4k vs uhd

N

ng4ever

2[H]4U
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Feb 18, 2016
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I know 3440x1440 is not really 4k but I don't think the Dell Alienware aw3423dw or aw3423dwf is meant to be 4k exactly.

So which is better for mainly movies, games, surfing the internet, watching youtube videos, and some office work ?

Glad I realized this but worried games or some games will not support 3440x1440. Is this a big issue ?


Though I know there is the SAMSUNG 32" Odyssey Neo S32BG85 which is 4k but if I get this instead, sense it is so much more by some in price, I will buy it from Best Buy sense I hear about it giving people so many problems. At least I can get a new one easily same day if need be or worst comes to worst return it completely if after 1 or 2 times it still does not work out. :(

Just price match at Best Buy with Amazon price!


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UHD is 4K. I think you mean QHD or WQHD.

4K will be better for desktop work because it's sharper with scaling applied. 3440x1440 gives you more horizontal view in games and is easier to run due to its lower res.

Yes, there are games that don't support ultrawide, or might require INI tweaks or injection hacks to do it.

You can use PCGamingWiki to check the games you play regularly. The terms to know are "Vertical minus", "Horizontal plus" scaling. Horizontal plus is what you want, aka "visible view area increases with wider aspect ratio". Vertical minus instead shrinks the vertical area whereas you gain no horizontal space. This is not what you want and it would be better to run the game in a 16:9 resolution (2560x1440) instead.

The rules are basically "if it's a multiplayer game, it might not support ultrawide." If it's a From Software game, it won't support ultrawide without mods due to From's incompetence.
 
kasakka said:
UHD is 4K. I think you mean QHD or WQHD.

4K will be better for desktop work because it's sharper with scaling applied. 3440x1440 gives you more horizontal view in games and is easier to run due to its lower res.

Yes, there are games that don't support ultrawide, or might require INI tweaks or injection hacks to do it.

You can use PCGamingWiki to check the games you play regularly. The terms to know are "Vertical minus", "Horizontal plus" scaling. Horizontal plus is what you want, aka "visible view area increases with wider aspect ratio". Vertical minus instead shrinks the vertical area whereas you gain no horizontal space. This is not what you want and it would be better to run the game in a 16:9 resolution (2560x1440) instead.

The rules are basically "if it's a multiplayer game, it might not support ultrawide." If it's a From Software game, it won't support ultrawide without mods due to From's incompetence.
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Thanks.

That brings up the question is it worth doing INI tweaks or injection hacks to force/make a game support WQHD/3440x1440 ? That or just don't play that game and support the developer.

Seems like just general 4k would be easier but what fun would that be ? Maybe
 
ng4ever said:
Thanks.

That brings up the question is it worth doing INI tweaks or injection hacks to force/make a game support WQHD/3440x1440 ? That or just don't play that game and support the developer.

Seems like just general 4k would be easier but what fun would that be ? Maybe
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Depends on if you want to play it at ultrawide or not. Personally I don't mind, the injection hacks are sometimes more involved or might make e.g online play not recommended (might get banned for mods).

16:9 is definitely easier. I do prefer the ultrawide aspect ratio for gaming.
 
kasakka said:
Depends on if you want to play it at ultrawide or not. Personally I don't mind, the injection hacks are sometimes more involved or might make e.g online play not recommended (might get banned for mods).

16:9 is definitely easier. I do prefer the ultrawide aspect ratio for gaming.
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Makes sense.

No effect no reward!

Seems like ultrawide is the future over VR right now. Does not mean that can not change. They both have there uses.

I tried VR made me dizzy.

Anyway sorry for going off topic.


One last question is 32:9 even more different?
 
ng4ever said:
Makes sense.

No effect no reward!

Seems like ultrawide is the future over VR right now. Does not mean that can not change. They both have there uses.

I tried VR made me dizzy.
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VR is pretty cool but still has a long way to go. It can work well or it can make you experience nausea, depends on the game and person. For example I played Resident Evil 7 with VR and it felt weird when you are sitting on a chair but moving your character around with a controller and looking around with the VR goggles. It felt like I was flying in my chair. There's so much work done on making it feel more natural to humans but we are not quite there yet.

ng4ever said:
One last question is 32:9 even more different?
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32:9 is more problematic. Some games just refuse to support the aspect ratio/resolution at all, many can be made to work with the above hacks.

