Phil Spencer: We're Years Away From 8K Being Standard In Games

I still need to get a 4k tv let alone 8k!

@HollowSpectre I got 2 4K TV's, but I'm not interested atm in 8K.

It will take years until 4K is standardised! I still have the same HD TV that I've been using since the 360 days and I don't plan on buying a new one soon.

@HollowSpectre

I hear ya. I am in the same position.

@Bruvas Very well put, totally agree!

I'm still with my 1080p, i never played on an 4K, i have the same TV in my living room since 2009 🤣

It's only PC that is getting there now so far, but definitely not a standard.

I think he’s right. Some of the 4K OLED TVs out there now are absolutely stunning to look at, 8k is a niche at the moment and years away from being mainstream.

Then people say it’s already a waste of resources trying to obtain native 4K running games, so what’s the point of trying for 8k. New technologies such as DLSS are obtaining amazing results, I think that’s the future.

I think we are still years away from doing Native 4k/60 with full path traced ray tracing let alone Native 8k. DLSS (or AMD/MS's equivalent) may make Native 8k pointless anyway but having the power to do it will be a long way away - especially as game design is still transitioning to SSD's and Multi-threaded CPU's, still in the early days of RT. Still going to rely on Dynamic Resolution Scaling, Variable Rate Shading, CB rendering and/or AI upscaling to deliver a '4k' image at 60 as devs push game design, push polygon counts, NPC counts, physics etc on newer hardware - all of which will make 8K even harder to reach. I am sure you could bump up the resolution of some older games to native 8k because they were designed around much less capable hardware and not that 'complex', fewer polygons etc. I am sure the Series X could do Native 8k on XB360 games for example...

I'm going to wait until 12k is the standard so I can do a 'It's over 9,000' reference

I think that 4k is more than enought. I would be fine with 1080p or 1440p. Better invest to overall graphics quality, better physics, AI and higher framerate than resolution.

@BAMozzy There are lot of old internal jokes/lines about ray tracing in computer graphics industry. There was a time when ray tracing in Hollywood CGI took weeks to render completely in large mainframes. If there will be time come when real-time hardware full path tracing at a cost effective method will be fully realised, that will be the era I want to live for. Without any optimisation smoke and mirrors baked trickery, we will be able to render a whole universe just like how physics laws work in real life. Ray Tracing has always been one of those very old sleeping lion that will rise one day when the perfect time comes.

The only place I see 8K is really going to feature is at exhibitions and events and competitions - where they have the space for the giant screens that 8K requires and can justify it.

I think 8K will mainly be projection TVs and that's still evolving. Still it will be fun when it properly arrives!

@HollowSpectre I am the same exact way! I don't even have a 4K tv yet!

Well the jump to 4K was worthwhile, the quality on the TV is miles better and much better on my eyes, even standard non 4k games and TV shows look better. As people have said though, 8K at the moment doesn't really matter too much on smaller screens, our eyes really wouldn't benefit.

I have bought a 4k tv ready for the series x and I have been comparing 1080p to 4k and its really not a big deal, per usual all the dweebs who made out it was night and day difference where talking nonsense

8K is years away from being a thing, That's if it even becomes a thing lol.. Less than 1% of the world has an 8k tv in their home..

I thought the human eye couldn’t distinguish between 4K and 8k anyway?

Yes, 8k. I want to see indie games in 8k and ultra crisp 2d artwork in 8k. I want VR titles in 8k. I want remasters in 8k.

This article and the responses are conflating technology progress and standardization/commoditization. They are related but not the same. Most games this next gen would/should run between 1080p and 4k. I expect 1440 to be normal. But it’s so silly to say that because MOST games will run that way then ALL games should.

Man. At this point game barely have a handle on 1920x1080 60Hz. Let's focus on 3840x2160 60hz for now.

@eggsbox That's not true. The important thing is PPI or pixels per inch versus distance of use. For example 1920x1080 on a 5" screen means for ever inch there are 548 pixels. A lot, right? When you apply that to a 55" screen though you end up with 40 pixels per inch. That means if you're the same distance from that screen as you would be your phone screen when using there will be a lot of screen door effect.

Same applies to 3840x2160 aka 4K. It depends on the size of your screen versus how far you're away from it.

Here is a chart that shows how they relate:

Can we get a proper handle on 4K before we even think about 8K first?

@InterceptorAlpha @Thretosix ah I see thanks for clarifying. I don’t have any technical understanding of this, was just commenting what I’d heard.

@TimG13 nope! just like we couldn’t do 480p when we tried for 1080p. The world is a very big, very weird place. 8k will be a nice feature for porting over iOS and Android games, for 2d indie adventure games, etc. 8k is the future and.. if I have to guess it will happen faster than you expect with DLSS 3 and larger screens becoming common (native 1440->8k upres would be my guess). And it’s cheaper to scale up more pixels compared to actually making nicer screens with real HDR so expect the tv market to go there in the next few years.

@Senua Look up Light Transport (2 minute papers) on Youtube. It's already miles ahead of standard ray/path tracing.

The first 8K/60 XSX game is already here. Falconeer. Granted, not too graphically demanding but it's a real thing already. 3090 is doing 8K/60 on well optimized games. I didn't think this would happen until 2 or 3 years from now, but it's here.

Next next gen will probably have a good number of games running at 8K, but 4K will probably still be the standard during the gen after next gen.

@SpacemanJupiter I know that channel and have been following his content regularly for years as I’m a huge enthusiast of not only computer graphics and deep learning/AGI but also computer science, physics and mathematics in general.

@HollowSpectre Same, I need a 4K TV first 🤣