p too) to 4k then back to 1080p look?
I hear it really can help to improve picture quality and recall NVidia having such a feature on the PC drivers.

[Xan]

Sounds pointless because upscaling adds information that wasn't there in the source signal, then downsampling removes said information again. Nvidia's DSR works by actually rendering the game in a higher resolution (up to 4K), then downscaling to native panel resolution and applying a Gaussian filter. Only 4K looks really sharp on a 1080p monitor though, most other factors tend to look a bit dirty/blurred, with the uneven scaling being obvious on vertical lines.

[gray117]

Speaking of 4k in relation to gaming and depending on the scaler, how would upscaling 480p/720p (maybe even 1080p too) to 4k then back to 1080p look?
I hear it really can help to improve picture quality and recall NVidia having such a feature on the PC drivers.

Maybe if only because the quick downscale is better than the rough/quick upscale... But it's slightly bonkers to go about it this way: You're still likely to see better performance from clean multiples and then a slight fudge if needed to full screen... Especially with a smaller source image.

The nvidia trick is different - to render a massive image straight away and then scale that source image down - at speed it's quicker/more accurate for them to do this than spend a lot of computing performance on a lot of sub pixel calculations (at a certain point you'll be taking more samples than even a low sampled 4k image and it probably is still more of a guess/fudge than that 4k image would be). ... what's more they might have a nifty pipeline has optionsfor only doing this on geometry/diffuse/normals but not for lighting or emissions such other elements - i.e. only spending this resource where it has the most benefits per pass/frame... although afaik it's just a full frame thing atm...

[Lord of Pirates]

DSR is a quick way to get super sampling even when you normally couldn't, I don't think it serves much purpose other than that and being able to take higher resolution screenshots.

[gray117]

DSR is a quick way to get super sampling even when you normally couldn't, I don't think it serves much purpose other than that and being able to take higher resolution screenshots.

No it can do relative wonders all kinds of things... but it is all relative - it's much more of a details orientated thing - yes your oblique/angled textures in particular will look better (I noticed this particularly with wolfenstein's floors recently where their sampling seemed to be a bit quick and dirty and not apparently exposed in the options... which kind of made the best of a bad situation), but were you generally noticing this or were you generally noticing that a texture here and there could simply be a higher resolution to begin with, and that shader could be more distinct to a certain material, or those LODs pushed further back or your frame rate just dropped etc?

... and like 4k is the overhead worth it at the moment? I don't know, I only tried it a handful of times, it's impressive enough that it works at speed tbh ... there's some bombast though - you have them claiming it'll do wonders for your shadows for example, but what typically would do more wonders for shadows in most games is if you could afford to compute a higher shadow map to begin with, or better lighting models... even the cascading ones... Mind you if you're part of the sli bunch, maxing out available detail and looking for more however you kind find it; then there's no reason not to love it.

[Thomago]

As many modern games don't support any decent anti aliasing and forcing high quality anti aliasing via the GPU driver more often than not fails, DSR is a godsent. I wouldn't want to miss it.

[SGGG2]

Speaking of 4k in relation to gaming and depending on the scaler, how would upscaling 480p/720p (maybe even 1080p too) to 4k then back to 1080p look?
I hear it really can help to improve picture quality and recall NVidia having such a feature on the PC drivers.

As others have pointed out it won't accomplish anything. nVidia's DSR is a fantastic alternative to anti-aliasing for PC games. I mostly play in 3D on a passive display where it's of little use (passive blanks half the vertical lines in each eye), enabling soft interlacing in Tridef provides the same result.

[Xan]

DSR is certainly great at reducing overall temporal noise in the image, though I find that it doesn't eliminate aliasing on polygon edges as well as other methods (relative to performance cost). Compared to the classic sparse grid modes which have been in drivers for years, there is also the issue of smaller UI elements that comes with rendering in a higher resolution. I find some of the newer shader based methods like TXAA can look similar to supersampling at times while only costing a fraction of performance.

[Xan]

Just wound up stumbling across this article, which fits the earlier framerate talk well; Mario Kart 8 apparently runs at 59 FPS most of the time.

[Bahn Yuki]

Thought I'd chime in here, I picked up 3 Vizio P Series 4K TVs. a 70" which has my PC connected to it and 2 50" models. I placed my PS3(HDMI) and modded XBOX 1(Component) both sending it 720p and it's absolutely stunning. For the 70" I have my PC with 2 x 980TI (HDMI 2.0) and it's by far the best IQ I have in my home. Playing SFV beta this weekend in 4K really shows the great art direction Capcom placed in this new game. As for response times I use HDMI 5 as you get 4K@60hz or 1080p@120hz. Input delay is around 18ms which is a little over a frame.

[Laughingman.s9]

Do any scalers go up to 2160p?

I'm not really interested in scalers unless they can match my display for 1:1 pixel mapping.

