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by Refusing23 534 days ago
Seems kinda silly to make an 8K video card when ... nobody on the planet has an 8K screen
3 comments

Perhaps you don't, but several of us do. They've been around a while, available in your local bestbuy/costco if you're rocking a 4:4:4 TV they're not even particularly pricey and great for computing (depending on the subpixel layout).

On the planet? Many people. Maybe you're thinking 12K or 16K.

It's been a few years since I worked at [big tech retailer], but 8K TVs basically didn't sell at the time. There was basically no native content - even the demos were upscaled 4K - and it was very hard to tell the difference between the two unless you were so close to the screen that you couldn't see the whole thing. For the content that was available, either you were dealing with heavy compression or setting up a high-capacity server, since file sizes basically necessitated most of the space on what people would consider a normal-sized hard drive to store just a few movies.

The value just wasn't there and probably won't ever be for most use cases. XR equipment might be an exception, video editing another.

I got 4K TVs for both of my kids, they're dirt cheap-- sub $200. I'm surprised the Steam hardware survey doesn't show more. A lot of my friends also set their kids up on TVs, and you can't hardly buy a 1080P TV anymore.
Does Steam hardware survey show the resolution of your usual desktop, or your gaming resolution? eg I run at 4k in Windows normally, but quite often run games at 1080p.
I'd bet it's either the native display resolution or whatever you had for your desktop when submitted. They're able to gather all kinds of hardware specs so I'd lean to the native resolution as the most likely answer.
2018 (6 years ago): https://www.techradar.com/reviews/dell-ultrasharp-up3218k

It's uncommon, sure, but as mentioned it was sold to me as being a development board for future resolutions.

> Seems kinda silly to make a 4K video card when ... nobody on the planet has a 4K screen.

Someone else probably said that years ago when everyone was rocking 1080/1440p screens.

If you look at the Steam hardware survey you’ll find the majority of gamers are still rocking 1080p/1440p displays.

What gamers look for is more framerate not particularly resolution. Most new gaming monitors are focusing on high refresh rates.

8K feels like a waste of compute for a very diminished return compared to 4K. I think 8K only makes sense when dealing with huge displays, I’m talking beyond 83 inches, we are still far from that.

Gaming aside, 4K is desirable even on <30" displays, and honestly I wouldn't mind a little bit more pixel density there to get it to true "retina" resolution. 6K might be a sweet spot?

Which would then imply that you don't need a display as big as 83" to see the benefits from 8K. Still, we're talking about very large panels here, of the kind that wouldn't even fit many computer desks, so yeah...

First consumer 4K monitors came out more than a decade ago. I think the Asus PQ321 in 2013. That’s close to where we are now with 8K.

How many of the cards of that time would you call “4K cards”? Even the Titan X that came a couple of years later doesn’t really cut it.

There’s such a thing as being too early to the game.

Gaming isn't the only use-case, but Steam hardware survey says ~4% of users are using 4k screens. So the market is still small.