4K owners: benching the 980 at 4K with AA??? Why???!!!!

[Eyeball Kid]

I've got a 980 Strix coming, and I've been tooling around looking at benchmarks in the meantime. Something I'm seeing (And am baffled by), are figures for 4k gaming, more often than not, with some degree of AA applied - AA was designed to emulate higher resolutions, so why bother? So I'm curious, 4K owners, in your experience if AA is needed at all at such a high resolution? I'm at 1440 right now, but thinking it'd be easy enough in the future to add another 980 if I upgrade my panel.

 

[evilsofa]

Given the number of pixels being the same, the larger the screen, the more aliasing will show.
Given the size of the screen being the same, the fewer pixels the screen has, the more aliasing will show.
Stated more simply, the higher the pixels per inch, the less aliasing will show.

The ideal screens for eliminating aliasing are smartphone screens; the 5" HTC One M8 with 441 pixels per inch has the highest PPI I'm aware of with a quick Google search, though there might be some that are higher. The iPhone 5s, 6 and 6+ are at 326 PPI.

Even the 24" 4K monitors (the smallest I've heard of) only have 183 PPI. The more common 31" or so 4K monitors have around 140 PPI. Your 2560x1440 monitor is probably 27" and has 108 PPI.

I have no idea what PPI will eliminate aliasing for the average user, but moving from 108 PPI to 140 PPI probably won't do it.

 

[Odellus]

^ pretty much. you need very, very high ppi to eliminate aliasing altogether. ppi so high that it isn't going to be feasible for a long time. although with the smaller 4K monitors i doubt you need real hardware aa. i'm sure smaa is more than enough.