Introduction

For the last few months, I've been ramping up towards a big change for the content that I do here at TweakTown, as I wasn't content with 'just' benchmarking 4K and 3440x1440 resolutions. I wanted to push into 8K but needed a slew of new hardware to pull it off.

Off I went securing a bunch of new hardware to run 7680x4320, which began with the Core i7-7700K (and then will continue with the new Core i9 processors, and the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X sitting next to me). For now, I'm going to be using the Core i7-7700K overclocked to 5GHz as it's more suited to gaming, while the Threadripper 1950X CPU will be tested in our next article.

We'll have detailed specs on the system used on the next page, but onto the resolution that we're testing here: 8K. 8K might seem like it's twice as much as 4K, because - well, 4+4 = 8... but it's far more pixels than you think. 8K is 4x the pixels of 4K and 16x the pixels of 1080p. This means if you look at your 1080p TV, you'd have to have 16 of them to have the pixels that are bursting around the place at 8K. It's an incredible feat.

I have Dell's new UP3218K display, which is the only native 8K monitor on the market. There are other tests done on other sites and by YouTubers at "8K", but it's not native 8K. You can run 8K by running 200% resolution on your game on a 4K monitor (200% on top of 4K renders the game at 7680x4320), but it's still not native.

Then there's NVIDIA's Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR) and AMD's Virtual Super Resolution (VSR). These technologies are the same as running 200% at 4K, rendering the game at 8K. But, it's nowhere near the same as running it on a native 8K panel which requires 2 x DP 1.4 cables just to run.