1080 image on 2K & 4K Monitors

[SmokeDarKnight]

Hey guys,

I'm looking at 4K and 2K monitors but just wanted to know what happens and how it looks when you put a 1080 image onto a 4K or 2K monitor? Does it look blurry or stretched etc.

I'd like to play games at 4K but if i was playing a game that i would prefer frame rate over resolution would it look bad playing a 1080 game on one of these monitors?

Any advise would be appreciated.

 

[nathanjrb]

Hey guys,

I'm looking at 4K and 2K monitors but just wanted to know what happens and how it looks when you put a 1080 image onto a 4K or 2K monitor? Does it look blurry or stretched etc.

I'd like to play games at 4K but if i was playing a game that i would prefer frame rate over resolution would it look bad playing a 1080 game on one of these monitors?

Any advise would be appreciated.

Well I imagine it will look a little less sharp as the pixels are 'larger'. I don't think it will look TOO bad anyway, certainly not on a 2k screen. Plus 4k is around the corner anyway so you won't have put up with it for long

 

[Wozza63]

You can look at consoles for the kind of effect an upscaled resolution has.

For me resolution and frames are the most important things. As long as I can play the game at native res (1080p for me) and 60fps then I don't care what settings I'm playing at. Of course I like to have higher settings when the game runs well on my card/laptop GPU.

 

[SmokeDarKnight]

Yeah fair point wozza about the consoles. I'm doing it out of curiosity more than anything. Was running AC Unity at 4k last night and capped it to 30 and it was running pretty smooth. Its an expensive experiment but didn't want to get a 4k monitor then not enjoy it at 1080 when I needed it. I could go 2k and meet it in the middle I guess.

 

[Wozza63]

If you aren't too bothered about graphical settings then that 980 shouldn't have any problems performing at 4k. But I definitely wouldn't expect Ultra out of many new games.

 

[ricbai]

The majority of the time, I have my AOC U2868PQU 4k monitor set to 2560x1440 instead of the 4k 3840x2160. Why? Well, Windows is just a bit too small on 4k (increasing the text display ratio/DPI up to "Larger - 150%" stops some games [such as Starcraft] from working correctly!) and I get a reasonable tradeoff between frame rate and resolution. Hopefully when Windows 10 comes out with DirectX12 (which, alledgely, is already supported by the GTX 980), I'll be able to make better use of the 4k features.

 

[SmokeDarKnight]

If you aren't too bothered about graphical settings then that 980 shouldn't have any problems performing at 4k. But I definitely wouldn't expect Ultra out of many new games.

I can get Assassins greed to run at 30 fps 4K on ultra. Black flag about 50s so i think it might be something worth getting, just wish i could try it first. Should try some more games and see how it goes i guess, Assassins creed cames are pretty poorly optimised.

 

[SmokeDarKnight]

The majority of the time, I have my AOC U2868PQU 4k monitor set to 2560x1440 instead of the 4k 3840x2160. Why? Well, Windows is just a bit too small on 4k (increasing the text display ratio/DPI up to "Larger - 150%" stops some games [such as Starcraft] from working correctly!) and I get a reasonable tradeoff between frame rate and resolution. Hopefully when Windows 10 comes out with DirectX12 (which, alledgely, is already supported by the GTX 980), I'll be able to make better use of the 4k features.

Cool that sounds pretty good. I'll maybe head out tomorrow and see what i can find. Fair point about direct x 12

 

[Karnor00]

Putting a 1080 image on a 4k screen will still look very sharp. That's because the 4k screen has exactly twice the resolution of 1080 - it means each 1080 pixel will be converted to exactly 4 pixels on the 4k screen.

However putting a 1080 image on a 2k screen won't look as sharp. That's because the image needs to be stretched a bit. Taking the width for example, 1080 pixels will be converted to 1536 pixels on the 2k screen. Which means each 1080 resolution pixel needs to be spread across 1.42 pixels on the 2k screen. However in reality they have to either take up 1 or 2 pixels width, and will never look quite perfect.

That's the reason that flat screens need to run in their native resolution (or an exact multiple of their native resolution) in order to look really crisp.

 

[mantadog]

Yeah a 4k screen is way better of you want to scale content from 1080p for the reason stated by karnor above. Go for the 4k screen and at worst a 1920x1080p pixel is the same size as four 4k pixels so it will just look the same as it would on a 1080p display. presuming the scaler doesn't mess things up but I guess if you buy a decent one it will be fine.

 

[SlimCini]

Out of curiosity... a GPU would have to work harder running 1080p on a 4k screen than 1080p on a 1080p screen wouldn't it? Given the card still has to actually process 4 times as many pixels, but just fill in four at once with the same colour? Or is that not true?

 

[nathanjrb]

Good question! I have no idea!

 

[steaky360]

I wouldn't have thought so, I think its the monitor that scales the image not the PC, I could be totally wrong about that though.

 

[SmokeDarKnight]

Hmm im not even sure if its the monitor because some monitors would give you a warning that the image was not optimized for the display, like when you overclock the refresh rate perhaps

 

[Mordant]

It's got to be the monitor - think about it you've set the display resolution in Windows/the game and so the graphics card is rendering and outputting at the resolution and the monitor is responsible for scaling if the supplied resolution is not it's naive resolution.

 

[mantadog]

It would be the monitor that handles that aspect, as far as your GPU is concerned your asking it to output 2073600 pixels at a resolution of 1920 x 1080 which is exactly what it does. You monitor receives those pixels and realises it's not what it was expecting so it does the leg work to make the changes required to get the best viewing experience.

 

[Tom DWC]

Can't speak for how games scale but I have to say I watch a lot of 1080p shows/film on my 1440p screen and I can't say I can detect any noticeable quality loss.

 

[steaky360]

I don't notice any quality loss using a 1920x1080 resolution image/video/game/etc. on my 4k display Looks great to my eyes (but I do wear glasses.... so that could be it )