In the earlier half of the last decade, we witnessed 4k monitors become affordable and GPUs become powerful enough to keep up with them.
This speeds up the creation of an entirely new benchmark in the gaming industry.
A benchmark, which, despite standing under the shadows of 8k gaming, stood the test of time and remains unchallenged as the yardstick to measure up gaming stations against each other.
The amalgamation of 4k resolution at 60fps tips off bells and whistles in the heads of passive and active gamers alike.
So unless you have been living under a rock for the past decade, you must have seen youtubers and influencers test how their builds, GPUs and off-the-line products fair up against the test of 4k gaming.
What is 4k Gaming?
The term ‘4k gaming’ refers to the act of playing games on a monitor that is running at 4k and has a resolution of 3840×2160(referring to the dimensions measured as ‘width’ times the ‘height’).
It is also often called Ultra High Definition or UHD.
The human eye has a resolution of about 1/60 arcseconds. That is 3600 increments per degree of your field of view.
This standard resolution power resonates with the dimensions of a 4k gaming monitor. Which means that at a distance of 2.5 to 3 feet, the pixels of a standard 4k gaming monitor become indistinguishable to the human eye.
This feature is what gets christened as Apple‘s Retina Display.
Wonders of 4k Gaming
The adaptation of 4k gaming resolutions in the masses was made possible, and one might even say was fueled, by the spectacular adaptation of Anti Aliasing (often called AA) in 4k gaming monitors.
Anti Aliasing is the method by which you eliminate ‘jaggies’ in your game. Jaggies are the distorted and often pixelated edges or lines which appear in your game.
It often occurs while attempting to render thin straight lines, like wires, in your game. Anti-aliasing helps you get a smoother and more visually pleasing graphic.
The successful implementation and execution of Anti-Aliasing methods are more obvious in 4k gaming setups than anywhere else.
Things to keep in mind while gaming in 4k
The challenges of executing a proper gaming build are universally known in the gaming community. The stakes only get higher when you aim to claim the proverbial ‘Holy grail’ of 4k gaming at 60fps.
A lot of things can go wrong very quickly. Choice of a substandard peripheral can easily cause a bottleneck in your build and curb your dreams.
Here is a list of items you need to keep a keen eye on while making your build.
- Monitor:This is the most obvious item in the list. ‘You must be kidding me’ must have been your reaction when you saw this item on the list. However, it must be noted that just getting a monitor with a 4k gaming certification isn’t enough. You should be actively lookout for these specification checks:
- Dimensions: Gaming monitors come in various dimensions. But you must lookout for a monitor that is at least 27 inches wide. As anything smaller than that at 4k resolution would lead to excessive pixel crowding and a less sharper image.
- Refresh rate: A gaming monitor which does not support high refresh rates is as good as a regular monitor. A monitor with a refresh rate of 60 hz to 144 hz is considered ideal for gaming.
- Connectors: Connectors play a key role in actively avoiding bottlenecks in your gaming experience. For this particular iteration, you are recommended to have Display port 1.4 or HDMI 2.0, or higher, for a seamless high frame rate gaming experience.
- Compatible Motherboard and Memory: While subsystems like the GPU and the CPU are the heart of your gaming station, the motherboard is the skeletal tissues which hold the entire body together. And thus the process of choosing a motherboard which is compatible with the rest should not be neglected. While looking for a motherboard, be sure to check for the abundance of slots, height and width. It is important that your motherboard checks out all the required features needed to sustain your GPU.
For memory, it is recommended that you choose the DDR4s and a 16 GB memory is often considered more-than-enough for your build intended to run 4k gaming at 60 fps.
