All other postprocessing off except bloom and light shafts (personal preference, not sure if it affects FPS at all)
Grass Density and Foliage Distance to High
I get 60fps or very close to (maybe 57-60) most of the time, except when it rains which for some reason drops it to 50. Why is raining so costly?
Despite the turn-downs I think it looks virtually the same as ultra. I canāt tell the difference on AA at 4k, I canāt tell the difference with SSAO (maybe itās just me), and I personally donāt think the extra detail in shadows is worth much. I play with a 1080p monitor next to the 4k, and playing at that res on ultra looks fine, but itās night/day difference with the 4k in my view.
Oh most definitely, but it depends on the source material. There are alot of 4k myths on the internet from my experience, and I bet most of them are spread by people who have never owned one. My impressions of a 4k monitor with a 1080 video cardā¦
Some caveats:
Applications can look crisper, but it wonāt exactly change the way you look at Windows.
1080p games and blu ray look a touch worse, donāt listen to the people that say ā1080p will look identical on 4k as itās exactly 4x the sizeā.
Photos taken from a consumer camera will most of the time look pretty similar, even if their resolution is at or above 3820x2160.
Now some good stuff:
Professional photographs and high-res CG look alot crisper, itās really nice. The wallpaper I have at the moment is of Pluto taken from NASAs satellite cameras and it looks incredible. I have read some people say 4k photos are like looking through a window, and I think thatās a nice metaphor.
4k youtube looks great. Sometimes you canāt tell much difference from 1080p but just as often itās a clear difference.
4k high-bit rate stuff, as rare as they are (afaik thereās no way to watch 4k blu rays on the pc yet), look incredible.
Games:
At 27" one of the worries was GUI scaling and other issues. For a few older games it can be a problem, but then you can always play them at 1080p. But to my surprise most games that are still active have patched in support or already had support for GUI scaling at higher resolutions (even before 4k monitors became a thing).
Older games that are 3d may or may not look better. Some games donāt look very different from 1080p to me, such as DiRT 3 and others.
Newer games that arenāt graphically intensive, such as indie games, can still look really nice. 4k gives everything a crispness that can really improve immersion. Itās almost like watching a game in 3d, the extra clarity gives everything additional depth.
Newer games that are graphically intensive are fab. Witcher 3 at 4k, which I keep going on about here and other threads, is head and shoulders the best looking game I have ever seen. Thereās many games I have yet to try at 4k, I only recently got the 1080, but I am excited to give them all a go.
With all that said, your eyes adjust to some extent to the new standard. Going back to 1080p resolution for games have become hard for me, it just doesnāt look good anymore. A bit like what happened with DVDs after moving to blu ray.
I donāt understand this. I mean I agree, I see the same thing, even when I verified a pixel perfect matchup on the TV. No scaling.
So I am just holding off on upgrading my main gaming monitor until I can get a 4k capable card because 1080p on a 4k leaves something to be desired for reasons.
I really like my 1080. But from everything Iāve read itās unrealistic to expect the current generation cards to do 4k at reasonable speeds with good detail. Still to 1080p and youāll probably be happier overall IMO.
Not at all. The 1080 and Titan XP GPUs can absolutely do 4k at high detail. They just canāt max out everything and also hit 60fps in graphically intensive modern games.
I think there is a gap here in what constitutes āgoodā for people.
To me, good would be high settings, not ultra with 60 fps fairly stable. (50-60) I think that with the 1080, you can expect 4k at medium-to-high settings at 60 or near 60 fps for most games, but not all.
And I have said this like 1000 times, that the GTX1080 isnāt going to be your 4K card, if you are expecting maxed out settings, or high settings in all games, or future proofing for next yearās titles. It is the only āaffordableā 4K capable card out there, but it isnāt a world beater at 650 bucks. I will continue to advise people to wait for the Ti. (which looks to be rumored to be a half step below the Titan X)
You can definitely tweak settings to get the GTX1080 to work at 4K, for sure. But I think people expect the 650$ card to just annihilate everything, and this card doesnāt do that at 4K. 1440p, hell yeah, VR games, hell yeah. But 4K, it is just serviceable.
This is kinda horseshit though because several of the āUltraā game settings most people would not be able to see the difference in side by side screenshots, and they can affect perf wildly out of proportion to visual difference. Also some of these effects have a non linear scale with res, meaning the larger the screen buffer the slower they get.
It just depends. āAll setttings ultraā is a bit of a meaningless metric because extra pixels is sometimes a better trade off than marginally better looking pixels.
Browse these tweak guides for example. Which of these effects are even noticeable on ultra vs. the (sometimes) high perf cost?
TL;DR āultra or nothināā is a dumb world view. People canāt even reliably tell PS4 from Xbone and PC and those are huge differences relative to stupid little ultra shadows tweaks
I donāt know how good WoW is at taking advantage of more cores but I am guessing ānot veryā and you were probably maxing out the cores WoW was using.
While I would definitely not say that the age of 4k gaming is upon us, Iāve found that Iām making very minor compromises with a GTX 1080 to play just about everything released prior to 2016 (except Witcher 3). Iām very sensitive to 60Hz, so am optimizing around frame rate, and have only had to turn down shadows / SSAO and hardware AA to get there for everything that Iāve tried to play. Fallout 4 - just dropped down god rays and used TAA; BF4 - everything maxed; etc. These are very nice looking games at 4k.
So yeah, the 1080 isnāt ready to rock a showpiece like Witcher 3 or poorly optimized ports like Deus Ex:MD or The Division, and I donāt think the 1080ti will be able to either. But playing 95% of my library on a 42" 4k screen is a hell of an immersive experience, with very little taken away because I donāt have shadow distance maxed out.
Is MSI generally an OK brand? It seems like they announce a lot of stuff that takes forever to hit retail. Iāve got watches set for both B&H and Amazon for the Aegis X 1080 which has been listed since mid augustā¦
