Technology

I think you overestimate the quality of many humans' eyes. Many people walk around with slightly bad vision no problem. Many older folks have bad vision even corrected. I cannot distinguish between 1080 and 4k in the majority of circumstances. Stick me in front of a computer and I can notice, but tvs and computers are at wildly different distances.

I've been using "cheap" 43" 4k TVs as my main monitor for over a decade now. I used to go purely with Hisense, they have great colour and PC text clarity, and I could get them most places for $250 CAD. But this year's model they switched from RGB subpixel layout to BGR, which is tricky to get working cleanly on a computer, even when forcing a BGR layout in the OS. One trick is to just flip the TV upside down (yes it actually works) but it just made the whole physical setup awkward. I went with a Sony recently for significantly more, but the picture quality is fantastic.

And then there’s the dev that still insists on limiting lines to 80 chars & you have all that blank space to the side & have to scroll forever per file, sigh….

I can still find 480p videos from when YouTube first started that rival the quality of the compressed crap “1080p” we get from YouTube today. It’s outrageous.

Yeah I'd way rather have higher bitrate 1080 than 4k. Seeing striping in big dark or light spots on the screen is infuriating

A big problem is that we’ve gotten so used to streaming services delivering visual slop, like YouTube’s 1080p option which is basically just upscaled 720p and can even look as bad as 480p.

YouTube is locking the good bitrates behind the premium paywall and even as a premium users you don't get to select a high bitrate when the source video was low res.

That's why videos should be upscaled before upload to force YouTube into offering high bitrate options at all. A good upscaler produces better results than simply stretching low-res videos.

So, a 55-inch TV, which is pretty much the smallest 4k TV you could get when they were new, has benefits over 1080p at a distance of 7.5 feet... how far away do people watch their TVs from? Am I weird?

And at the size of computer monitors, for the distance they are from your face, they would always have full benefit on this chart. And even working into 8k a decent amount.

And that's only for people with typical vision, for people with above-average acuity, the benefits would start further away.

But yeah, for VR for sure, since having an 8k screen there would directly determine how far away a 4k flat screen can be properly re-created. If your headset is only 4k, a 4k flat screen in VR is only worth it when it takes up most of your field of view. That's how I have mine set up, but I would imagine most people would prefer it to be half the size or twice the distance away, or a combination.

So 8k screens in VR will be very relevant for augmented reality, since performance costs there are pretty low anyway. And still convey benefits if you are running actual VR games at half the physical panel resolution due to performance demand being too high otherwise. You get some relatively free upscaling then. Won't look as good as native 8k, but benefits a bit anyway.

There is also fixed and dynamic foveated rendering to think about, with an 8k screen, even running only 10% of it at that resolution and 20% at 4k, 30% at 1080p, and the remaining 40% at 540p, even with the overhead of so many foveation steps, you'll get a notable reduction in performance cost. Fixed foveated would likely need to lean higher towards bigger percentages of higher res, but has the performance advantage of not having to move around at all from frame to frame. Can benefit from more pre-planning and optimization.

Seriously, articles like this are just clickbait.

They also ignore all sorts of usecases.

Like for a desktop monitor, 4k is extremely noticeable vs even 1440P or 1080P/2k

Unless you're sitting very far away, the sharpness of text and therefore amount of readable information you can fit on the screen changes dramatically.

I don't remember that discussion at all... I remember people being super excited for 1080p, but annoyed that there was no content for it because DVDs were still 480p and TV content was similar. Blurays were 1080p, but weren't really a thing until the late 00s.

We've had 4k for a decade, and there's still not much content for it. When there is, the difference w/ 1080p isn't so significant as to be worth the cost, as it's usually just upscaled 1080 content. 4k makes a lot of sense for a monitor that's 30" or larger, but for a TV where you're 10-15 feet away it doesn't make nearly as much sense.

My father in law loves to sit and research.. that's his thing.. made a career out of it yadda yadda yadda..

He asked me about a new TV.. I was like..well have you seen rtings.com?

My MIL had to remind him to eat.. lmfao

He just rabbit holed for days. It was like he clicked a TV tropes link or something.

Anyway, he made a very informed decision and loves his TV. Haha

I’m supposed to be watching Haunted Hotel right now. It’s on, but here we are…

As someone with a lowly 1080p projector and a 4k TV, I much prefer the 1080.

Viewsonic PX701HDH. I blow it up to 185" and I cannot see the pixels until I am uncomfortably close to the image.

The quality of the display/projector itself makes a huge difference. With a projector specifically - the bulb itself (and how much life left) is going to make a huge difference in picture quality.