Asus Xonar DGX 5.1
Posted On at by admin
Recently I acquired a new screen for my gaming PC, a Panasonic
TX-L65WT600 65-Inch 4K panel to sit in my lounge (I use a wireless
keyboard and mouse/gamepad for gaming), replacing an LG 50” Plasma that
was 1080p.
Having heard about the benefits of Ultra-HD, I was excited to try it out
from a PC gamer’s point of view, and hopefully some of you might find
my initial impressions of the new format interesting!
Initial Setup
When booting into Windows 7 for the first time using this screen, my
initial impression was “Everything is TINY”. Desktop icons and the
taskbar were so small that I could hardly make any of them out, but when
I ventured nearer the screen, they were all perfectly displayed and it
was difficult to make out individual pixels.
In order to make everything viewable from a distance I set the desktop
resolution to 1920x1080 (using an HDMI cable). In theory this should
work as 4K is 4 times the resolution of 1080p (meaning 4 pixels at 4k = 1
pixel at 1080p). This did work nicely, however in order to get above
30FPS in games a DisplayPort cable is required, as HDMI 1.4 doesn’t have
the bandwidth required for 60FPS/60HZ.
I therefore plugged in the DisplayPort cable and tried to do the same
thing with the desktop resolution, but to no avail. It appears that
supported resolutions with DisplayPort differ greatly than with HDMI
(setting custom desktop resolutions with the Display Port cable ended up
crashing the Nvidia drivers), so I had to leave it at 4K native
resolution, but increase the scaling of text and icons within Windows to
200%. This is due to the way that DisplayPort sees the monitor. It
essentially splits the display into two halves vertically, and then
stitches them together to create one display (the BIOS screen and
windows welcome screen is split vertically into two identical screens
until the desktop is displayed).
The main problem with using DisplayPort is that when gaming in 4K it
works flawlessly, but if the game is too demanding for 4K and you want
to play in 1080p or 1440p, you simply can’t. The resolutions aren’t
supported. There are a bunch of resolutions available below 4k, but most
appear in strange ratios and are seemingly unusable. This could be a
problem with Nvidia’s drivers, the panel itself or DisplayPort, However,
after searching for solutions I simply couldn’t find one. There are
scaling options in the Nvidia control panel to stretch the display
manually to fit the screen, but these were disabled when using
Displayport.
It became apparent that the newly introduced HDMI 2.0 standard would be
the best solution, and waiting for updates from Microsoft (in the form
of Windows 10 or other software updates) should hopefully combat scaling
problems.
Games
Putting the teething issues aside, I loaded up Crysis 3 to put my GTX
780Ti through its paces. Setting the resolution to 4K (3840 x 2160) and
all other options except Anti-Aliasing to “Very High”, I was greeted
with the most breathtaking gaming visuals I have ever seen. Textures
were crisp to the point of being photo-realistic and the game just
looked amazing. At 25 Frames Per Second. Hmmm.
It became quickly obvious that one of the fastest single-chip graphics
cards in the world was simply not good enough to run games with this
standard of visual fidelity, as it has to push 4 times as many pixels as
1080p.
I did find, however, that Anti Aliasing was not particularly necessary
at this resolution due to the sheer density of the pixels, which was a
bonus.
Running other (less graphically demanding) games was a joy. Diablo 3 and
Borderlands 2 looked amazing at 4K (easily running 60 frames per
second), and I found no issues with the HUD on screen, as it seemed to
scale well with the resolution, keeping its original size relative to
the game. Far Cry 3 and The Witcher 2 also looked outstanding, but
averaged 30-40 FPS each.
I found that the increase in resolution also increased the Video Ram
usage of the graphics card, and the 3GB on board the 780Ti was quickly
filled up with Far Cry 3’s textures. It seems that future cards may have
to be shipped with more VRAM in order to cope with graphically
intensive games running at 4K and avoid stuttering whilst textures are
loaded in and out of the GPU’s memory.
Films/Media
When watching BluRay content at 1080p, the screen held up very nicely.
The resolution was maintained well, and looked exactly like it did on
the 50” TV. Game of Thrones and Life of Pi were still very crisp and I
didn’t notice any loss of quality by the screen up-scaling 1080p
content.
Unfortunately there really are no 4K output formats apart from games to
enjoy on this screen at the moment – Youtube’s 4K streams are woefully
compressed to the point that they seem only slightly better than 1080p
and Netflix will only stream 4K to devices such as consoles and
specific, built in, TV apps (4K streaming for PC’s is on its way
according to Netflix support but if you’re looking forward to watching
House of Cards or Breaking Bad in 4K on your PC, you’ll have to wait for
now).
There is also no industry standard agreed-upon format for 4K media yet,
so streaming and playing directly from hard drives is the only option at
the moment.
I have scratched my ultra-high resolution video itch by watching
downloaded clips of nature films with ‘epic’ music dubbed over the top,
although each 1 minute clip is about 400MB in size. One downloadable 4K
film is over 360GB!
If you want to watch anything in uncompressed Ultra-HD, unfortunately
for now you’ll have to settle for watching a one-minute long video of a
bee buzzing around a flower, set to ‘Sail’ by AWOL Nation.
Viewing Distance
When using the display I sit around 7 feet from it on the couch. At this
distance I found that switching between 1080p and 4K did have a very
notable difference in the amount of clarity, but I needed to get closer
(about 3-4 feet) to really see how different it was. At this distance,
in 1080p I could easily make out individual pixels and the image had a
very ‘granular’ appearance to it, with a noticeable screen-door effect.
In 4K however, I didn’t notice any pixilation whatsoever. The games
looked just as clear from 3 feet away as they did from 8 feet away. In
fact, it was difficult to make out individual pixels even with my face
almost pressed against the screen. Due to this, I have found that in
order to truly experience the clarity of 4K resolution, you’ll need to
sit close to the monitor. In fact, too close for comfort in a lounge
setup.
Further Usage
After using the display for a few weeks I have finally settled on using a
resolution of 2560 x 1440 for most games over HDMI 1.4. With this
resolution I can enjoy 60FPS over HDMI and it adds a nice amount of
fidelity to games over 1080p, without impacting too much on performance
using the single 780Ti. This is until I invest in a GTX 980 (or 2) with
HDMI 2.0 capabilities.
One final note is that with the new consoles out, developers seem to be
upping the usage of VRam for PC ports, with recent games such as
Bethesda’s “The Evil Within” and WB’s “Shadow of Mordor” recommending
6GB for ultra textures, even at 1080p. When switching to 4k, this will
inevitably demand more VRam use, and therefore it may be worth waiting
for cards with 6-8GB VRam before 4K becomes a truly viable gaming
resolution.
