**Is 4K High Refresh Rate Worth It?**

I've been considering the upgrade to a 4K high refresh rate monitor for some time now, especially since Battlefield 5 is released and I'm eager to experience the latest gaming technology. However, before making any decisions, I wanted to weigh the pros and cons of such an investment.

As you may know, frame rate drops down to 100 frames per second with a 4K high refresh rate monitor, which might not be as smooth as the 160 frames per second offered by some systems. But don't get me wrong; it's still very good and a significant improvement over lower refresh rates.

To put this into perspective, I've been using both 1440p and 4K high refresh rate monitors side by side, and while they're both great in their own right, there is a noticeable difference. The 1440p monitor is already quite sharp, but the individual pixels are still visible at close distance. In contrast, the 4K high refresh rate monitor's pixels are much smaller, making it feel less like you're looking at a monitor displaying an image and more like you're looking through a window into a game.

This "window-ness" is hard to put into words, but it's a significant difference that affects your gaming experience. With the 1440p monitor, you can still see individual pixels, which reminds your brain that you're looking at a monitor displaying an image. On the other hand, the 4K high refresh rate monitor makes the image feel more immersive and engaging.

When it comes to performance, I've found that even mid-range graphics cards struggle with 4K gaming at high refresh rates. To truly experience the benefits of a 4K high refresh rate monitor, you need a system capable of driving those high frame rates smoothly. In my opinion, you should consider an RX 6800 XT or an RTX 3080 to make the most of your new monitor.

Now, I know some of you might be thinking, "Is it worth the extra outlay?" Well, considering the current market values of graphics cards and monitors, I don't think anything's worth it just yet. If you have a system that's already capable of handling high refresh rates at lower resolutions, there's no compelling reason to upgrade just yet.

However, if you're one of the lucky few who already have an RTX 3080 or an RX 6800 XT graphics card and want to experience the best of what 4K gaming has to offer, then yes, a high refresh rate 4K monitor is definitely worth it. The extra sharpness and windowiness make for a more immersive gaming experience that's hard to put into words.

For those who don't have such powerful hardware, I'd recommend holding on to your current system for dear life and appreciating every moment with it until the market calms down. If you're looking at more MSRP prices, I think the subjective difference between 1440p and 4K is not as significant as the performance hit and the hit to your wallet would suggest.

