Gaming with a 4K monitor at 1080p resolution.

Just a theoretical question, say that I bought a 4K monitor and wanted to run some of my games at 1080p (maybe the game doesn't have a 4K resolution or the graphics card isn't fast enough to run the game at an acceptable frame rate), how well does 4K monitors display 1080p content. When I looked for information about this, I find a lot of different answers, I was hoping to hear from people who have done this. Some people say that the 4K monitor does not simply display 4 pixels for every 1080p pixel, but uses some kind of fancy interpolation that might degrade image quality.

Going to need to know which monitor, they all use differing methods of displaying resolutions lower than native.

Just planning for the future, I don't have a 4K monitor yet. I guess that is why I am hearing a lot of different opinions about how well a 4K monitor displays 1080p content. Does any 4K monitor use the simple 4 pixels = one 1080p pixel scheme?

AFAIK they all upscale to some degree. The type of upscaling that looks best is a personal preference though.

4K is an integral multiple of 1080p so scaling isn't too difficult. Simply quadrupling the pixels makes it look more or less exactly the same as a native 1080p display. It's scaling by nonintegral factors where it gets complicated. That's better left to the GPU.

BTW, the 4K Seikis can do 1080p at 120Hz. That's more or less perfect for a dual purpose gaming/workstation.

I was just thinking that a good way to alleviate the poor scaling of 1080p resolution by 4K monitors would be with NVIDIA's Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR). Right now it runs games at a higher resolution and converts them to a lower resolution. It would probably take little, to no tweaking, to get this feature to run in reverse, run a game in lower resolution and convert it to a higher resolution. This would allow any games that have maximum resolutions that are not as high as 4K to be output in native 4K resolution (hopefully with little, to no distortion).

AnimeMania said:

I was just thinking that a good way to alleviate the poor scaling of 1080p resolution by 4K monitors would be with NVIDIA's Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR). Right now it runs games at a higher resolution and converts them to a lower resolution. It would probably take little, to no tweaking, to get this feature to run in reverse, run a game in lower resolution and convert it to a higher resolution. This would allow any games that have maximum resolutions that are not as high as 4K to be output in native 4K resolution (hopefully with little, to no distortion).

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Can't you edit the video config manually on most games? Just set it to 4K that way.

AnimeMania said:

I was just thinking that a good way to alleviate the poor scaling of 1080p resolution by 4K monitors would be with NVIDIA's Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR). Right now it runs games at a higher resolution and converts them to a lower resolution. It would probably take little, to no tweaking, to get this feature to run in reverse, run a game in lower resolution and convert it to a higher resolution. This would allow any games that have maximum resolutions that are not as high as 4K to be output in native 4K resolution (hopefully with little, to no distortion).

Click to expand...

"Inverse DSR" is already done whenever you select a resolution that has "(scaled)" appended to it. And yes, the scalers built into GPUs are about the best real time scalers you can get. You can even set it somewhere between 1080p and 4K and have it look better than setting it to 1080p - GPU scalers do quite well with nonintegral scaling factors. (For that matter, 3D rendering depends on a lot of nonintegral, nonuniform scaling!)