[emu]

I love using a 32" 8k monitor for working with text/code. To me, as a software engineer who stares at code all day, higher quality text rendering is sufficient justification for 8k.

I tried playing a few games at 8k (just for fun) and found that it simply wasn't worth the frame rate hit, or really even that noticeable an improvement with the assets in the games I tried.

One nice property of 8k resolutions is that they have an integer scaling factor from both 4k (2x) and 1440p (3x), so if you have an 8k monitor you can play games at either of those resolutions with high quality scaling.

[zepolen]

Is 8k really noticeable vs 4k for text?

[emu]

Yes, the difference between 4k and 8k text is easily noticeable for a 32" monitor, and I'm not particularly eagle-eyed. Text is sharper and finer details are better rendered. For videos and images I don't notice the difference in practice.

I had a 4k 32" monitor at work and found that it simply didn't give sharp, high resolution text, driven by either a Macbook or by a Linux box. And you wouldn't really expect that, either: a 4k 32" monitor is only ~140dpi, which is only marginally higher resolution than the ~100dpi screens we had for many years.

I think the best point of comparison for the Dell UP3218k monitor which I have is a Retina Macbook Pro screen: subjectively, it's a similar experience in terms of text sharpness and legibility (>200 DPI, glossy), just in a 32" form factor.

I suspect 8k at 32" is actually a bit higher resolution than necessary (~280dpi), but there's nothing else on the >30" high resolution monitor market other than Apple's 6k display, which is significantly more expensive.

Be aware that there's no Mac OS support for 8k displays, but Linux and Windows on a desktop with a reasonably modern NVidia GPU work great.

[steffan]

I have a 32" 4K monitor and the text quality is noticeably worse than on my Macbook Pro w/ Retina display and my iPad Pro. The dpi on the UP3218K is actually higher than my iPad (280 vs 264 iirc). That will likely be my next monitor unless another manufacturer introduces a 30-32" 8K monitor in the next few months.

[galkk]

Not OP, but I use 4k 43" (larger diagonal) and I'm certain that on 43" it'll be noticeable