The bigger problem is the way most games implement field of view. The way they do it causes pretty severe distortion at the edges of the screen at 32:9. This can be sometimes seen even at 21:9 but is much less noticeable than 32:9. It results in those very edges becoming very elongated, like a fisheye lens effect. FOV sliders can help mitigate it, but I feel it can still look jarring especially in first person shooters.

Check out this RDR2 video for example, and look at how objects like trees etc look when they are closer to the center vs when they are at the edges. They start elongating, looking fat etc.



Then compare to Control, which ironically is one of the few games with zero or minimal distortion, despite not officially supporting the aspect ratio and requiring INI file tweaks to enable the aspect ratio. In 32:9 the game is a lot less claustrophobic and more immersive.



To me 32:9 is mostly great for desktop use and I'd rather run games at a narrower aspect ratio. On a 5120x1440 screen, playing RDR2, I found a custom resolution of 3840x1440 managed to avoid most of the distortion issues, gave a bit wider view than 3440x1440, and increased performance over full resolution. With the caveat of black bars on sides of course.
 
kasakka said:
VR is pretty cool but still has a long way to go. It can work well or it can make you experience nausea, depends on the game and person. For example I played Resident Evil 7 with VR and it felt weird when you are sitting on a chair but moving your character around with a controller and looking around with the VR goggles. It felt like I was flying in my chair. There's so much work done on making it feel more natural to humans but we are not quite there yet.


32:9 is more problematic. Some games just refuse to support the aspect ratio/resolution at all, many can be made to work with the above hacks.

The bigger problem is the way most games implement field of view. The way they do it causes pretty severe distortion at the edges of the screen at 32:9. This can be sometimes seen even at 21:9 but is much less noticeable than 32:9. It results in those very edges becoming very elongated, like a fisheye lens effect. FOV sliders can help mitigate it, but I feel it can still look jarring especially in first person shooters.

Check out this RDR2 video for example, and look at how objects like trees etc look when they are closer to the center vs when they are at the edges. They start elongating, looking fat etc.



Then compare to Control, which ironically is one of the few games with zero or minimal distortion, despite not officially supporting the aspect ratio and requiring INI file tweaks to enable the aspect ratio. In 32:9 the game is a lot less claustrophobic and more immersive.



To me 32:9 is mostly great for desktop use and I'd rather run games at a narrower aspect ratio. On a 5120x1440 screen, playing RDR2, I found a custom resolution of 3840x1440 managed to avoid most of the distortion issues, gave a bit wider view than 3440x1440, and increased performance over full resolution. With the caveat of black bars on sides of course.
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Wow thank you! Great info!
 
kasakka said:
VR is pretty cool but still has a long way to go. It can work well or it can make you experience nausea, depends on the game and person. For example I played Resident Evil 7 with VR and it felt weird when you are sitting on a chair but moving your character around with a controller and looking around with the VR goggles. It felt like I was flying in my chair. There's so much work done on making it feel more natural to humans but we are not quite there yet.
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RE7 was not originally designed for VR, so avoiding motion sickness was not designed into the game mechanics from the beginning. RE7 doesn't even use motion controllers, right? Resident Evil Village, on the other hand, looks like a proper VR port.

Games that have been designed for VR have various locomotion mechanism for completely avoiding motion sickness:
  • I Expect You to Die's gameplay is centered on you staying seated.
  • Beat Saber's gameplay is centered on your staying standing, occasionally doing one side step or crouching.
  • Budget Cuts has teleportation as a core game mechanic.
  • A Chair in a Room was designed for room scale, so you can avoid teleportation and just walk around normally, if you have big enough room (2x2m or 3x3m, I don't remember).
And then there are locomotion mechanism which reduce motion sickness:
  • The Climb and Lone Echo and have you push yourself around with your hands, which avoids motion sickness for most.
  • Sprint Vector has you running at incredible speeds, but because you swing your hands to move, it likewise avoids motion sickness for most.
    • This and many other locomotion tricks I remember seeing first in 2017, in the Freedom Locomotion prototype. That was the first time that I had a multiple-hour session in VR just walking around without getting sick. In hindsight, two hours of jogging-in-place in the mountain trail level of the Freedom Locomotion prototype might have helped me to acclimate to VR locomotion, because since then I don't remember anymore getting motion sickness.
  • Driving and flying simulators are slightly easier to port to VR than traditional first-person games, because the cockpit gives a frame of reference which reduces motion sickness, but even then doing barrel rolls in a jet plane or hitting the ditch in Dirt Rally is bound to make newcomers dizzy.
In newer VR games, because it has been discovered that most people get used to movement in VR and no longer get motion sick (it takes months of acclimation and is brain-dependent), there are more games which have smooth movement using a joystick (for example Zenith: The Last City, Population: One and VAIL VR). But even they have various tricks and comfort options to reduce motion sickness. For example starting and stopping movement abruptly feels better than having smooth acceleration, likewise for snap turn vs smooth turn. Reducing the field of fiew ("tunnel vision") while moving is also a common comfort option.