In conclusion, 4K high refresh rate gaming is only worth it if you already have a system that's super overpowered. For everyone else, 1080p remains the best option, especially considering the budget-friendly options available in the market today.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday we're gonna compare a high-end option to a sell your kidneys on the black market end option is going from high refresh rate 1440p at 27 inch to high refresh rate 4k at 27 inch worth the extra outlay but before that it's time for a sponsor for today's video so that i didn't have to actually sell one of my kidneys to buy this 4k monitor today's video is sponsored by squarespace for those of you that want to get your own website up and running without much of a hassle squarespace makes it super easy for you to get started on your new website because they have more templates than you can waive a terrified gt710 at modifying these templates to fit your need is so easy that even i could do it squarespace also has a whole host of other features like mobile optimized websites so that your site will look good regardless of what device people are using it on if you want to use your website to sell macaroni art finger painting you can do that with squarespace's powerful ecommerce features on top of that you can optimize the seo of your fingerpaint sales so that you don't get lost in the googles if that sounds good to you head over to squarespace.com for a free trial and once you're done setting up your new site and you want to go live use squarespace forward slash david to get 10 percent of your first website purchase or domain purchase thank you again squarespace for sponsoring today's video now for today's video i'm going to focus more on the subjective differences in my opinion i'm not going to be going into too much detail about various use cases and who should be looking at it and who shouldn't be because optimum tech actually recently did a video where he goes into a lot of detail about that and he does detailed breakdowns way better than i'd ever be able to so i have that video linked in the description below for you to check out this video is just going to be my subjective opinion considering that i've been lucky enough to actually live with both of these monitors for a while being powered by a system that can handle both resolutions fairly well i think that i can give you some insight into whether or not i think it's worth going from 1440p to 4k but before we get into that there is quite a lot that you need to bear in mind if you're actually considering going to 4k not only is the 4k high refresh rate monitor itself a lot more expensive than the 1440p options the vue sonic xg27 many numbers which i'll show on the screen here on newegg at the moment costs about 480 us dollars whereas this acer xb27 many numbers behind it um is one of the cheaper high refresh rate 4k options but on newegg at the moment it still costs you about 850 dollars which is a considerable difference although the hardware pricing market is less stable than the price of bitcoin at the moment so these prices do change quite regularly in fact i paid the equivalent of about 650 us dollars for this 4k monitor so yeah there's a lot of leeway there but you shouldn't only take into account the difference in price between the actual monitors because it's a lot easier to game at 1440p 120 frames per second than it is to game at 4k 120 frames per second because remember with 4k every one of those frames is about 8.3 million pixels which means to get 120 frames per second your graphics card has to drive almost a billion pixels per second and a billion of anything seems like way more than any one person should ever have access to but anyway basically 4k is a lot more difficult to drive than 1440p take battlefield 5 being powered by an rtx 3080 for example with high settings at 1440p the system that i used for these tests gets around 160 frames per second at 1440p whereas if you knock it up to 4k that frame rate drops down to 100 frames per second which bear in mind for 4k high settings in battlefield 5 is still very good but it's it's a lot less than 160 which means that you also have to take into account what system you're going to use to try and game on that monitor in my opinion at the moment you shouldn't be considering anything less than like an rx 6800 xt or an rtx 3080 above to try and get high refresh rate 4k gaming at reasonable settings to still make it worth it now up until this point i've not given you any new information have i obviously 4k high refresh rate is a lot more difficult to drive than the already difficult to drive high refresh rate 1440p monitor situation um but do i think it's worth the additional outlay now considering the current market values of graphics cards and monitors and stuff i don't think anything's worth it i think if you have a system hold on to it for dear life and appreciate every moment with it until we can ride out this this scalpocalypse that we're currently living in um but if we were looking at more msrp prices is the subjective difference between the two as big as the performance hit and the hit to your wallet would suggest um no it really isn't it obviously isn't because at this point you're very much getting into the territory of the law of diminishing returns there isn't nearly as big a difference between 1440p and 4k as there is between 720p and 1080p for example but that doesn't mean that the difference doesn't matter now i've spent ages a being the two of these monitors side by side and yes you do kind of have to look for the differences in sharpness between the two monitors and other than that the experience is very similar they're equally smooth in my opinion and the rest of the gaming experience is similar but that small difference in sharpness does actually add up to quite a big subjective difference to me and the reason for that is because with the 1440p monitor it is already very sharp but at a pretty close distance to the monitor you can still see individual pixels they are tiny but i can still see them which kind of reminds your brain that you're looking at a monitor displaying an image whereas with the 4k high refresh rate monitor again sitting fairly close you can't see the individual pixels which kind of removes a pretty big visual artifact that monitors have which is the kind of jagginess of the individual pixels stitched together to make an image so it feels less like you're looking at a monitor displaying an image and more like you're looking through a window into a game which sounds really stupid and i i feel stupid saying it but it it genuinely is that kind of difference so at the end of the day is the window-ness of the 4k gaming experience worth the extra outlay if you're one of the lucky 15 people that already have an rtx 3080 or an rx 6800 xt graphics cards that only really start stretching their legs at 4k then i think it definitely is worth going for a high refresh rate 4k monitor because you get the extra sharpness and windowiness of the 4k gaming experience but you don't have to sacrifice smoothness and input lag and stuff like that like you used to and i think that's pretty cool but honestly for everybody else 1080p is still honestly the best option like the fact that at the moment you can flip not much money by a 1080p ips high refresh rate monitor with freesync and g-sync in it means that the budget gamer has access to really good image quality and then you don't need a super powerful graphics card to be able to power that good image quality so yeah in conclusion is 4k high refresh rate worth it only if you already have a graphics card that's super overpowered and actually 1080p is still the best option um so yeah with that bombshell