4K monitors still have a niche existence. Noisy Steam Hardware Survey Only 2.54 percent of the players use the high resolution. While 2160p is more popular among GameStar readers, it’s anything but mainstream at 13.8 percent. That’s why we didn’t even ask you about 8K in our last survey, and Steam isn’t (yet) making the effort either.
No wonder. After all, there is practically no graphics card that is able to calculate so many pixels with acceptable frame rates. You can see how much more a GPU has to do here in the following table:
| designation | resolution | Pixel |
|---|---|---|
| 8K, 4320p | 7.680 x 4.320 | 33.177.600 |
| 4K, 2160p | 3.840 x 2.160 | 8.294.400 |
| WQHD, 1440p | 2.560 x .1440 | 3.686.400 |
| Full HD, 1080p | 1.920 x 1.080 | 2.073.600 |
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With the RTX 3090, Nvidia made an attempt to focus on the 8K resolution a little, but without the AI upscaler DLSS the results were modest – in our test, it averaged around 34 FPS from six games.
RTX 4090: 8K-Benchmarks von Nvidia
With the brand new flagship Geforce RTX 4090, Nvidia is now making another attempt in terms of 8K gaming and presents the first benchmarks:
(Image source: Nvidia)
In fact, the new flagship manages to get some of the games shown above the 60 frames per second limit without the support of the AI upscaler DLSS. Particularly interesting are Hunt: Showdown with 83 FPS and Forza Horizon 5 with around 60 FPS. Especially since, according to the data sheet, the highest settings were used in the respective games.
We haven’t counted the individual pixels in the diagram, but even without DLSS, the RTX 4090 achieves an average of roughly 63 FPS. So does this make it the world’s first true 8K graphics card?
The first 8K graphics card – with some drawbacks
According to the benchmarks shown, that could certainly be said. But of course it has to be considered here that Nvidia will have made a selection of games that make the performance look particularly good. Also, some of the games, such as Apex Legends and Lost Ark, are not particularly performance-hungry.
For titles like that Microsoft Flight Simulator or Red Dead Redemption 2, the RTX 4090 cannot do without the support of DLSS either. At least not on the highest graphics settings. It would be interesting to see how the results turn out at medium and maybe also low settings.
Well available: RTX cards at Amazon
Irrespective of this, the RTX 4090 is certainly a big performance step, also in the direction of 8K resolution. Until 8K reaches the masses of gamers, it will probably take many more years and generations of graphics cards. Because even 4K gaming is hardly affordable for many, as the following article also shows:
What do you say about the benchmarks? Are you impressed with the performance of the RTX 4090? Or are you telling yourself that 8K resolution is completely irrelevant anyway? Write it to us in the comments!
