Gaming in 8K and Beyond

well 8K@15 fps... don't want see such thing...

 

There's so much room for improvements on affordable 4K sets it's kind of funny to think that we're expected to clamor for incredibly expensive 8K sets that don't even fully address the current shortfalls in today's high priced 4K TVs.

Brightness, contrast, and more LEDs being used in wide array backlit sets, are all things that if improved on can make a noticeable difference in affordable mid-range TVs. That, and including the top of the line image processors in model lines that include sets sized for the desktop.

And of course there's the two biggies of having sets that fully support the HDMI 2.1 specification, and can give us a refresh rate that supports 120 fps with all the bells and whistles like HDR also enabled, and which support VRR, and FreeSync. A display port connector would also be nice.

Just read any well written review of good mid-range 4K sets at around 43" inches in size and it immediately becomes apparent that there's a lot that can be done that could take those sets from being very good to being awesome.

I'm using a RTX 2080, and even if I upgraded to nVidia's highest end card of its next gaming series, let's call it a RTX 3080 Ti, I very likely wouldn't be able to game AAA titles of the last few years at 8K and 60 fps, let alone whatever games were just coming out, and would be coming out in the next few years following. Edit: Nor would 30-60 fps with a variable refresh rate likely be in the cards, imo. At least not for new titles, and upcoming titles.

By the time we got cards that made AAA games at 8K playable, today's 8K panels would likely be both improved on, and greatly reduced in price. With the advent of 4K sets at somewhat reasonable prices we had a video card like the GTX 980 Ti that was arguably overpowered for 1080 panels with the games of the time, and we had a lot of 4K video content on the horizon. And then the GTX 1080, and 1080 Ti, really made gaming at 4K highly plausible.

Today's situation is a bit different in important ways. The movie studios don't have a vast library of content that should get remastered in 8K, nor have 8K digital cameras been used all that much in recent films. A lot of the world isn't set up to get 8K cable broadcasts of sporting events.

Conventional wisdom is going to be harder than ever to shift to accept this last boost in resolution as having solid benefits for the average customer. Prices will have to come down a lot, and 8K content become a lot more common, before people will just say "Better to have a 8K panel and not need it, than to need a 8K panel and not have it".

But what do I know, maybe there will be big improvements in how sets scale, and even 4K content will look noticeably better on an 8K set.

Edit 2: Another point to consider is that with 4K we had UHD blu ray players, and services like Netflix and Amazon come around to support transmitting video at 4K. We recently saw news that Samsung was getting out of the blu ray player business, and we need to think if 8K blu ray will take off any time soon, and at what prices. Given how both Netflix and Amazon aren't exactly generous with the bitrate of 4K content, I'm not optimistic with how they'd handle 8K. Though if 8K content was considered a boutique item, and priced accordingly, then Amazon might think it wise to give some bang for all the bucks they were charging. With Netflix, I just don't know.

 

Even 1080 can be increased quite a bit before the next res-step is necessary. There are so many good AA-algorythems that 1080p is enough for most things. And if that isn't enough, there are many "standard"-resolutions up to 4k.
Don't get me wrong, I really love higher res in games, but it is so expensive that it makes sense to first increase the per pixel quality up to the "max".
Than there is the thing with 144 Hz … impossible with 4k so far.

8k is so far away. It is hard enough to get 4k really good content for the TV. 4k Netflix <<<< UHD BR. I really don't see the need for 8k in the next 10 years. Only if the display size increases dramatically. But than you also need higher frame rates, because with a larger picture you easier spot the picture-changes. Just because everything is bigger. 4k50/60 for movies would be great before going up to 8k.

 

Why are we talking 8K?

I imagine if we could only get 8X the performance of the base PS4, the whole forum would break out confetti and champagne.

That would still be a far cry from the performance needed to do 16X 1080p with a major upgrade in fidelity in other areas for a AAA title.

Nevertheless, 8K is coming. And it’s not going to be the sole marketing feature of next gen TVs. 4K was marketed in conjunction with other new features so will 8K. Just like HDR, atomos and new display screen tech (OLED) helped sell us on 4K sets, new next gen features will help sell 8K TVs.

We are probably a long way off from 8K AAA titles but 8K TVs will probably sell just fine without them.

 

Rendering will inevitably become more and more similar to video compression and shading will be decoupled spatially and temporally.

