720p gaming on cheap 4K tv

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matt167

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I just bought a house. Old TV quit. New tv is just a Hisense 58” 4K that was on rollback. I’ve never had 4K but I didn’t even think about it. My media center PC which I also play some light games on has an R7 450 4gb that will not play anything gaming above 720p except 2004-2005 era games will run at 1080P. Will 720p be acceptable within reason or will I need an RX6400 to push 1080p? I have a single slot low profile which is why I’m so limited. But the $25 video card has been great.
 
matt167 said:
I just bought a house. Old TV quit. New tv is just a Hisense 58” 4K that was on rollback. I’ve never had 4K but I didn’t even think about it. My media center PC which I also play some light games on has an R7 450 4gb that will not play anything gaming above 720p except 2004-2005 era games will run at 1080P. Will 720p be acceptable within reason or will I need an RX6400 to push 1080p? I have a single slot low profile which is why I’m so limited. But the $25 video card has been great.
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hmmm. 1080 looks fine on my hisense, ill see how 720 looks. give me a bit....
what are you playing? so i can compare something similar, if i have it.

edit: works fine, just looks like an older console. it looks like the tv might be trying some upscaling or something, 720 doesnt look as bad as i recall...
 
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The most graphically intensive game I play on it is GTA 5, but it’s also used for Dolphin emulation and source engine games run perfectly.
 
matt167 said:
I just bought a house. Old TV quit. New tv is just a Hisense 58” 4K that was on rollback. I’ve never had 4K but I didn’t even think about it. My media center PC which I also play some light games on has an R7 450 4gb that will not play anything gaming above 720p except 2004-2005 era games will run at 1080P. Will 720p be acceptable within reason or will I need an RX6400 to push 1080p? I have a single slot low profile which is why I’m so limited. But the $25 video card has been great.
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My advise is save up for a decent 4k card especially if your tv can run 4k 120. Imo 1080p looks very pixelated and blurry on a large 4k screen. Even 1440p looks bad and blocky. You ideally want to be at you native resolution for that sweet sharp 2160p image quality.
 
xDiVolatilX said:
My advise is save up for a decent 4k card especially if your tv can run 4k 120. Imo 1080p looks very pixelated and blurry on a large 4k screen. Even 1440p looks bad and blocky. You ideally want to be at you native resolution for that sweet sharp 2160p image quality.
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It's for his htpc that only accepts single slot low profile cards. He isn't concerned about 4k gaming there :).
 
vick1000 said:
Modern processors in TVs do excellent upscaling, it should look 90% as good as a native 720p image.
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Absolutely not. 720p on a large 4K display will look worse. Especially on a Hisense. They are not known for good upscaling.
 
I’m going to try it and see what it looks like. I don’t have the game drive with me at the moment which is why I haven’t yet.

My main rig is also still not set up, but that one is the one I use when I play eye candy games. GTA 5 is the newest game I’ve ever ran on the media pc. And the media pc was my plex server that I put the cheap video card in to see how I would like it. It still runs Plex too
 
I forgot that I had Heaven benchmark on it, and set it to 720p to see what it looked like. It looks okay. I can tell its not native resolution.
 
I snagged a low profile Dell RX550 for $40. That I should be able to overclock a little and probably run 1080p in most games I want to. Considering 720p is okay, 1080p on the 4K screen will be better… game debate called the Rx550 a 4K card for GTA 5. I thought that was funny.
 
vick1000 said:
Modern processors in TVs do excellent upscaling, it should look 90% as good as a native 720p image.
Click to expand...
Definitely it won't
If TV's had simplest to implement integer/point scaling it would be roughly true but unfortunately they almost exclusively do not (there were some exceptions) and rather use some kind of blurry upscaling.

It is less of an issue on modern GPU's as they can do integer upscaling themselves. 3840x2160 nicely supports integer upscaling of 1920x1080 and 1280x720. Not sure the GPU's mentioned in OP can do it though or even 2160p at 60Hz

The thing about that blurry upscaling is however that it is only jarring at the beginning and one gets used to the image fairly quickly.

I would only advice against trying to compensate blurriness with any sharpening filters. People have tendency to do so thinking it makes details more visible - it does not. It only makes image look more "busy".
 
I stuck the RX550 in and set the screen res to 1080p since some dialog boxes on some of my software displayed tiny at 4K and it was annoying. It looks 90% as good to me. I ran heaven at 1080p and 720p. My wife can notice that 720p looks a little muddy with this card but the performance is double of the old card. And it can do 1080p where it looks great. I found the game drive I want to use but I’m going boating this weekend so I’ll update on gaming later.
 
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