Ultimate PC Gaming: What Does It Take to Play at 4K and 144Hz?

Though monitors that can do it are far from ubiquitous, the past year has seen the release of four new, extremely high-end gaming panels (the loftiest of all of them pictured above) that beg the question: If you could play PC games at 4K (3,840 by 2,160 pixels) and 144 frames per second, would you?

Of course, any hardcore PC gamers on the planet reading this are nodding themselves to a neck injury with a vigorous "yes!" right about now. But easy there, hard chargers—it's not quite that simple.

Playing AAA-grade PC games at 4K and the typical monitor refresh rate of 60Hz—never mind 144Hz!—has only started to become a thing. Even many moderately priced gaming monitors don't display at a refresh rate higher than that. Gaming monitors that can display a 144Hz signal demand a bit more from your wallet, not just for the panel, but for the supporting hardware. And 4K ones? A lot more.

Not only that, is it even possible to push a leading-edge game to 144 frames per second at 4K without turning your gaming PC into an inferno? Let's dig into why you would want to do that, and then...we'll try and do exactly that.

First Off: 4K 144Hz Is Not All It's Cracked Up to Be

More than a few of the newest gaming monitors use a "144Hz" maximum refresh-rate number as their main selling point. But it's important to dig into what this actually means for gamers.

At the simplest level, the number of hertz (Hz) equates to the number of times per second the display can rewrite. If your PC is able to push a game at a frame rate higher than 60 frames per second, with a so-called "high-refresh" display you can actually see those extra frames onscreen. And, if all else falls into place, that should enhance smoothness and reaction times.

With 4K 144Hz monitors, though, it gets more complicated, because of the huge amount of data that needs to move through the display interface. For starters, anyone thinking about purchasing a 4K 144Hz monitor needs to know the term "chroma subsampling." The limitations of the DisplayPort 1.4b cable interface dictate that it can transfer "only" 26Gbps of data, which is just enough bandwidth for pushing a 4K signal at 120Hz. Any 4K video stream that needs to be transferred at a refresh rate above that ceiling needs to be downgraded from its full potential of 4:4:4, to 4:2:2.

For context, normally, an image sent from your PC to your monitor will use a subsampling of "4:4:4." Those figures, in a nutshell, indicate the number of colors and "lumas" (the brightness level used to display that color) that are being used to create an image.

For content like movies and TV, subsampling all the way down to 4:2:0 or 4:1:1 is perfectly fine. However, for displaying things like computer-generated text, the elements in an operating system UI, or a HUD in a game, knocking down the subsampling can make the text look blurrier, carry less contrast, and degrade the overall visual experience. Kind of counter to the point of 4K, right?

Running at 4K at 144Hz over DisplayPort 1.4b will work only if the image is being transmitted at 4:2:2. In theory, HDMI 2.1 could solve this problem when it comes out sometime later this year, though proof of that concept remains to be seen. The compromise for now, then, is that even if the monitor supports a 144Hz rate, you should be running at 4K at a maximum of 120Hz, which maintains your 4:4:4 subsampling and is still plenty smooth. Only the most discerning, trained-eye gamers might notice the 24Hz difference.

So, What Does It Take to Get to 120 or 144?

Whether you're looking at 120Hz or 144Hz as your target near-term, you'll want to think ahead, as the hardware involved is very expensive.

A major barrier for your average gamer into the world of 4K 144Hz gaming is cost. The monitors themselves retail for more than $1,500 (though Acer's new Nitro XV273K may change all that, at under $1,000, depending on whether it is worthy; we just got it into our labs for testing).

Right now, beyond that Nitro, the monitors that can run 4K games at 144Hz at this writing are these three...

That's just the display. The PC required to run a game at 144 frames per second (fps) in 4K, or even at 120fps, will set you back quite the bundle of green too.

In our testing, we found that at the bare minimum, most gamers will need a PC that uses dual GeForce RTX 2080 graphics cards just to hit 100fps at 4K. To get to 120fps or 144fps, dual GeForce RTX 2080 Ti cards are what you'll need. In either case, the cards would be linked through Nvidia's new NVLink system (the successor to SLI).

This story entails our first experiments with NVLink. NVLink requires a special NVLink High-Bandwidth Bridge module that covers the NVLink blade connectors at the tops of the cards. Unlike the flexible SLI bridges of yore, NVLink bridges are hard and come in different models for different motherboard slot spacing. Plus, third-party makers of Nvidia's GeForce RTX cards make different bridges for their own GeForce RTX cards! (So, for example, you might not be able to use an MSI NVLink bridge meant for its GeForce RTX cards with a pair of Nvidia's own Founders Edition RTX cards, and vice versa.)

So, figuring all that out is a minor hurdle. Then there's the major money question.

At MSRP, we're talking roughly $1,600 for the GeForce RTX 2080 setup, and a whopping $2,400 for the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti setup...and that's just the cards, assuming you have a buff system ready to support them. And you'll have to add about another $100 for the appropriate NVLink bridge module.

So, sum that all up: the cards, a processor/motherboard combo that can do these cards justice, enough memory to get you through, and a power supply and PC case that can handle the demands of two top-end, fire-breathing GPUs. Then, atop all that, throw in that normal-size 4K/144Hz monitor you're looking at, and you're looking at an investment somewhere in the range of $4,000 to $6,000. Or...opt for HP's titanic, 65-inch Omen X Emperium 65 BFGD we just tested (the quintessential 4K/144Hz monster monitor), and a cool $4,999 will get you, um, just the monitor alone.