 

I really don't think 8k gaming is necessary for most users.

https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/by-size/size-to-distance-relationship

A person with 20/20 vision can't distinguish pixels of a 1080p 50" TV at 1.93 m. At 0.93 m the person even can't distinguish 4k pixels.

We can deduce that even a person has super good vision of 20/10, at about 2 m he cannot distinguish 4k pixels of A 50" TV.
In other words, 4k is also very sufficient for most people, even for those with very good vision of 20/10.

8k is only useful for those who watch 50" TV at only 0.5~1 m. It's not a common case.

 

It's a less useful metric since you're comparing Real Life ubersampling to potentially rasterizing only 1 to a few samples per pixel (Clearly, there's a need for various techniques to oversample/reconstruct edges, for instance. AF increases the texture samples per pixel, variable rate shading increases/decreases amount of shading per area based on thing, conservative raster does thing etc.)

I'm going to bed

 

High refresh rate is more important for constatly moving content than spatial resolution.

For Trials I would love 120hz mode for consoles.

For next gen and relatively simple game a shading resolution of ~1080p - 2160p and screen refresh at 120hz, should be where to aim for.

 

There is some hope that higher screen refresh rates will be supported on new sets. Whether that is taken advantage of is another matter. But variable refresh rate Is definitely a worthwhile feature, though I also fear it will be used to allow the frame rates to fluctuate downwards.

 

And 2m is still close... 3m is more typical. IMO for 8k to make sense we would need at least 120" taking into account that most people are sitting further away than 2m.

For example if we take a 120" TV and put it in front of someone with a more typical 20/15 VA, and then sit them a more typical 3m away, well this 120" TV is ~3m diagonally and ~2.615m horizontally. 20/15 VA is equal to being able to resolve 1/80 of a degree. Using the tangent function we find that this person resolves 0.0006545m of the screen. Thus we find that these ~average eyeballs in ~average viewing conditions resolves 2.615/0.0006545=~3995 pixels on this wall of pixels. So even with a 120" TV, at a more typical viewing distance for someone with a closer to average VA, the pixels are still just barely being resolved on a 4k screen...

 

LG got support for both this year in 4k, really hope other manufacturers will follow.

 

General panel R&D is focussed on resolution, not because there is great demand for ever higher definition small panels but because there is a large demand for ever larger panels without massive pixels (relatively) and multi-panel panning controllers. This is mostly being driven by the marketing and advertising industry and to a lesser degree control informatics vendors.

Controls rooms like this (from WARGAMES), are becoming more and more common for transport, utility and shipping companies, who want a clear, large overview of a lot of detailed information.

 

To infinite immersion and beyond...

The trend of the past 40 years of gaming so far has been moving away from games that solely were about testing reflexes towards more immersive environments. Doom both 1994 and 2019 (eternal) still has much more in common with each other than a holodeck, but things like VR are a natural evolution of the trend. The question, what are the next innovations after VR? Does it really become too cumbersome and expensive and possibly pointless to develop things like haptic gloves or maybe gloves which can simulate touching surfaces for the mass market? Something which could simulate taste? Hard to see how it could be done without literally hacking the nervous system a la Existenz and that would probably imply living in a dystopian future.

Of course there is the Matrix as well...but Existenz is more relevant to gaming.

 

The natural progression from VR would be AR and then LARP.

Spoiler

For those that don't know LARP stands for Live Action Role Playing, in this case you'd go from the virtual world back to the real world with simulated real environments with actual real food, props and NPCs. Oh and real body odor too.

Sorry, I couldn't help myself.

Regards,
SB

 

A thread for future gaming predictions and discussion beyond say the next 10 years isn't such a bad idea. Maybe people will look back in a century and laugh at the crazy predictions if we're not all living underground due to nuclear apocalypse, or jacked into the matrix by then.

 

I think we'll probably see the return of the old VR booths, but with suspended exoskeletons you can be strapped into that simulate movement, and haptic feedback within safety limits.

 

At what timelines though? Without a timeline, such 'predictions' are purely sci-fi, like so much Hollywood. In a thousand years, anything is possible, but over the next 10, not so much.

 

I'd say on the order of 20-30 years time.

 

They're already here:

(NSFW)

Spoiler

 

Just as a warning before anyone looks at the spoiler, it is extremely NSFW.

Regards,
SB