1440p in Elite and beyond!

[Iron5ight]

Recently purchased a GTX970 for future games as some of the latest were beginning to suffer under my 670. (Which was an awesome card in it's own right)

My rig is as follows:

AMD Phenom x6 1090t (3.8Ghz OC)
MSI GTX 970
8Gb RAM
Plenty of SDD space.

Now I'm extremely happy playing in 1080p (max for my monitor), but wondered if anyone here as recently made the move to a 2560x1440 monitor and if they have any comments on the pitfalls and perks for doing so. Is the increase in resolution worth the potential loss of a few FPS?

Thanks.

[pargyrak]

With the 970 you will have less than 60 fps on planets at 1440p.. If you go to 4K...then 980Ti or SLI

[Digga]

You could consider 2560x1080 on that card.
I believe in the UK you can pick up a 34" 2560x1080 for near £300 and it will give you a great ED experience.

[Zadkiel]

Recently purchased a GTX970 for future games as some of the latest were beginning to suffer under my 670. (Which was an awesome card in it's own right)

My rig is as follows:

AMD Phenom x6 1090t (3.8Ghz OC)
MSI GTX 970
8Gb RAM
Plenty of SDD space.

Now I'm extremely happy playing in 1080p, but wondered if anyone here as recently made the move to 2560x1440 and if they have any comments on the pitfalls and perks for doing so. Is the increase in resolution worth the potential loss of a few FPS?

Thanks.

As a quick aside, you talk about 2560x1440 as being an 'increase in resolution' - but is your display capable of that resolution? If it's a 1080 display then by choosing a higher resolution you are in fact using DSR (downscaled resolution) where the graphics are first rendered at the higher resolution but then downscaled - the video is still outputted at 1080, you just get a very marginal improvement in detail by rendering at a higher resolution and then downscaling it.

I recently did the exact same upgrade (from 670 to 970), on a slightly better specced machine and played with using DSR, and my conclusion was that it wasn't worth it. I couldn't see any noticable improvement in graphical fidelity in 1440 DSR over 1080, but I could see the framerate reduction and also hear the noisier fans

[TorTorden]

I figured he was buing aa new monitor.
I just went from regular 1080p to a 34" 3440x1440 and definitely recommend higher resolution.

2560x1440 should be fine on that card, maybe not ultra everything on surface but that's about it really.
Also might depend a bit on you. I consider steady 45-55fps to be ok np. Others would want at least 70+ to call it OK
And many many more is just fine and dandy with 30fps.

My 2gb 960 was ok in 3440x1440 excpept for maybe crysis 3 and horizons beta (suffered from vram limitations mostly)

[Iron5ight]

Thanks for the replies so far, and yes I neglected to mention that the upgrade would require a new monitor.

[Zadkiel]

Ah, OK, your OP wasn't clear and I assumed you were talking about using DSR because you have an Nvidia card and the 'Geforce Experience' software (on my system at least) tells me that 1440DSR is the 'optimal' setting for Elite on a 1080 monitor.

[Roger Wilco Jr]

I built a new machine for Elite and started with a GTX-970 and a 2560x1440p monitor. I never played Elite in 1080p, but it looks great at 1440p and I'd recommend it. I think you'll get 60fps in most situations, but it may drop into the 50s in stations and maybe the 40s on planets. Just using high settings instead of ultra will help with that, and honestly I can't really tell much of a difference between the two. You'll also be stuck with 1.0 super sampling, as 1.5 or 2.0 will kill your fps.

After about 3 months, I got a second 970 in SLI. Now I maintain 60fps just about everywhere in ultra.

[CMDR Clypsis]

Here's my breakdown:
I am an Enthusiast level Gamer and have:
Core i7 920 (yes a 7 yr old proc!)
24GB of DDR3 (max for my Mobo)
4 SSD raid0
2x GTX760 2GB SLi
Samsung U28D590D 28" 4K (3840x2160) monitor
Corsair's RM1000i PSU
Crammed in Corsair's Carbide Air 540

When I made the Jump from 1080p to 2160p/4K the biggest performace hit i noticed was with SYS RAM, I only had 6GB at the time, and due to the massive textures loaded into memory for 2160p/4K rezzes 6GB wasn't cutting it. I use MSI's versatile Afterburner program to keep after Temps and mild OCs of my VCs but it also provides a neat tool of OSD for my temps VC/SYS also showing MEM loads.

Running E:D @ 2160p/4K floating in deep space both cards run with 1.5GB VRAM used and my SYS MEM loads @ 10GB-12GB usage! Planetside, in combat, or Ring Systems my VRAM usage Maxes on both cards and my SYS MEM hits 16GB-17GB usage!!

Up until Horizons came out I could run E:D at 2160p/4K with all graphical eye candy @Ultra with a FPS of 40-110 depending on what was onscreen. Now with Horizons at those settings as soon as a planet what was land-able popped my FPS would tank to <24FPS it was stop frame animation.. super scary plummeting towards a planet @over 120 Mm/s with an altitude of only 7km. The CUDA cores of the 760s just can't hack that resolution and run the COMPUTE calculations required for the procedural generation of the planet surfaces.

Now for some personal insight on the ingame IQE like supersampling, anti-aliasing, and such. Those IQEs were introduced at a time when screen resolutions were low and introduced aliasing (AKA the Stair-Step effect) due to the fact that @ 1024x768 on a 19" screen the individual pixels (the tiny box of RGB cells that make the image used to read this post) were ~.25-.5mm in size... massive by computing stds, which can cause a "screen door effect" that makes the image you're looking at appear as though you are looking at it through a screen door. Not good.

Which leads to DPI or pixel density. The pixel density of a 28” UHD screen (like mine) is 157.35 Pixels Per Inch (PPI), compared to 108.79 PPI for a 27” 2560 x 1440 model and 81.59 PPI for a 27” 1920 x 1080 monitor, and 67.37 PPI for a 19" 1024 x 768 monitor. So the Higher the DPI/PPI of a screen the more tiny pixels are crammed into a small space the more all those tiny individual pixels disappear into one smooth uninterrupted viewing surface.

Now with so many pixels in such a small space the aliasing is all but non-existent, meaning that the "stair-step" effect is present but it's so small it's imperceptible, which is the purpose of "anti-aliasing" it is a software/hardware induced processing effect that breaks up the "stair-step" by taking a "large" stair-step and introducing more stair-steps into the edge to "smooth" out the jaggedness caused by the aliasing of the "stair-step". Since the system introduces more processing into the image it requires more resources from the VC which is why at high levels of anti-aliasing and supersampling you get such a performance hit.

So if you have a high enough resolution with a screen with sufficient DPI/PPI, anti-aliasing/supersampling is grossly redundant, unnecessary, and causes additional performance loss on top of the high requirement to run a game at such high resolutions to begin.