4K gaming rig

Zak Storey attempts to capture that great white whale of PC gaming

IT’S THAT ALMOST MYTHICAL THING— as gentle as a whisper, and just as fragile. We move one step closer each and every year, and yet it seemingly moves one step further away every time we approach it.

4K gaming is something we’ve written about for many years at Maximum PC, and something that has never come to fruition— at least, not in the way we want it to. Why is that? Well, just as much as technology advances, processors get more efficient, and graphics cards render an ever greater number of frames, so to do graphics improve, code gets denser, and more modern effects come into play to imitate real life, requiring more processing power.

If the question was “Are the games of 2016 playable at 4K today at 60fps?” we could happily say “Yeah, with ease”—and yet that’s not the aim. We are human, and because of that, we constantly strive for more. It’s in our very nature and is the driving force in our society.

This hunt for gaming excellence leads to better technologies that worm their way into every facet of our existence: better graphics cards, more powerful processors, and faster memory and storage affect everything from video rendering and 3D modelling to tailored medicine, protein folding, and more. Without this multi-billion dollar industry we would undoubtedly be worse off as a species.

And so, we’re once again hunting for that mythical white whale. The aim is simple: 4K gaming at frame rates that are as high as we can muster, on a budget that is far more reasonable than it was in the past. Is this the moment we finally see 4K overtake HD and QHD as our main resolution? Let’s find out.