Gefen VGA to DVI scaler plus can do 2K, that's as high as I've seen from the more popular hardware scalers used for retro gaming

[Smashbro29]

This weekend I headed off to get a 1080p HD TV. My old one is knackered and was always a bit hideous.

Then as I was talking to the guy at the store, a customer returned a 4K TV... they clearly had too little time and plenty of money... they'd accidentally bought completely the wrong model. It was returned having never been used... the TV was still in its internal packaging and untouched, but the box (and the bags containing the remotes and such) had been torn to pieces.

This model already had £600 off, and they offered another £400 off for the trashed packaging, so an insanely good deal, taking most of the RRP of the price. Now, I love a Cave/AMI cardboard box, but I don't give two hoots about a TV's box.

I did a little research and the Sony TV (with the Triluminous display and such) has a fantastic reputation for upscaling 1080p content for it's 4K screen. Apparently rather than just linearly scale, it apparently uses some 'database interpolation' to upscale images.

So I took it.

So, compared to my crappy old HD TV, console gaming (PS4/Xbox One) does look tremendous on this TV. Sunset Overdrive in particular looks bloody glorious in the thick of the action... but it's really the screen vibrancy and such I'm taking benefit of, and good upscaling, rather than 4K. But certainly, I'm very impressed by how well it handles 1080p console content.

In terms of films, which we bought it for, Blu-ray content looks lovely, and the limited 4K content I have access to is bloody insane. My wife works in TV/video/film, and has seen much camera/processing/broadcasting technology and hardware in the industry move to 4K, so it seems like it's coming.

Tonight I will try throwing retro gaming through it (original hardware direct into the component/composite/Scart ports, and an HDMI Retron5, and old stuff including Jamma PCBs via a scanline generator) and let you all know. I'll also through my PS3 and 360 through it.

I'm not too techy with this kind of stuff, but I'll report in my perspective.

It will always be second to my Sony PVM, of course, which is my prime retro gaming TV.

And if 4K doesn't stick, my set seems to do 1080p tremendously, and I paid what you'd normally pay for a low-to-mid range 1080p HD TV.

That is a good deal but that you would use a retron at all makes me wary of your opinion.

[tacoguy64]

I'm waiting for 4k OLED monitors with a refresh rate of more than 120hz.

[broken harbour]

I don't understand how a manufacturer could screw up upscaling on a 4K tv.

2160 = 720x3 or 1080x2.

How hard is that? So if you're already using a Framemeister or similar device that's already outputting 720p or 1080p, I would assume it would look good on a 2160p set.


* I probably don't understand how it works, someone explain it to me if I'm wrong.

[Galgomite]

Just a reply to the original question:
G-sync/ FreeSync 4k TVs (or at least monitors) will be excellent for emulators and next-gen scalers. We'll have timing, tearing and lag problems solved, and crt emulation will be better than ever. However, this appears to be years away. There isn't a 4k scaler in sight, most emulators still don't support adaptive framerates, and I don't know of a 4k 32" display with gsync yet. From all I hear HDMI is not about to support adaptive sync either, even though Sony should be pushing this for the sake of game consoles.
There are 4k tvs with low input lag (Vizio and Samsung's I think), and I'm sure they're great experiences if you're in the market, but I think there's no sense in retro gaming on a 4k tv just yet.

[Bahn Yuki]

https://youtu.be/ZIFctARbOvY

[Stevens]

Thanks for posting that video BY. Answered the questions about a DC on a 4K.

[Bahn Yuki]

Thanks for posting that video BY. Answered the questions about a DC on a 4K.

Yeah I did whole bunch of videos regarding gaming on today's tvs. I'm going to do another one soon when I get back from los Angeles detailing my new epson 2045 projector.

[tacoguy64]

Hey Bahn Yuki,

Is this the exxact model reciever you are talking about?
http://www.onkyousa.com/Products/model. ... s=Receiver

And great to hear about the SCART to HDMI converter working for you. I was under the impression that they add a bunch of input lag. Nice 4k set up.

[neorichieb1971]

Is now a good time to go 4k where TV's are concerned?

I'm supposed to upgrade early next year but not sure if 4k has stabilized with standards. I think the TV's released in June 2015 were supposed to be standardized spec.

[Xyga]

Many broadcast and even physical release sources aren't up to 1080p standards yet, so what are 4K standards ?

I bet we're still far from that, you'd better wait and save a bit more and get your 4K in mother OLED glory in a year or two, this is what will count, not whatver marketing agreement BS manufacturers will come with some day.

PS: every brand and model has its own upscaling zimba zumba, this is what 4K is about anyway, as real 4K sources are only just a gimmick. It'll be reality in 10~15 years, maybe.

[FinalBaton]

I fully agree with Xyga

I really don't think that 4K tv is a must buy right now
Pretty much nothing runs at that resolution right now, except some pc games

Most consoles games can't keep a steady 60fps at 1080p, so where a couple years away, at the earliest, from 4K on consoles.

Most broadcast stuff is in 720p still

Might as well wait for when that format will actually be exploited. Wait a couple years, is my advice