So, now that you've gotten yourself up off the floor, how about we look at some of the benchmarks we ran to investigate this wild frontier? We just happened to have one of those Omen X Emperium 65 BFGDs sitting in our lab while we concocted this crazy scheme of a story, so things sort of...escalated. In a good way.

Let's Get Benching...

Now, of course, the cost for anything is relative to your own situation. But for the purposes of what comes below, let's assume this is a reasonable scenario: You do have giant piles of cash sitting around the house, just begging to be spent. What games could you actually expect to play at 4K resolution and 144Hz, if you were to go out and buy a capable PC for yourself?

We ran our benchmarking suite on a testbed using the two card configurations mentioned above—a dual GeForce RTX 2080 arrangement, and again with dual GeForce RTX 2080 Ti cards—to find out which games in our test suite were optimized well enough to get 4K running at 144Hz. Speaking of the games, we chose a mix of current hot multiplayer titles, some of the most graphically demanding single-player titles released in the past few months, and some legacy games that are useful for comparing against results we've recorded over the past several years. All of these games were set at their highest in-game graphical-detail presets (with one exception: Apex Legends).

And, well, the results speak for themselves. Drumroll for the money charts, please...here's what we saw with the GeForce RTX 2080 dual setup...

Hmmm, not all that auspicious of a start. Only the four games at the bottom of the chart were able to top even 120Hz/120fps.

Okay, letting loose the heaviest artillery, the twin GeForce RTX 2080 Ti cards...

As you can see, of all the games we ran here, only a mere six of 14 got to the 4K 120Hz mark, let alone 144Hz.

To repeat: That's with twin GeForce RTX 2080 Ti cards. Let's stress a third time, in different words: These results were gathered using the absolute highest-power video-card configuration available in consumer/gaming graphics in early 2019. This is the peak of the peak, the crème de la crème. And still we came up short in most of our test cases!

So, How Will We Get to 144 Consistently?

It does bear mentioning that these results are highly, highly dependent on whether the game you want to play is specifically tuned to support Nvidia's NVLink technology or not, as well as whether the game has been processed by Nvidia for its DLSS anti-aliasing feature.

DLSS is a new type of anti-aliasing that uses Nvidia's supercomputers alongside the Tensor cores found in the GeForce RTX line of video cards to drastically reduce the load on your graphics card's resources while actually improving the graphical fidelity of a game. (For much more on DLSS and a more detailed explanation, see our face-off between the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and the AMD Radeon VII.) For example, AAA titles such as Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which scored 103fps in our initial dual GeForce RTX 2080 Ti benchmarks, suddenly started posting regular returns of 140fps and higher, once Nvidia pushed its newest 419.67 firmware update for its cards, which rolled out as we tested.

This update incorporated some major DLSS optimizations, which boosted the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmarks by upward of 40 percent on the dual GeForce RTX 2080 Ti setup, and nearly 60 percent on the dual GeForce RTX 2080 (again, all at 4K resolution). Now, of course, that is just one game. But if Nvidia's claims of developers incorporating DLSS in many future PC titles do pan out, this could bring down the cost of 4K 144Hz gaming sooner than expected, at least for titles that support it.

However, for legacy titles (even those that came out just last year), the problem is still one of hardware power alone. Driver tweaks and DLSS may never come to the rescue for those games. For example, the popular Far Cry 5 (which has no DLSS support) scored exactly the same frame-rate results on both its Ultra and High presets (98fps) in NVLink. Why? Because none of those optimizations has been implemented by Ubisoft on the back end.

So, then, how about ditching all this complicated NVLink stuff and just running one high-end card? Well, alas, our testing showed that a single GeForce RTX 2080 Ti simply doesn't have enough horsepower to get 4K up to 120fps on most titles, with details levels turned up. Even though the NVLink-ed dual GeForce RTX 2080 Ti setup effectively doubles the size of the engine, all that extra horsepower is just unrealized potential if the game you're playing isn't optimized to harness it.

The Verdict? 4K/144Hz Is Possible, But Fire Up the Money Furnace

So, what does it take to game at 4K 144Hz? Everything, pretty much: all the money, and today's best video cards, in plural. Even using one of the most advanced (and expensive) gaming testbeds that money can buy, we were barely able to get more than a few late-model games across the 144fps finish line without compromise.

Now, of course, we couldn't test with every relevant game on the market. (There has to be a limit to this kind of madness, and a return to us testing gear people can actually afford. Our bosses are watching.) Most of the games that were able to pull off 4K/144Hz are either several years old, or are multiplayer titles that are already highly optimized. The problem is, with those latter esports-style games, serious players wouldn't necessarily want to play at these lofty settings to start with. Why? Coarser textures can act as a competitive advantage in those environments, and a high frame rate is often more important than the highest possible resolution.

But, back to our initial fantasy: infinite money! If you've got a gaming budget with a limitless burn rate and the desire to be the only one in your district with whipped-butter-smooth 4K graphics, it is technically possible to start gaming in 4K at 144Hz today. It just depends on the game. With some games, you can max it all out. With others, you'll have to dial down the detail settings, negating much of the point of doing this.

And, as we mentioned, we suspect that with the progressive implementation of DLSS on many new titles, 4K gaming at 144Hz may become, in a seemingly contradictory way, more possible with newer AAA games as time goes on. It may well be the older ones that get left behind. Just know what you like to play before diving in, to determine whether this kind of hyper-expensive experiment is worth the trouble for you. Unless you play your cards exactly right, you'll be better off waiting a few years, for when getting to this particular pinnacle of PC gaming is less dear.