The PS5, and indeed Xbox Series X, might be rated to run some games at the frankly ridiculous 8K resolution, but the true 8K gaming powerhouse appears to be the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090.
At least that's going by videos posted by YouTuber Bang4BuckPC Gamer showing a range of games running pretty much maxed out at 8K on the RTX 3090, Nvidia’s most powerful enthusiast-grade graphics card.
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And the results are impressive, yet also showcase just how taxing running games at 8K can be.
Feel the GeForce
Take The Witcher 3 as an example: it’s a five-year-old game but is still one of the most visually pleasing titles around, and it’s also rather demanding when run at full settings. With its graphics settings set to ultra, the game still couldn’t hit 60 frames per second at 8K on a machine with an RTX 3090 and a powerful AMD Ryzen 3950X processor.
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However, it mostly ran over 30 fps and looked fantastic doing so. While it's difficult to tell via a YouTube video, at 8K the textures in The Witcher 3 look superbly crisp with details seemingly picked out of all manner of environments.
New horizons
The same can be said for Horizon Zero Dawn running at 8K. While this is a game that was first made for PS4 hardware, it’s still rather demanding for powerful PCs when pushed into super-high settings. At 8K the environments look pretty exceptional; where once there was aliasing on the PS4, there’s none here with everything looking very crisp and clear.
It doesn't appear that there's any clever Nvidia tech like deep learning supersampling (DLSS) being applied here. So there's scope for such games to run at faster frame rate if it was used.
Nevertheless, these videos show how much power the GeForce RTX 3090 has to be able to tackle such an extreme resolution, when a lot of people are still gaming at 1080p or 1440p. And what’s promising here is that it shows that 4K gaming, once a seemingly unrealistic target, is now with the reach of consumer-grade gaming hardware that won't break the bank. Meanwhile, 8K remains a new frontier high-end PCs might start to explore.
As such, it’s an exciting time to be a gaming fan, not least because the PS5 and Xbox Series X are on their way. AMD Big Navi and the Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards are set make their debut on October 28, which should give Nvidia's new cards some exciting competition.
