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Comment by sjwright | Hacker News Reader

Sharp, clear and legible text even at small font sizes. Once you’ve gone “retina” you won’t go back.

The smartphone market has already declared high DPI the winner here; desktops are lagging behind only due to inertia.

I'd be okay with a 36-38" 4K without scaling, would love 8K at 36-38" ... I don't know why I can't get a monitor that size at anything other than 1440p. Currently using a 42" 4K, but the physical size is a bit too big. My vision isn't great, but 2x:8k:38" would be perfect imho.

The reason for desktops is rather simple. GPUs aren't there yet to support such high resolutions with high framerates at the same time. Since it's too expensive to have one monitor for each use case (one for text, one for video, one for games etc.), they provide some middle ground.

I'd take high refrersh rate with medium resolution (2.5K or something) over high resolution with low refresh rate.

So it has nothing to do with inertia, there are multiple reasons involved.

Outside of gaming, I don't buy this. You don't need an exceptionally powerful GPU to render web pages at 4K; the fact that there are 4K phones out there is proof that this isn't true.

Inertia and general lack of demand is a much better explanation. Most people either haven't experienced high-DPI monitors or just don't care that much about their PCs.

I think one issue you are overlooking is cost of the panel itself. There's a huge difference in price between a ~200-300ppi panel that's 4.7 diagonal inches vs a laptop display (13-15 DI) and a "standard" size desktop monitor (22-27 DI). Add in the requirements of acceptable brightness and it gets expensive fast.

You're right, but I think this is mostly a chicken-and-egg problem; the displays are expensive because there isn't much demand for them, and demand is low partly because of the high cost. Once we reach a turning point (which hopefully will be accelerated by the release of the new Mac Pro monitor), high-resolution panel prices will drop pretty quickly.

For comparison, people said the same thing about IPS panels (and it was true for a long time), but these days you can get a decent IPS panel for barely more than the equivalent TN.

Gaming is a big use case for monitor makers, so they can't ignore it.

But it affects non gaming scenarios too. Static text is fine. But try scrolling that sharp text, or move something on the screen. Low refresh rate - more artifacts (motion blur, ghosting etc.). You'd see very clear difference with high refresh rate ones.

So resolution is not everything when it comes to monitors. For anything dynamic, refresh rate is more important.

I never said resolution is everything—in fact, I personally chose a high refresh rate over a 4K resolution for my recent monitor upgrade. But to say "it has nothing to do with inertia" is simply wrong and ignores the lack of demand for monitors with high resolutions/refresh rates.

I mentioned above, that GPUs are the limiting factor still, to effectively use both high refresh rate and high resolutions at the same time in all use cases. That's not inertia, rather a current limitation. That's why there is more demand for something in between still. I.e. GPUs didn't even catch up to 4K / 144 Hz yet (gaming use case is the major driver). Once they do, demand will increase.

4k @ 120hz already exists. It's expensive, but you've been able to buy it for a while now. For example the ASUS ROG Swift PG27UQ (ignore the 144hz nonsense, that's at 4:2:2 - you'll get 120hz 8bit at 4:4:4 though, and 100hz 4:4:4 10-bit HDR)

I'm never trying to read text while it's scrolling, so I don't really care if it blurs and ghosts for 20ms.

And video content generally works fine at 30, let alone 60.

You don't read it directly, but you still glance at it to see where to stop, and you get a lot more irritation when you glance at the ghosting or over-blurred text. High refresh rate gives you a lot more smoothness.

> the fact that there are 4K phones out there is proof that this isn't true.

Going to nitpick on this - 4K phones don't actually render at 4K. They only displayed video at 4K, and rendered at half resolution. But you're otherwise correct that you don't really need a power GPU to do basic UI work at 4K. Or rather, that even low-end GPUs these days are fairly powerful.

> You don't need an exceptionally powerful GPU to render web pages at 4K; the fact that there are 4K phones out there is proof that this isn't true.

idk whether the the GPU is the limiting factor, but browsing gif heavy subreddits on a 4K display brings my computer to its knees. I have a haswell i5 @ 4.3GHz and a 1080ti so I don't think my machine is underpowered.

I have two 4k 60hz monitors connected to a low power Intel NUC's onboard graphics card. Unless you are gaming, refresh rates aren't a problem.

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