Welcome to the revolution
The king is dead. Long live the king. After a few years when stereoscopic 3D ruled supreme as the next big thing in PC displays, it’s finally been usurped. High-DPI or high-resolution tech is the master of all it surveys, and that’s a very good thing indeed.
Stereoscopic 3D was only a big noise in PC visuals because the industry was frantically searching for something new to promote – something to pimp and generally shout about. Not that 3D is entirely worthless, but 3D based on silly goggles has for us always been a niche activity. It’s not the future of PC displays. But that’s exactly how we see the role of high-res technology. So far, the history of high-res in desktop PCs has been one of frustration.
Way back in 2006, Dell rolled out the glorious 3007WFP and its 2,560 x 1,600 pixel grid (ed: IBM launched the T221 back in 2001, with a resolution of 3,840 x 2400 pixels, higher than 4K). There was much rejoicing, but the harsh truth for a long while after was that little progress followed.
In the meantime, 1080p resolutions and fabulously high-DPI displays have become routine in smartphones. Tablets with four megapixels or more are commonplace. Even affordable laptops and lightweight Ultrabooks have managed to match or even outstrip that magisterial Dell panel.
4K is the real deal
So, it’s with much fanfare that we welcomed the first 4K PC monitors. Okay, they have price tags almost as preposterous as their pixel counts, but you’ve got to start somewhere. Likewise, it’s good to see that more and more monitor makers are offering 27in monitors with healthy 2,560 x 1,440 panels. Overall, it feels like we’re on our way again.
So that’s why the time is ripe for getting a feel for the state of play in properly high-resolution PC displays, but what’s available today? And will you have to make compromises in other areas in return for all those lovely pixels? There are plenty of other trends to keep up with in PC display tech. High refresh rate panels are gradually spreading out across the market, for instance.
BenQ, among others, is now offering LCD monitors with claimed flicker-free backlighting and Nvidia has its own ideas about how to enable seriously smooth frame rates, so it’s time to get pedantic about flat panels. We’ve been waiting an awfully long time, but it feels like the high resolution revolution is finally coming to the desktop PC.
Rehashing the revolution
To be clear, there have always been high resolution PCs. In fact, given a large enough budget, the PC has offered the highest screen resolutions of any technology from its inception. In recent years, however, the PC was increasingly being left behind by mobile devices in what you might called the mainstream high-DPI explosion.
Currently, by far the most common resolution for new desktop PC monitors is 1,920 x 1,080, which is the same pixel grid offered by most high-end smartphones with mere four or five-inch screens. Compare that to tablets and things only look worse.
The Apple iPad’s Retina upgrade arrived over a year and a half ago, bringing with it 2,048 x 1,536 pixels and setting off a resolution race. Today, you can buy a Google Nexus 10in tablet with a staggering native resolution of 2,560 x 1,600 pixels.
4K is here to stay
Aping Apple
Of course, smartphones and tablets aren’t PCs, so maybe that comparison isn’t fair. Problem is, laptop PCs and Ultrabooks have been getting in on the action, too. Once again, it was Apple that set the tone with the first MacBook Retina models and their bonkers 2,880 by 1,800 pixel 15-inch panels, again well over a year ago.
"That’s not a PC," you say? In hardware terms, a MacBook is a PC and will run Windows happily enough. Anyway, with the likes of Dell now producing 11in Ultrabooks with 2,560 x 1,440 pixel panels, you know that the high-resolution revolution has gone mainstream.
Moreover, much as it pains us to say it, we have Apple to thank for this burgeoning high-resolution revolution in digital devices. It was Apple that got high-res into the public consciousness with its Retina displays for tablets and phones.
Without those, at the very least, the revolution would have been much longer coming. The final piece of the broader display puzzle is, of course, the HDTV. Fair to say, it’s a little more immune to the influence of all things Apple, but even here, the next big thing is actually smaller pixels. 4K technology is beginning to build momentum.
Sharp Shooter
In case you’ve missed our coverage of 4K in TechRadar’s passim, it refers to the number of horizontal pixels – in this case 4,000. The number actually varies a little in practice. Unlike the 1080p standard, which is always 1,920 by 1,080 pixels, a 4K display might have slightly fewer than 4,000 horizontal pixels, or slightly more. The vertical pixel count varies too, but is typically around 2,100.
