I had that display for a while and here's my observations to share. Hope this helps you out:
* The display inf only exports UHD and 1920x1080 on AMD cards, and if you select 1080 it scales up. You'll be plagued with black/half-screen issues on every resolution switch.
* On NVIDIA, it didn't even export 1080p for me, but just odd ones that are much wider than high. Less black-screen issues with the new beta driver - it's workable if you play at UHD only.
Either way, the best bet to play games at lower resolutions is to use windowed mode. Fullscreen at 1080p really, really stinks on that kind of display size. Most games just read resolution info from EDID, so even if you play in windowed mode you only ever get really awkward resolutions to choose from. If you're lucky, you can edit the config to add custom resolutions - not all games support that though.
* The display really has had bad latency, compared to my previous HP zr30w. Even at 40fps in UHD, it felt much blurrier/laggier than any other panel I used at the same framerate. It really was THAT noticeable, even on slower-paced shooters or even just minecraft.
* While the resolution really is amazing to look at in detail (and in theory, you get better awareness of what's happening "in the distance"), it doesn't add all that much to gameplay. I tended not to notice it after a while. You need really above-average vision and sit very close too.
* Most games aren't optimised to run at UHD - interface elements get painfully small with no way to scale them up. This is a showstopper especially for strategy games, where it's all squashed in the corners and you visually have to hunt for the info you are looking for.
In retrospect, getting a current-gen 4K panel for gaming is a really bad move. The tech is awesome and the colours of the 32" Dell are the best I've ever seen on a panel, but you really don't want to use it for gaming.
To put it really bluntly: If you want to get it to do some serious dev work on it, be it software, design, graphics, it's one of the best-looking panels ever (subjectively), but it's a big tradeoff you have to keep in mind if you want to game on it too. To get it only for gaming is a big waste of money.
I'm sure I'll revisit later in a year or two, once the tech is stable (SST mode working), and software-side support for it is more prevalent.
I doubt we'll ever get SST mode at full resolution and refresh rate with this display - it would require that the scalers be replaced with scalers that handle the full resolution (the tech is there now with the latest crop of 28" screens doing 4K in SST mode). The latest NVidia drivers deactivate the 1080p option in MST mode -(older drivers allowed it, but a FHD resolution meant 4/3 of the screen remains black and a 1/4 the size of the screen picture at the center of the screen), but you could switch back to SST mode to get FHD at 60Hz. 2560x1440 is another storythough and in my experience not doable (for whatever reason... they could turn one one scaler and run that resolution on a single scaler just fine). So, in ways it's even worse than when the first 2560x1600 displays came out.. at least there your GFX cards could scale up and while you lost on sharpness, playing fast games on it meant you didn't really notice (there was bad lag as well though). I agree with the previous poster that getting a 4K screen for gaming may be premature, and it's pretty much a disaster unless you have the GPU power to drive the 4K resolution.
nivviv
4 Posts
0
May 19th, 2014 08:00
I had that display for a while and here's my observations to share. Hope this helps you out:
* The display inf only exports UHD and 1920x1080 on AMD cards, and if you select 1080 it scales up. You'll be plagued with black/half-screen issues on every resolution switch.
* On NVIDIA, it didn't even export 1080p for me, but just odd ones that are much wider than high. Less black-screen issues with the new beta driver - it's workable if you play at UHD only.
Either way, the best bet to play games at lower resolutions is to use windowed mode. Fullscreen at 1080p really, really stinks on that kind of display size. Most games just read resolution info from EDID, so even if you play in windowed mode you only ever get really awkward resolutions to choose from. If you're lucky, you can edit the config to add custom resolutions - not all games support that though.
* The display really has had bad latency, compared to my previous HP zr30w. Even at 40fps in UHD, it felt much blurrier/laggier than any other panel I used at the same framerate. It really was THAT noticeable, even on slower-paced shooters or even just minecraft.
* While the resolution really is amazing to look at in detail (and in theory, you get better awareness of what's happening "in the distance"), it doesn't add all that much to gameplay. I tended not to notice it after a while. You need really above-average vision and sit very close too.
* Most games aren't optimised to run at UHD - interface elements get painfully small with no way to scale them up. This is a showstopper especially for strategy games, where it's all squashed in the corners and you visually have to hunt for the info you are looking for.
In retrospect, getting a current-gen 4K panel for gaming is a really bad move. The tech is awesome and the colours of the 32" Dell are the best I've ever seen on a panel, but you really don't want to use it for gaming.
To put it really bluntly: If you want to get it to do some serious dev work on it, be it software, design, graphics, it's one of the best-looking panels ever (subjectively), but it's a big tradeoff you have to keep in mind if you want to game on it too. To get it only for gaming is a big waste of money.
I'm sure I'll revisit later in a year or two, once the tech is stable (SST mode working), and software-side support for it is more prevalent.
humba
1 Rookie
•
77 Posts
0
May 30th, 2014 13:00