The bigger problem is the way most games implement field of view. The way they do it causes pretty severe distortion at the edges of the screen at 32:9.
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Speaking of the problematics of 32:9 and how field of view is implented in games, VR headsets with very wide field of view might also need better support from VR games. I remember hearing that said in a Hypervision interview. Pimax has had wide FOV headsets for already quite some time, and recently Hypervision demoed a prototype of their 240 degree FOV pancake lenses. I hope we'll soon start having headsets which use it, maybe even next year.
 
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I wouldn't bother, mostly because I wouldn't bother with a curved ultrawide. Those things are nice for spreadsheets, but actually increase distortion in games. Games render images assuming they will be displayed on a flat surface. If you curve the screen towards the viewer the stretched, distorted pixels at the edge increase in apparent size. If you stick your face in the screen they're still the same size, but if your head is in the middle at a normal distance from the screen a curved screen makes the already stretched part of the image out near the edge take up a larger portion of your field of view than a flat one. For spreadsheets and web browsers it's the opposite. A letter or .jpg is the same number of pixels wide no matter where it is on the screen. Curving a large screen evens out the apparent size when your head is in the middle when you're doing desktop stuff. I have yet to see a game that has a screen curvature adjustment, and until manual or automatic curvature adjustments become common I'll regard curved screens as inferior for gaming.

Once upon a time I have a 3x 27" 2560x1440 surround setup driven by a pair of GTX 680s in SLI. That was like 70"x13" or so, 48:9 aspect ratio. Actually more like 72x13 with bezels. So I pretty much had an extreme version of an ultrawide. That generated tons of distortion on the side screens, but it really wasn't bothersome as long as I kept my head in the middle and the immersion was great. Skyrim looked glorious. Games also looked better with the screens arranged in a straight line. Of course the annoying bit was for non-gaming use it was a lot better to angle the side screens towards me pretty significantly.

These days I have a 3840x1440 standard corporate issue curved ultrawide on my desk at work and a 43" 4k plus a couple of 24" 1920x1200 screens in portrait as side screens at home. I like a 43" 4k screen since they give me lots of real estate for work and are very flexible for gaming as long as they don't have a brain-damaged scaler. They're not as sharp as 32" or 27" 4k screens, but are comparable to 27" 1440p, 23" 1080p and most ultrawides in pixel size. Not being brain damaged means the monitor will display a centered image without scaling, so you can run it as 3840x1440 with black bars, 2560x1440 with black on all sides, etc. So if a game does something stupid or it's a competitive FPS that doesn't allow "cheating" by adjusting FOV you can just change your effective screen size. Most games look fine on it using the whole screen but if you hit something that's locked at like 80 degrees FOV it'll feel way too zoomed in.
 
Ok then what about this screen I know it is much bigger.

ASUS Republic of Gamers Swift PG42UQ 41.5" 4K HDR 138 Hz Gaming Monitor
 
ng4ever said:
Ok then what about this screen I know it is much bigger.

ASUS Republic of Gamers Swift PG42UQ 41.5" 4K HDR 138 Hz Gaming Monitor
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It uses the same panel as the LG C2 42" OLED TV, which can be had for $500 less. The LG has slightly less peak brightness and a 120 Hz refresh rate instead of 138 Hz, but it has a glossy coating versus the matte on the ASUS which makes the perception of color and text a lot clearer. The LG also has the option of using black frame insertion while the ASUS doesn't. The ASUS does have DisplayPort inputs if you don't have a video card with HDMI 2.1 outputs. All NVIDIA 3000-series, 4000-series, AMD 6000-series, and AMD 7000-series have HDMI 2.1 outputs. NVIDIA 2000-series and older cards only have HDMI 2.0b. The two displays are otherwise identical, save for the firmware.
 
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