But the finer details don’t matter a great deal. Whether you’ve got 3,840 or 4,000 pixels, the overall result is still a panel with roughly four times as many pixels as a 1080p display. Four times the pixels, four times the visual detail.
The first 4K PC monitors arrived but at fairly eye-watering prices of around £3,000, but that is changing fairly rapidly. What’s more, the idea of using an HDTV as a PC monitor might actually make sense with 4K. Our thinking goes something like this.
With 1080p technology, a really big screen – say 40-inch and up – meant really big pixels. Fine when viewing from 10 feet away. Bad when it’s a PC monitor a foot and a half from your face. But a 40in 4K screen would have a pixel pitch as good as, or better than most current monitors. Food for thought.
High-res doldrums
Anyway, put all that together and you’ve got displays big and small going super high-res, and the PC trapped awkwardly in the middle. Fortunately, that’s beginning to change. Actually, we thought it was beginning to change back in 2006 when Dell rolled out the 2,560 x 1,600 30in 3007WFP, but 30in panels never really took off and aren’t a whole lot cheaper today than they were in 2006.
Instead, it’s the 27in 2,560 x 1,440 segment that’s finally giving the high-res monitor market a proper kick start. For a while, only one manufacturer was producing 27in high-res screens, namely LG. Sure, you could buy 27-inchers from plenty of monitor makers, but they all used the same panel. That’s not good, because a single supplier isn’t conducive to competitive pricing.
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Then Samsung came on board, and more recently AU Optronics has got in on the game too. For us, AU Optronics’ entry is the most significant. That’s partly because AU Optronics tends to operate towards the value end of the market, pricing its panels aggressively, but it’s also because it uses its own panel technology (AHVA or Advanced Hyper Viewing Angle).
It’s really AU Optronics’ take on IPS, but again it adds to competition and choice. Of course, with any exciting new technology there has to be something that threatens to spoil to party, and that something is graphics performance.
Video cards must now catch up
4K’s good enough … for now
With a 4K panel, you’re pumping four times the number of pixels for each frame, so to maintain frame rates, you need four times the graphics horsepower. That’s very, very scary. We’ve done some reasonably extensive testing in this area, and our conclusion is that the video card that can cope with 4K has yet to be created. Not even the new Radeon R9 290 Series from AMD or GeForce GTX 780 Ti from Nvidia can handle the heat from the 4K kitchen.
Perhaps a trio of 780 Tis could do the trick, but the bottom line is that there’s work to be done. But that’s okay, because panels in the broader 2,560-pixel market are pretty bloody wonderful and halve the stress on you GPU compared with 4K.
Likewise, the one good thing about the relatively slow pace of change in the PC monitor market is that a high-res panel bought today is about as good a long-term investment as you can make. So, as Arnold Schwarzenegger says, do it. Do it now.
Super-smooth graphics
Last year saw the arrival of the first mainstream LCD monitors with super-high refresh rates beyond 120Hz. Now some manufacturers are flogging 240Hz panels. What’s next for super-smooth graphics?
Nvidia recently pulled the wraps off a new technology known as G-Sync. The idea here is syncing the GPU with the display. This is possible to a degree already courtesy of v-sync settings in-game or via the graphics driver. The problem is, v-sync is a pretty blunt tool and only really works at certain refresh rate steppings.
It’s a bit more complicated than that, but the mismatch inherent in a display with a fixed refresh rate being fed variable frame rates by a GPU means stuttering is usually going to creep in somewhere. The answer is to dynamically match the display refresh to the GPU’s output, and that’s exactly what G-Sync technology does.
The only slight snag is that it requires hardware built into the display, so you’ll need to invest in a new monitor, which could be a deal-breaker. In better news, G-Sync works with any Nvidia GPU from the 650 Ti upwards.
Overall, we welcome G-Sync, but we’ll have to wait and see how widely the tech is adopted. It’s not very much use if it limits your choice of monitor to a handful of compatible models. Another recent development is the advent of screens with so-called flicker-free backlights.
The supposed issue here are pulse-width modulated backlights that achieve variable brightness by rapidly switching the backlight on and off. Some manufacturers, including BenQ, claim this introduces flicker, but in our testing it’s very difficult to spot any actual difference. Then again, maybe it’s a bit like the rainbow effect with DLP monitors, and some people will be more sensitive to it than others. Try before you buy!
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Opinion: Resolution revolution: why are desktops so late to the 4K party?