Definitely eventually, just as it was with the push to 1080p. It's just hilarious watching people bend over backwards to play in 4K at full power though. Eventually we'll have singular GPU solutions capable of handling it at reasonable prices. But the rush for bragging rights meanwhile is what it is.

Eh...sounds nice, but I'm fine with just 1080p and 60-120 FPS right now.

What are you talking about this is totally an important and worthwhile thing that we should all care deeply about and throw our money at as soon as possible.

Yarp. Playing at 4k is still very much an e-peen measure. *yawn* I'll take my stable and smooth 1080P experience over that any day. Plus, I save oodles of money by not chasing after the newest, shiniest thing. ;)

Actually it depends on how large your screen is. If you have a huge monitor then 4k makes sense. Otherwise not really.

well rather a proof of concept then really practical :D
Regarding 4K gaming though - depending how Vega and Ryzen turn out and Intel and Nvidia react i actually might buy a 4k setup this year

HD is already enough for me.
Full HD is awesome.

> Full HD, I don't care.. too expensive, no real benefit (if you play on a 15'' laptop like me).

Maybe 2k is "okay" if you want something really "cool", because you can use 1440x900 double resolution (in a 15'' Full HD is small)....
But 4k make already no sense at all.

Well, we're living in an age where the benefits of higher resolutions don't automatically provide superior experiences and are more tied to your display size. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, where individual pixels were hard to miss even on smaller, blurry CRT screens, the doubling of resolutions was quite a revelation - from 320x240 to 640x480 to 1280x960. But from that point it's really a case of diminishing returns. On monitor sizes below 22", even HD is of questionable benefit (compare watching a 720x576 DVD to a 1920x1080 Bluray on such a screen), and as HftB pointed out, 4K support really only bears noticeable quality improvements from display sizes of 60" upwards.

Of course, we're talking motion footage here, i.e. games and movies. For still photography, higher resolutions almost always prove beneficial, even on smaller screens.

I think it's been pointed out that 12k is actually an aspect ratio of 16:3 (11520x2160), which is essentially just a triple-head setup, so what Project Cars 2 is really offering is the ability to support 4k on three monitors with a FOV of 180°or so. To be honest, I think most scalable games can do that in some fashion (I did it with Doom 3 BFG for shits and giggles), although some probably have HUD issues when stretching out over three monitors (HUD elements being split down the middle between two displays, HUD stretching, less than optimum positioning of individual HUD elements)

Whilst Ryzen seems promising, what little info' that has made it to the public through viewings, seems the gfx cards aren't upto much.

Perhaps AMD are holding back, but it didn't seem to be so, in which case they'll have to beat nvidia on price to not get cackled at.

When Apple announced Retina Display, everybody claimed that they do not need it.

However, almost all new smartphones now have better screen than Retina Display.

1080p is fine now, but I guess 4K/8K display will be the basic screen in next decade.

ya still really unsure about ryzen - i really want them to be that good that i actually buy them - second best outcome would be that they are not "perfect" but good enough so that nvidia has to react by decreasing their prices.

Whether you can discern the difference in resolution depends quite much how much fine detail there is in the game anyway.

Like I said, many old 3D games from the 90s allow using quite high resolutions on modern systems that were not probably available for normal people back in the 90s (playing on their 3Dfx Voodoo 2 cards at max 800x600 resolution). I recall many Unreal engine games being like this, for instance, and many old games maybe have received widescreen mods and such allowing them to be run on higher resolutions than before.

But even if you crank the resolution to something like 1600x1200 or 1920x1080, it doesn't really look any better than running it in 1024x768 or even lower. The reason is that increasing the resolution does not increase the low polygon counts on the game objects, or the fuzzy low-detail textures, etc. They look pretty much the same in 1600x1200 as in 800x600, only difference maybe being polygon edges being a bit less jaggy (if no edge antialiasing is used by the game).

So yeah, in order to really benefit from ultra-high resolutions in games, the game details (textures, polygon counts etc.) should be increased too. A simple black square looks just the same in 640x480 as it does in 12k resolutions.

And of course the screen size matters too, the bigger the resolution, the bigger the monitor should be to really see any difference. No reason to use a 12k resolution on a 14" laptop screen, I guess.

I don't understand 4k for anything at this point. For people with 4k TVs, what content exactly are you watching at that resolution? Are there already lots of 4K movies on Bluray discs or such, is Netflix showing lots of 4K movies and TV series (how fast and reliable internet connection does it need for streaming those without hiccups and visual artifacts) etc.?

It just feels silly to me how I've had a HDTV for years now, yet still I am 90% of the time watching old SD content on it that our TV companies still show. There are a couple of (free) HD channels, but all the other HD channels are behind pay walls. And no I don't have a Bluray player either.

I guess Netflix would be the most probable source for me even for basic HDTV content (unless I'd want to watch the bigger US Netflix selection through VPN or such, in which case I think it is not HD quality anymore, coming overseas...). I have no idea where I'd get 4K content. Watch the same 4K demo video over and over again that comes with the TV?

Yup, I completely agree. I do have a HDTV now (which I got for my Wii U more than anything) but rarely ever watch any HD TV (I don't even get the free HD channels as we don't have a HD box) other than the odd stuff on Netflix (or through my Now TV box, I think the catch up channels might be HD).
Also, this xkcd comic sums it up pretty well.

Switching to 4K when little or no content exists for it seems ridiculous. I think for most people it's one of those things to brag about (probably without ever understanding what it actually means) and provides little real benefit.

My personal favourite is when they advertise for HD or 4K TVs... on my SD TV channel where it would literally be impossible to notice the difference in picture quality in any genuine comparison (and if it wasn't that would only prove their products are pointless)