Comment by bhauer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bhauer | Hacker News Reader

Excellent. Again, a big thank you to Seiki for dropping a bomb on the display industry, whether or not Dell acknowledges it.

3840x2160 at 28 inches is quite fantastic. A step closer to 10,000+ horizontal pixels in a single ~50 inch display, which I consider an ideal for desktop computing.

The burning question for me right now is who will sell me a GPU with three DisplayPorts to drive three of these? The top-end nVidia cards provide only a single DisplayPort [1]. I don't particularly care about 3D performance at this resolution—at least not yet—I just want three 3840x2160 capable ports from a single PCI Express slot. Ideally with a GTX 650 style short-length form-factor [2]. Again, 3D is of secondary concern to me, and the GTX 650 can already power 1x 3840x2160 (via HDMI 1.4) and 2x 2560x1600 (via DVI) without breaking a sweat—some of my colleagues and I are doing that presently. A 3x DisplayPort card for predominantly 2D productivity work is not unreasonable.

[1] http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-780...

[2] http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-650...

If you're happy with the HDMI port driving your 4K monitor (which means you're running at 30Hz), it seems that a GTX 660 or better will work. (AMD cards have similar port layouts)

DP: 4K @ 60Hz

HDMI: 4K @ 30Hz

2xDVI: use dual-link DVI->HDMI adapters (which are expensive, granted)

If your monitor supports being driven by 2 HDMI cables, you can use 2 of the HDMI ports to drive one of the monitors at 60Hz.

Of course, I haven't actually tried this.

I am presently happy with 30 Hz—very happy in fact because the resolution is so spectacular. However, if I owned three of these Dell monitors, I would definitely want them to all function at 60 Hz. And I don't believe the dual-link DVI ports on the nVidia cards will do greater than 2560x1600.

I think the only way to drive three of these Dells at 60 Hz would be a 3x DisplayPort GPU. nVidia and AMD, are you listening? With an affinity for a wide spectrum of GPU options, especially at nVidia, why is this not a thing?

It's probably worth testing if you can borrow a dual-link DVI->HDMI adapter, but I would be surprised if it didn't work. Those adapters don't actually do a full conversion; they work by telling the video card to send HDMI signals out of the DVI pins. It's obviously physically possible, 4K@30Hz requires less bandwidth than 2560x1600 @60Hz.

nVidia is supposed to release its next generation of cards (AKA Maxwell) in the spring. They will likely support HDMI 2.0, which will support 4K@60hz. I'm really surprised that the new AMD cards that came out this fall don't support HDMI 2.0.

Apparently AMD makes one at least, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7024581

And so does NVIDIA, never heard of their NVS line though.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?gclid=CPr5wO6T77s...

+1 for the idea of the single 50inch 16K display. I also would love something like that, running a single 40inch 4K display should be possible quite soon and would give me roughly the same DPI as my current 2x 1920x1200 24s.

But since im a coder, separating windows in different monitors might be better than using one super large display with windows cluttered everywhere, but id be willing to try.

What to you use your displays for ? A display like that should be epic for video/photo work.

> separating windows in different monitors might be better than using one super large display with windows cluttered everywhere

There's lots of desktop environments which will provide you with nice window tiling, so you can simulate any monitor split you want. Or even without full tiling, many environments allow to use a halfscreen-left / halfscreen-right placement.

> who will sell me a GPU with three DisplayPorts to drive three of these?

Visiontek makes a couple of eyefinity cards with 6 mini-dps. I didn't see the measurements but it doesn't look too long.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814129...

I so want to believe you're right, but I don't see anything on that page that suggests those DisplayPorts can drive 3840x2160. The footnotes imply, but do not say specifically, that 2560x1600 is the maximum resolution supported by each port. Am I wrong?

I'm not sure what resolutions it supports. Looking at it again it seems like a 2560x1600 max is a safe assumption. Looks like you're stuck with full-length, double width cards for now: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814129...

Awesome! That fits the bill just fine since it's still just right for the board in my PC, which has a single PCI Express x16 slot. Thank you for pointing me to this!

All the 7000 series Radeons and many of the earlier ones support DisplayPort 1.2, which gives them enough bandwidth per connection to handle 4k, and the total pixel count of 3 4k displays is only slightly higher than 6x2560x1600. The 7000 series Radeons increased the maximum dimension of an Eyefinity array from 8k to 16k, so 3 4k monitors in any rectangular layout should work.

The AMD W600 [1] has six mDP ports that each support 4K. Also it's half-length and single-width.

[1] http://www.amd.com/us/products/workstation/graphics/firepro-...

Quoting from http://www.displayport.org/embedded-systems/microsoft-pushes... :

Microsoft Senior Program Manager Gavin Gear created his newest setup with a pixel rate that is truly jaw-dropping – 1.5 billion pixels per second (yes, that’s a billion with a “B”). The overall 12K x 2K resolution (across the three screens) on the PC gaming rig was built by three Sharp PN-KN321 4K Ultra HD displays connected with DisplayPort 1.2 to register the best refresh rates enabled through Multi-Stream Transport. Gear also took advantage of ASUS’ HD 7970 DirectCUII’s four DisplayPort outputs.

You're looking at top-end desktop geforce, but in this case you probably want top-end workstation nvidia cards: http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro-desktop-gpus.html

Quadro K6000 for example has 2xDP + 2xDVI available. It's probably not something you want to buy for home though.

Mac Pro supports three 4k monitors.

Whatever Apple is putting in the Mac Pro I think will do it.

You can't buy those off the shelf. The cards used in the Mac Pro are a cross between AMD Radeon and FirePro cards. You can step up to "full" FirePro cards, and get 2, 4 or 6 display ports, depending on model.

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