If you are upgrading your monitor you are probably looking around at all the different options and thinking, is it worth getting a 4k monitor? There are a few things to consider.
First of all, don’t panic if you can only afford to run a good old HD monitor. 1080 is a good resolution to work with and games still look sharp. If you prefer smaller screens, say 24″ or up to 27″ then you will still get a good number of pixels per square inch of screen space and your images will look good. If you’ve never known any different then you aren’t going to suffer by sticking with the tried and tested.
That said, 4K is slowly becoming more and more affordable, in particular the screens themselves. Once the preserve of ultra high resolution enthusiasts, 4K screen are coming down in price and falling into the realms of possibility for every day folk with a bigger budget.
Monitor Size
It is important to consider the size of your monitor when weighing up the options. The more pixels you have on a screen the smaller things are going to look without adequate scaling. The good news is that with more people adopting higher resolutions scaling is becoming more of an issue. Operating system and game developers are more likely to make things work, so hopefully you aren’t squinting at tiny text anymore. The other solution to this problem is to get a big screen, start looking over 30″ and text that looks teeny at 24″ is going to look about right.
PC Hardware
A further problem you will need to deal with is the sheer number of pixels that your PC is going to have to move around the screen. It’s a lot of work for a graphics card to generate 60 or more 3840 x 2160 frames every second to keep the demanding gamers happy. You’re going to need a top line PC spec to get good results, and that’s going to include an expensive graphics card. High performance GPUs were coming down in price before the Bitcoin boom seems to have messed up the market somewhat. If you can get hold of stock the cards tend to be very expensive.
Tempted to pull the trigger? Start exploring the best 4K monitors here.
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