Five things to know about 4K gaming: We’re glitching our way to gaming nirvana

When we reviewed the AMD R9 295X2 last week we took our first steps into testing 4K as well. 4K displays (3840×2160, technically) are The Next Big Thing for gaming, and with a graphics card as powerful as the R9 295X2, you really need to step into the 4K gaming world in order to benefit from the GPU’s full power. 4K displays capable of 60Hz can now be yours for as low as $700.

Here are five things you need to know about 4K gaming before you decide whether or not it’s worth jumping for. While we’ll have some benchmarks to show you, this article is about the experience of playing in 4K, rather than raw frame rates. To test the 4K experience we fired up a mix of the most popular games available on Steam, including Borderlands 2, Total War: Rome 2, BioShock Infinite, Battlefield 4, The Walking Dead: Episode 2, Metro Last Light, Hitman: Absolution, Portal 2, and The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. 

Note: In some cases, I’ve resized screenshots back to 1080p in order to make file sizes less onerous. I encourage you to click the images to zoom in; in the case of the 4K gameplay images, the level of detail is truly astonishing.

24 inches is too small

The Dell UP2414Q that AMD sent along with its R9 295X2 is easily the nicest monitor I’ve ever played with. It’s professionally calibrated and the IPS panel is simply gorgeous; I’ll be talking more about it in a second article. Given the enormous price gap between it ($1200) and a 32-inch display like the Asus PQ321Q ($2900) you might think the 24 inch panel is abetter deal.

It isn’t.

3820×2160 is 4x the resolution of 1920×1080, which means that screen elements are just 25% the size. Windows 8.1 includes a sophisticated scaling mechanism for improving fonts, menus, and windows, but this scaler is only reliably used in Microsoft’s own software. Many applications either ignore it or treat it incorrectly. A 32-inch display has 1.78x the surface area of a 24-inch monitor, which means screen elements rendered on a 32-inch panel will be 44.5% the size they were on a 1920×1080 panel as opposed to 25%.

At 24 inches, some applications are intolerably tiny. Here, for example, is the Origin login screen. This is its only size; increasing the scaling via Windows has no effect.

Desktop icons and other in-game menus are often rendered in illegible fonts. Even when some game elements scale beautifully, others fall flat — in BF4, it’s impossible to read the Commo Rose, though all the other UI elements are rendered correctly.

Good luck with that font.

In BioShock Infinite, you can’t read in-game texts or descriptions of objects without putting your nose against the monitor. Sometimes the games that scale well aren’t the titles you’d expect — big-budget productions like BioShock Infinite and Battlefield 4 have broken scaling in some areas, while The Walking Dead: Episode 2 has no such problem.