So I was drooling a bit at this monitor over the weekend.
http://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-U28D590-Display-3840x2160-Monitor/dp/B00IY66YRU/ref=sr_1_cc_2?s=aps&srs=2530035011&ie=UTF8&qid=1406572855&sr=8-2-catcorr&keywords=uhd+28"+samsung
I'm trying to determine exactly what i need to make this worth a purchase. I'm currently running 1900x1200 resolution on a 24" Dell monitor with a 630 nvidia card that came with my current desktop. It handles games at that resolution quite well, but I know its not going to handle a UHD by itself. I've tried to do some research on what minimal card i would need to make buying the monitor worthwhile but its not really something that benchmark tests really go into unless they are for the super high end cards. I'm looking for something around the 250 max investment range if i was going to buy the monitor, so the question is, is that high enough or am i dreaming without waiting for the technology to drop in price.
Thanks
Stercus, Stercus, Stercus, Morituri Sum
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For $250, you'd be looking at the Radeon R9 280 or Geforce GTX 760, though if you're happy with how a GT 630 does at 19x12, maybe you could live with one of those at 4K.
Other options include windowed mode, go dual and keep gaming on your current monitor, etc.
And, of course, you still have to ask yourself if it's worth getting a 4K display if you're going to run everything in 1080p anyway.
not to mention that as resolution scales up, so do VRAM requirements. for 4K you'll want 4GB VRAM minimum, 8GB preferred (notice how there's not a single card out there with 8GB of VRAM....)
Registered just for the Mass Effect threads | Steam: click ^^^ | Origin: curlyhairedboy
The cards are good, but sli/crossfire support is never where it should be.
I sometimes run games at 2500 just because UIs and other features don't scale well at 4k.
IMO, you are better off waiting until you can find a powerful single card that can game at 4k, and wait for a more mature monitor.
Even for productivity I wasn't super impressed because it's hard to configure multiple apps on a single hi res screen - I had a much better experience with two 2500 monitors.
I'm OK with it because I have a $1200 annual home office budget that I bought it from, but I def. would wait if you're spending your own money.
I've currently got two of the 280x's in crossfire and even on that I'm hesitant to try as I don't think it will really be worth it. I'd say stick with 2500
Yeah, my Dell 2408 got a purple line on the screen for several months before it bit it.
There is a single card out that can game at 4k. It costs $3000, but it exists!
That is also slightly larger then the down payment I just put on a car
...do it
They only go to 2xSLI. Two GPUS on each card for a total of four maximum.
Of course that single card cost almost 40% more than I spent on my entire rig last year (3930K w/ 180mm closed loop cooler, Rampage IV mobo, 32GB 1866MHz RAM, 1000W Corsair PSU, Maingear Shift chassis, 480GB M500 SSD, 2TB WD Black HDD, originally had a 4GB 770GTX got the Titan later)
~ Buckaroo Banzai
Or keep it as a spare for when one of the other two eventually catches fire!
Or I can get two 780ti and get the same performance for $1300 :P
Hence, the $3000 video card. We should all SLI two of them!
? It has 8GB, with 4 GB per gpu. Seems legit. Plus that link I gave has them testing it at 4k/UHD and it gets 60+ fps in several titles, while beating the titan Z in almost all of the tests. Dual R9 295x2's can almost certainly run all titles at 4k/UHD no problem. You might get into a little bit of trouble for something like a heavily modded skyrim but that is sort of an edge case.
In all honestly something like tri sli'd 780ti's or titan blacks is probably the best and cheapest way to get decent 4k/UHD game play.
*"Only" he says, when referring to 4gb of VRAM.
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/180402-five-things-to-know-about-4k-gaming-were-glitching-our-way-to-gaming-nirvana
In an SLI setup, only one of the cards RAM is used, the bridge acts as a link between the tertiary GPUS and the primary card's RAMBUS.
And 4 gigs of RAM is heaps for 1920x1080/1920x1200, enough even for up to 1600p. But 4K? That's stretching it pretty hard, especially for newer games.
Why do you think 4 gigs per gpu is stretching it at 4k/UHD? Everything I've seen so far has indicated that a single 295x2 can run pretty much everything fine, and most reviews I've seen have shown sli'd 780ti's with 3GB per gpu being almost enough.
WRONG!
In multi GPU the frame buffer is loaded into both cards. So both cards are using all their VRAM, but it doesn't double since the same information is loaded into both, it's not just loading into one card.
I've got two PC's on my LAN with dual 780ti's and one with dual Titans, I can eat more than 3gb of VRAM and even 4 fully cranked. Games like say Watch Dogs (among a few others) do better on the 8 core xeon, 64gb, dual Titan Black box by leaps and bounds. The kicker is that if you max out VRAM you go to system RAM, this isn't going to really tank "average FPS" but it will cause stuttering to hell and back when it has to do it. If you're doing 3/4gb the game will work fine till things get heavy and then it stutters like an old NES on Contra, that's a bug not a feature.
Turns out it's not as hard to explain as I thought. I tend to go into far too much detail...
You aren't off there. It would take pages to fully describe what's going on in SLI. But it doesn't take much to clear up why SLI doesn't double up on VRAM like it doubles up on GPUs.