When it comes to PC gaming, there’s still a reasonable debate about the merits of 4K versus the older 1440p. But forget all that as the world’s first 110-inch 16K TV has been announced.
For now, it’s a prototype, not something you can actually buy. Actual resolution is 15,360 x 8,640 pixels. So this monster is essentially four of his 8K pixel grids crammed together, or sixteen of his 4K displays. Or, if you want to get really silly, you can use 64 1080p panels.
A higher number would be no less than 132,710,400 pixels. Of course, each pixel consists of red, green, and blue sub-pixels. That is 398,131,200 individually addressable sub-pixels. Incorporate it into the Cleartype font smoothing algorithm and process it.
Of course, such a display immediately leads to all sorts of “why”s and “hows.” As detailed in Vincent Teoh of HDTV testingthis screen is being shown at the Display Week 2023 show in Los Angeles.
This is brought to you by BOE, a leading TV and monitor panel manufacturer that only makes screens, not fully finished products that you can buy. Some specifications were also detailed at the show. This is an LCD panel with 400 nits, 1,200:1 contrast ratio, and 99 coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut. All these mean it is a monster IPS type panel.
It also runs at just 60Hz, which isn’t all that surprising given the tremendous bandwidth requirements that come with it. Speaking of which, Teoh said the display was actually running 8K content that he upscaled to 16K.
This highlights the obvious pressing problem of a shortage of 16K content. As far as we know, his true 16K camera does not exist to capture content. Additionally, driving the display at his 16K is a big deal.
Coincidentally, the only device that can do that is the PC. The DisplayPort 2.0 standard supports 16K at 30 bits per pixel 4:4:4 at 60 Hz refresh rate using DSC video compression.
So in theory you could use an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT or XTX which both support DisplayPort 2.1 and drive this feature natively. However, for games, the GPU load is 16x that of 4K. And that would be unspeakable for current GPUs.
After all, this is all just a minor distraction. As we mentioned at the beginning, in a world where 4K is no problem for PC gaming, Nvidia has launched his $400 RTX 4060 Ti aimed at 1080p gameplay. This is a display panel that produces a graphics load that is 64x that of 1080p and 16x that of 1080p. 4K is irrelevant.
That being said, getting 16K playable takes a little longer than flicking a DLSS switch in frame generation. But one day, no one will know. 4K and its 8 million pixels were unthinkable in an era when games were played at 1024 x 768p pixels on big, chunky fishbowl CRT monitors. So, it’s hard to imagine at this point, but eventually he’ll see 16K games come to fruition.
