Nvidia’s beastly RTX 4090 has just managed to set a new record by running a game at 13K resolution. We don’t just mean something along the lines of Tetris, either, but a modern and well-loved title — Genshin Impact.
One brave RTX 4090 owner attempted to run the game at 13K. Despite the ultra-high resolution, the RTX 4090 made the game run at a surprisingly high frame rate, and there’s video footage that proves it.
No one questions the fact that the RTX 4090 is great for 4K gaming. If any card can pull off playing AAA titles at max settings and on a high resolution, it’s definitely Nvidia’s latest and greatest. However, Golden Reviewer on YouTube decided to try it out in a previously untested setting by pushing the resolution up to 13K.
The game, Genshin Impact, is an open-world RPG that was made to run on mobile devices, so it’s not the most demanding title. Using an RTX 4090 is overkill for this game, and the publisher confirms this, asking for a GTX 1060 as the recommended GPU. However, things are different when you drive up the settings as high as Golden Reviewer did.
The YouTuber set all of the game’s settings to high, tweaked the resolution to 13,760 x 5760, and started recording. Tom’s Hardware did the math: a 13K resolution translates to 178.32 megapixels per frame. This makes it 1.4 times higher than 8K and a whopping 8.5 times higher than 4K.
If you’re wondering, running the game at 13K doesn’t mean that the user somehow obtained a 13K monitor. Those are still not available on the market. Instead, the image was upscaled to reach 13K.
No matter how it was achieved, the resolution is pretty much insane by today’s standards, and yet, Genshin Impact plays very well on it. The game averaged around 30 frames per second (fps), which is completely playable. Most gamers long for 60 fps and above, but obviously, when you’re playing at 13K, 30 fps is still great.
Golden Reviewer
As for the visuals, it’s safe to say that they hold up. There’s a lack of annoying pixelation, the edges are crisp, and the image is every bit as good as it should be. Even when zooming in closely, the details are on point.
On the other hand, zooming out reveals a fair bit of blurriness; you can’t tell that the game is being played at 13K just by image quality alone. However, for a mobile title being played on PC at 13K, we’ll have to say that it looks great.
When Nvidia’s RTX 4090 is not being throttled (or set on fire) by the ongoing issue of melting cables, it’s certainly the best graphics card on the current market — provided you only care about pure performance metrics and not a mix of power and value. Today’s crazy 13K test is certainly a testament to the card’s abilities, even if there won’t be any real need for this kind of performance anytime soon.