With 4K gaming on the verge of becoming the standard for many console and PC gamers out there, YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips wanted to push the envelope by aiming for a monstrous PC that was capable of playing games at 16K - a resolution that comes in at 15360x8640 - or about 132 million pixels. And it would seem like they succeeded, to some degree.
The experiment had some hiccups during the start, as one would expect; but in the end, the mad men over in Vancouver managed to get it to run, thanks to some help from both Nvidia and Acer. The system was custom-built using non-consumer grade graphics cards, insane amounts of cabling and 16 4K capable G-Sync monitors supplied by Acer.
The system used the following hardware to achieve this feat:
- Four Nvidia Quadro P5000 Graphics Cards
- ASUS Rampage 5 Edition Motherboard
- Intel Core i7 6900K CPU
- 32GB of Corsair DDR4X RAM
- Nvidia Quadro-Sync 2 card
As for the cost of the system, outside of the custom built desktop that was supplied to them, you're looking at a relative price of around $12,000 just for the hardware as mentioned above; not to mention the cost of running the system, seeing as just the monitor array would consume 1100 watts of power, as pointed out by the team.
In the end, the system managed to run Minecraft and Half-Life 2 at a pretty respectable 40 to 50FPS; however, games that required a bit more oomph like Rise of the Tomb Raider ran at a mere one frame-per-second on this system at low-quality settings. Civilization V managed to come in at a lowly 20FPS, not to mention having the smallest UI thanks to the resolution, making it barely playable.
It would seem from this experiment that 16K gaming is completely plausible; however, waiting for display manufacturers to squeeze all those pixels into a smaller panel is recommended unless you were willing to splurge to take the crown as the king of the so-called 'PC Master Race'.
Source and Image: YouTube
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