Asus 4K monitor is just $4K, but don’t get too excited: Your computer isn’t powerful enough to use it In a cute quirk of fate, at Computex 2013 Asus has announced that its consumer- oriented, IGZO-based 31.5-inch 4K monitor will cost $4K when it’s released in the US later this month. Before you all run out and buy one, though, ask yourself one question: Do you have a graphics card that’s actually capable of outputting 4K? Over at The Verge, the intrepid Vlad Savov managed to get some hands-on time with the Asus PQ321 . As you can see in the image below, the first thing he did was plug the 4K monitor into his 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. Despite appearing to work flawlessly, the implementation is anything but. The Nvidia GT 650M in the MacBook Pro is theoretically capable of 4K output, but OS X is restricted to merely scaling up the laptop’s output, rather than outputting native 4K (3840×2160) resolution. 31.5-inch Asus PQ321 4K monitor, attached to a MacBook Pro with Retina display [Image credit: The Verge] Despite the relatively low output resolution (2560×1600), Savov notes that “tangible lag” and a “troublingly low [mouse cursor] refresh rate” are evident when running apps that tax the laptop’s hardware. The experience is better with 4K video, but again it’s being downscaled to 2560×1600 by the GPU, and then scaled back up to 4K by the Asus monitor. ( Read more about Asus’s PQ321 monitor.) It’s easy enough to blame these issues on poor multi-monitor support from OS X, but it’s also clear that the Nvidia GT 650M simply doesn’t have the power to drive two high-resolution displays. There aren’t many laptops out there with better specs than last year’s MacBook Pro, either. The situation is better on the PC, of course: All of the latest Nvidia and AMD GPUs support native 4K output, and Windows copes well with multiple displays at different resolutions. The video below, from the Extreme Windows Blog, shows you Windows 8 and an Nvidia GTX 660 Ti handling three monitors — a 55-inch Toshiba 4K TV and two 27-inch 2560×1400 Samsungs — while running Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 flawlessly. 4K gaming, on the other hand, is another situation entirely. Short of the most powerful ($1,000+) graphics cards, there is nothing on the market that even comes close to running modern games at 4K. At 3840×2160, GPUs have to drive four times the number of pixels as 1920×1080. A few months ago we tested the GTX Titan, GTX 680, and Radeon 7970 on a triple-monitor 5760×1080 setup ; Titan was the only GPU that came close to pulling it off… and 4K is 25% more pixels than 5760×1080! In a roundabout way, we have ultimately just put our finger on the nub of the 4K problem: As it stands, 4K is out of the reach of mobile users and gamers, with the only valid use being professional graphics work. Intel’s Haswell contains a GPU that apparently supports 4K resolution, which should help out future laptops, but it certainly won’t do more than display your desktop or videos at that resolution. $4,000 for a 31.5-inch monitor might seem exorbitant, but the fact is that Asus probably won’t shift more than a few thousand of these monitors — all of them to creatives or extreme gamers. It will be a long time until mid-range computers can power 4K displays, and thus it’ll be a long time until 4K displays are mass-produced for a reasonable cost.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Jun 2013 05:04:43 +0000
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