Graphics are important; after all they are the first thing anyone will see in a game. With all this talk about texture resolutions, anti-aliasing, and framerate, people have forgotten an important aspect of visuals, the resolution. Current popular resolutions vary from 720p (1280×720) to 1080p (1920×1080), the former mostly being Xbox One and Wii U titles with the latter being mostly PC with some PS4 and Xbox One titles. However, with recent improvements and price drops in graphics hardware, most notably the release of Nvidia’s 970 GPU, developers have begun adding in more and more support for what people are hoping is the next standard resolution, 4K (3840×2160), AKA Ultra High-Definition.
eOn our TVs, monitors, phones, etc. the screens are just a bunch of small squares, each square contains a color that, when put together, generate a picture.
Resolution is just how many of these squares, called pixels, are on the display. The more pixels there are on screen, the better looking games become, think
of it as trying to create a picture with lego, the more pieces you have, the more details the final product can have.
Console gamers shouldn’t hold their breath though, the current gen struggles to output at 1080p, 60FPS, let alone 4K at all. PC gamers can rejoice however, as the 4K resolution is already upon them.
Not even PC gamers have it all easy, a graphics card capable of running 4K games at acceptable framerates will cost hundreds of dollars to buy, and that’s not even counting the other components to ensure the system doesn’t get bottlenecked or the monitors that start from $500. Even with the money, PC gamers will have to sacrifice the framerates they’ve come to cherish, with many HDMI displays incapable of displaying 4K resolutions at higher than 30 frames per second, the most being 60 if the player decides to use the
DisplayPort interface instead of HDMI.
Outside of gaming, 4K poses its own problems, mainly a lack of support due to not being mainstream. When any new technology, whether it be 1080p or Blu-Rays, was first introduced, their main problem soon became a lack of support due to the industry not seeing high adoption rates. Currently, you’d be hard pressed to find much content, whether it be wallpapers, movies, YouTube videos, or even games outside of major blockbusters that support 4K resolution natively. Here, we can see a screenshot of a newly installed copy of Windows 7 suffering from this issue.
Microsoft never anticipated people to use 4K in the Windows 7 lifespan, and as a result, the menus and icons do not scale up to 4K and cause the system to be rather difficult to use, especially for those with impaired vision. Don’t forget that the low resolution icons probably wouldn’t scale very pleasantly into 4K either.
Those concerned about the future of high definition displays shouldn’t be too worried, 4K isn’t dead, its just taking its baby steps. HDTV took decades to grow into popularity and 4K will take a while too, maybe not a decade, but equipment needed to display 4K would have to get much cheaper than it currently is for consumers to adopt the format and trigger a response from content providers to actually produce their movies and games in 4K to meet the rising demand. This is especially true for the avid PC gaming crowd who would want to run their games in 4K at 60-120 frames per second, hardware that even now, is hard to come by.
Marketing research company, ABI has anticipated the market for 4K displays to be rather slow until 2017, where 5% of household TVs will be 4K, doubling to 10% the following year. This is great news for fans of 4K, since Tawain-based research firm, WitsView reported that 6-7% of the current TV market is made up of 4K TVs, an adoption rate that was much greater than anticipated and could mean great things for the future of 4K, if the price and quality of graphics hardware can catch up in time.
People might say that 4K (millions of pixels) is unnecessary, and while that may be true while the cost is so high, when the costs go down, people and content producers alike will start adopting the format, and that’s when the real progress in graphics will start. It’ll take a while, at least several years so don’t go and throw out your monitors and rigs just yet, but once it starts getting affordable, the 4K market is one you’re definitely going to want to watch out for.
