The road to 4K gamingWant to justify that £829 graphics card you just bought? Need to figure out how to drive that massive-o-screen that almost melted your credit card? Well, the only realistic answer is either incredibly high-resolution...
The road to 4K gamingWant to justify that £829 graphics card you just bought? Need to figure out how to drive that massive-o-screen that almost melted your credit card? Well, the only realistic answer is either incredibly high-resolution gaming or going for a multi-GPU setup that might melt your PSU, as well as your personal wealth. The thing is, despite the fact that graphical hardware has evolved at an astounding rate over the last few years, panel and game technology hasn't really kept up. Since the last generation consoles came around, most of us have been aiming for 1080p resolutions. At first that was a laudable goal and it felt like an age before it became the standard res. But now it is, with the Steam hardware survey claiming around a third of users have a primary display running at 1,920 x 1,080. At that resolution, even sub-£100 graphics cards are more than capable of running most new titles on relatively high settings, at playable frame rates. To really push your modern midrange/high-end graphics cards you need to up the resolution and, sadly, the 30-inch panels of the last five years - with their 2,560 x 1,600 resolutions - are still at the top of the tech tree, knocking around the £1,000 mark. There are 27-inch screens with the 16:9 res of 2,560 x 1,440, and these are probably your best bet for high-res gaming on a relatively sensible budget. The next step up is to strap a bunch of screens together in some sort of widescreen surround setup. We're talking about resolutions of around 5,880 x 1,080 when you're linking up three 1080p screens in landscape mode with bezel correction. And with those extra pixels filling up your eyes you may actually need a second GPU just to cope with it all. When I started this whole long-winded testing process, I was of the opinion that the square peg of surround screen gaming was struggling to fit into the same round hole as 3D. I thought both were resource-intensive frame rate hogs - limiting the fidelity of your game, without adding much to your experience. And to be honest, that opinion hasn't changed. You need some incredible graphical grunt to get the most out of a triple-screen array, and for the most part that means selling your soul to the dark god of multi-GPU gaming. Beware, though - that way madness lies. The resolutions involved in multi-screen arrays in-game put huge demands on your available GPU power, but as we start to tread the seemingly long dirt track to 4K gaming, maybe this is something that we need to start thinking about seriously. Strapping a few monitors to a couple of GPUs is the only realistic way for us to achieve resolutions above what our blessed 30-inch Dell panel can render, which is the only way to really put the latest and greatest graphics chips through their high-res paces. As an exercise in seeing just how far we can push the modern GPUs of this generation - and seeing how close we are to machines capable of 4K gaming - the high resolutions involved in surround screens setups are useful. But as a gaming experience right now, they're simply an indulgence, with a huge amount of wasted screen real estate and a massive premium placed on frame rates. The whole deal with surround screen gaming is to have a wrap-around view of your game world, with a pair of panels either side of a central screen essentially acting as your peripheral vision. If extra screens were given away - and the frame rate hit wasn't effectively halving performance - then it would be a neat extra to have, adding a little immersion to your experience. But that isn't the way of surround gaming. At best you're looking at screens around the £100 mark, so you're adding another £200 to your gaming setup for a pair of panels that, by definition, you're not actually meant to be looking at. The distorted images stretched out over the peripheral screens aren't pretty, but are there to catch the corner of your eye while you're focusing most of your attention on what's happening right in front