thank you very much for watching if you liked the video like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one and until the next video byetoday we're gonna compare a high-end option to a sell your kidneys on the black market end option is going from high refresh rate 1440p at 27 inch to high refresh rate 4k at 27 inch worth the extra outlay but before that it's time for a sponsor for today's video so that i didn't have to actually sell one of my kidneys to buy this 4k monitor today's video is sponsored by squarespace for those of you that want to get your own website up and running without much of a hassle squarespace makes it super easy for you to get started on your new website because they have more templates than you can waive a terrified gt710 at modifying these templates to fit your need is so easy that even i could do it squarespace also has a whole host of other features like mobile optimized websites so that your site will look good regardless of what device people are using it on if you want to use your website to sell macaroni art finger painting you can do that with squarespace's powerful ecommerce features on top of that you can optimize the seo of your fingerpaint sales so that you don't get lost in the googles if that sounds good to you head over to squarespace.com for a free trial and once you're done setting up your new site and you want to go live use squarespace forward slash david to get 10 percent of your first website purchase or domain purchase thank you again squarespace for sponsoring today's video now for today's video i'm going to focus more on the subjective differences in my opinion i'm not going to be going into too much detail about various use cases and who should be looking at it and who shouldn't be because optimum tech actually recently did a video where he goes into a lot of detail about that and he does detailed breakdowns way better than i'd ever be able to so i have that video linked in the description below for you to check out this video is just going to be my subjective opinion considering that i've been lucky enough to actually live with both of these monitors for a while being powered by a system that can handle both resolutions fairly well i think that i can give you some insight into whether or not i think it's worth going from 1440p to 4k but before we get into that there is quite a lot that you need to bear in mind if you're actually considering going to 4k not only is the 4k high refresh rate monitor itself a lot more expensive than the 1440p options the vue sonic xg27 many numbers which i'll show on the screen here on newegg at the moment costs about 480 us dollars whereas this acer xb27 many numbers behind it um is one of the cheaper high refresh rate 4k options but on newegg at the moment it still costs you about 850 dollars which is a considerable difference although the hardware pricing market is less stable than the price of bitcoin at the moment so these prices do change quite regularly in fact i paid the equivalent of about 650 us dollars for this 4k monitor so yeah there's a lot of leeway there but you shouldn't only take into account the difference in price between the actual monitors because it's a lot easier to game at 1440p 120 frames per second than it is to game at 4k 120 frames per second because remember with 4k every one of those frames is about 8.3 million pixels which means to get 120 frames per second your graphics card has to drive almost a billion pixels per second and a billion of anything seems like way more than any one person should ever have access to but anyway basically 4k is a lot more difficult to drive than 1440p take battlefield 5 being powered by an rtx 3080 for example with high settings at 1440p the system that i used for these tests gets around 160 frames per second at 1440p whereas if you knock it up to 4k that frame rate drops down to 100 frames per second which bear in mind for 4k high settings in battlefield 5 is still very good but it's it's a lot less than 160 which means that you also have to take into account what system you're going to use to try and game on that monitor in my opinion at the moment you shouldn't be considering anything less than like an rx 6800 xt or an rtx 3080 above to try and get high refresh rate 4k gaming at reasonable settings to still make it worth it now up until this point i've not given you any new information have i obviously 4k high refresh rate is a lot more difficult to drive than the already difficult to drive high refresh rate 1440p monitor situation um but do i think it's worth the additional outlay now considering the current market values of graphics cards and monitors and stuff i don't think anything's worth it i think if you have a system hold on to it for dear life and appreciate every moment with it until we can ride out this this scalpocalypse that we're currently living in um but if we were looking at more msrp prices is the subjective difference between the two as big as the performance hit and the hit to your wallet would suggest um no it really isn't it obviously isn't because at this point you're very much getting into the territory of the law of diminishing returns there isn't nearly as big a difference between 1440p and 4k as there is between 720p and 1080p for example but that doesn't mean that the difference doesn't matter now i've spent ages a being the two of these monitors side by side and yes you do kind of have to look for the differences in sharpness between the two monitors and other than that the experience is very similar they're equally smooth in my opinion and the rest of the gaming experience is similar but that small difference in sharpness does actually add up to quite a big subjective difference to me and the reason for that is because with the 1440p monitor it is already very sharp but at a pretty close distance to the monitor you can still see individual pixels they are tiny but i can still see them which kind of reminds your brain that you're looking at a monitor displaying an image whereas with the 4k high refresh rate monitor again sitting fairly close you can't see the individual pixels which kind of removes a pretty big visual artifact that monitors have which is the kind of jagginess of the individual pixels stitched together to make an image so it feels less like you're looking at a monitor displaying an image and more like you're looking through a window into a game which sounds really stupid and i i feel stupid saying it but it it genuinely is that kind of difference so at the end of the day is the window-ness of the 4k gaming experience worth the extra outlay if you're one of the lucky 15 people that already have an rtx 3080 or an rx 6800 xt graphics cards that only really start stretching their legs at 4k then i think it definitely is worth going for a high refresh rate 4k monitor because you get the extra sharpness and windowiness of the 4k gaming experience but you don't have to sacrifice smoothness and input lag and stuff like that like you used to and i think that's pretty cool but honestly for everybody else 1080p is still honestly the best option like the fact that at the moment you can flip not much money by a 1080p ips high refresh rate monitor with freesync and g-sync in it means that the budget gamer has access to really good image quality and then you don't need a super powerful graphics card to be able to power that good image quality so yeah in conclusion is 4k high refresh rate worth it only if you already have a graphics card that's super overpowered and actually 1080p is still the best option um so yeah with that bombshell thank you very much for watching if you liked the video like and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one and until the next video bye