| To anyone has a slightly older Mac and thinking about getting a 4k screen: DON'T. 4k is not supported on many older models. Check your official specs. Most Macs has max 1440p@60hz output. 4k is only supported @ 30hz, which is no good for daily usage.
And the main problem is, if you get a 4k monitor( to future proof your setup), and try to use it at 1440p, everything will be blurry and pixels will shift and distort. Just get a native 1440p monitor. If you have a never Mac, getting a 4k 27" monitor may still be a bad idea. Since 4k is too much for a 27" screen, you will need to use scaling in Mac options, and ideally set it to "looks like 1440p" But this will cause your mac to do 1.5 scaling and create a burden in your GPU and CPU. It will render everything doubled at 5k and try to scale it to 4k. If you're using a Macbook, your fans will never stop even on idle. This is even worse performance than getting a 5k monitor and using it native 2x scaled, which is easy on GPU. One side note; there is no USB-C Hub that offer 4k@60hz output, technically not possible. You have to get a separate hdmi or dp adapter, or an expensive Thunderbolt 3 dock. But there are some usb-c to hdmi or dp adapters which also offers Power Delivery. I've already wasted money and time figuring this out, so you don't have to :) |
From a pragmatic standpoint you'll need a gpu that supports display port 1.2 or hdmi 2.0 or thunderbold / usb-c, and at least 1GB of vram as many operating systems take up to roughly 900MB of vram to run a desktop at 4k. Firefox and Chrome can run fine on 100MB of vram (even Youtube at full 60fps at 100MB of vram is fine), but they really want around 500MB of vram to breath, so 2GB is a good safe minimum for having a lot of windows open at 4k.
The 2015 MBP has 2GB of vram and supports display port 1.2.