Why it matters to you
8K is doable today, but it won’t be anything close to mainstream for a long time yet.
Forget 4K, the mad scientists at Thirty IR have managed to get the already stunning The Witcher III running at 8K resolution with every setting maxed out. It looks phenomenal, but the PC required to run it is almost as impressive. It’s fitted with a ridiculous four Nvidia GTX Titan Xps.
Considering it takes a rather expensive graphics card and hardly a cheap display to run your games at 4K resolution, you’d be forgiven for not having made the jump yet — even if the major consoles are. 4K is a hefty resolution. At 3,840 x 2,160 it has four times the pixels as a standard 1080P display, but 8K takes it to a whole new level.
At 7,680 x 4,320, 8K resolution is four times again what 4K has, or 16 times the overall pixels of 1080P, so requires a monumental amount of computing power to run. Indeed to make The Witcher III play at that resolution and detail level at a smooth 60 frames per second, Thirty IR had to link up four Nvidia GTX Titan Xp graphics cards, which at $1,200 apiece are the most expensive and most powerful single-core graphics cards in the world.
You can’t pair up that much graphical power with a weak processor though. To go along with that hefty setup, there is an Intel Core i7-6950X CPU running at 4.3GHz, with 64GB of 3,200MHZ DDR4 memory, all mounted on an Asus Rampage V Extreme motherboard.
But that’s not all. To even record the footage for a game like that and to make sure that the performance of the main rig wasn’t impacted by it, Thirty IR used a secondary, super-powered system (thanks Kotaku). That one is fitted with four GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards, an Intel Core i7-3970X overclocked to 4.8GHz, and 32GB of 2,133MHz DDR3 memory.
That’s an insane amount of high-end hardware, but for an idea of why it was all necessary, just try running the header video at 8K resolution. Even high-powered gaming systems struggle to run the video of that gameplay, let alone play the game at even close to decent frame rates at such detail settings.
Bear in mind too that on top of that, the gamers recording this footage needed an 8K monitor, too. They used the newly released Dell $5,000 UP3218K display.
The Witcher III isn’t the only game they’ve been playing on that monster setup though. There’s also For Honor gameplay to enjoy at ultra detail settings, with others available on the main channel.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwWD5PfMDcs?feature=oembed&w=100&h=100]