Thinking of going 4x4K... but kind of?

[Odyn]

Hey everyone. Its been a while ... I'm going to apologize for the extremely disjointed post but here goes anyways:

 

So I'm thinking of making a 4x4K system but I don't want the same monitors. Weird, right? Hear me out ... I want to have a main monitor I use for gaming (144hz+ hopefully), flanked by 2x monitor on either side and 1 stacked on top but I want them to just be regular 4k screens (not hitting 60 hz would be fine since they're for display only). It'll be a ... pyramid? lol. Now heres the part that I'm getting messed up on: pixel and interface math.

 

I have a 3090 with 3x DP 1.4a and 1x HDMI 2.1. 

The maximum display res is listed as 7680x4320 (8k). 

EVGAs website says the 3090 supports 4k 120hz HDR and 8k 60hz HDR. 

GPU-Z reads max fillrate as 201.6 GPixels/s, or 201600000000 pixels/s

If I'm mathing correctly...  Pixels/s = Hres x Vres x Refresh rate x Depth (assuming 10bit which is 1024 per channel, or 1024^3)

so 7680x4320x60x(1024^3) = 2137450604396544000 pixels/s, or 2.13M Gpixels. 

... how?! Am I missing something super fundamental? Compression maybe? 

 

Well, now I'm also doing some other napkin math and:

8k 60hz HDR is the equivalent pixel rate of 4x4K 60hz HDR (since 8K is just 4x 4k, right?)

So that means I should be able to do the following:

1x 4k 120hz HDR 

3x 4k 60hz no HDR

 

 

Baaahhhhh. As you guys can see I'm all sorts of confused. Much needed help here...  

 

[pio]

You're over thinking it.  The max resolutions and whatnot, reported by your GPU manufacturer, are for each monitor, not the entire array.  You're good to go, outside of GPU horsepower at that res.  I think you're going to find a 3090 a tad anemic for that resolution with any sort of 3d loads like gaming.  All depends on what you're doing though.

Personally, I'd suggest the 3x bottom monitors all matching if you can.  That way you can turn on "Nvidia Surround" on games that you want to use it on (and still retain that top monitor function as a secondary).

Edited May 3 by pio

[Odyn]

3 minutes ago, pio said:

You're over thinking it.  The max resolutions and whatnot, reported by your GPU manufacturer, are for each monitor, not the entire array.  You're good to go.

Personally, I'd suggest the 3x bottom monitors all matching if you can.  That way you can turn on "Nvidia Surround" on games that you want to use it on (and still retain that top monitor function as a secondary).

Yeah definitely overthinking it. Have you done a 3x4k nvidia surround before? Seems like my card will be screaming murder. IIRC I get headaches at anything lower than 90hz-ish. 

Edited May 3 by Odyn
clarification

[pio]

11 minutes ago, Odyn said:

Yeah definitely overthinking it. Have you done a 3x4k nvidia surround before? Seems like my card will be screaming murder. IIRC I get headaches at anything lower than 90hz-ish. 

No, but I used to run Eyefinity from 2007 till about 2017, and then 5120x1440 @ 120Hz (32:9 ultrawide) from 2020 till now.  I use Radeon cards at the moment, but same idea.  My current monitor is ROUGHLY equivalent to two 27" 1440p / 120Hz panels.

Your 3090 will do OLDER titles fine with surround.  No problem at all.  More modern like 2020 and newer titles, you'll probably struggle.  That's why I said just leave it open as an OPTION by having the 3 monitors match.  You don't HAVE to use Surround, but if you're going for that style monitor setup anyway........why not allow yourself the option to use it if you want to?

Edited May 3 by pio

[Odyn]

15 minutes ago, pio said:

No, but I used to run Eyefinity from 2007 till about 2017, and then 5120x1440 @ 120Hz (32:9 ultrawide) from 2020 till now.  I use Radeon cards at the moment, but same idea.  My current monitor is ROUGHLY equivalent to two 27" 1440p / 120Hz panels.

Your 3090 will do OLDER titles fine with surround.  No problem at all.  More modern like 2020 and newer titles, you'll probably struggle.  That's why I said just leave it open as an OPTION by having the 3 monitors match.  You don't HAVE to use Surround, but if you're going for that style monitor setup anyway........why not allow yourself the option to use it if you want to?

budget, mainly lol. If I were to do something like that I'd *HAVE* to have 120hz good looking panels. Now that I think about it ... i do tend to get headaches below 75-90hz depending on the light source. 

Maybe I should just do a 2x2 stack of 4k 120hz monitors and be done. I'm stuck in decision paralysis. 

[pio]

6 minutes ago, Odyn said:

budget, mainly lol. If I were to do something like that I'd *HAVE* to have 120hz good looking panels. Now that I think about it ... i do tend to get headaches below 75-90hz depending on the light source. 

Maybe I should just do a 2x2 stack of 4k 120hz monitors and be done. I'm stuck in decision paralysis. 

I've seen a LOT of people run the triple bottom + top monitor option on the battlestation threads and whatnot.  It's a popular choice and kinda makes sense.  I'm just trying to think of it from a practicality perspective.  If I've already got 3 monitors lined up and I'm wanting to play a driving or flight game, I'd absolutely want Eyefinity / Surround on.  Shooters, personally I'd want single monitor a lot of the times due to HUD problems.  So that's why I was saying that, because that's what I personally would want out of my monitor setup (which I'm wanting to ditch my ultrawide for eyefinity again ).

I get the concern about going below 120Hz, that's why I went Ultrawide this go around was to try out higher refresh rates.  My old Eyefinity was all 60Hz IPS.

And yup, budget is exactly the reason I'm still stuck on this 49" Ultrawide.    Buying 3x nicer 4k, 120Hz panels gets spendy quickly.

Edited May 3 by pio

[Slaughtahouse]

To simplify the answer to the question (can my GPU run X displays?), just look at the bandwidth of each port.

 

1.4a does 32 Gbps

HDMI 2.1 does 48 Gbps.

 

Then just cross check the constraint (bandwidth) against your target output. HDMI 2.1 can safely do 4K / 120hz / 10 bit. My 3060 Ti was hooked up to my C9 OLED doing 4K / 120 HDR back in 2020. 

 

The Display ports will be a bottleneck if you want to push 4K / 120hz. 4K / 60hz should be doable at 10 bit no problem on all 3 display ports.  

 

Quick google search will find you calculators to help: Video Timings Calculator (tomverbeure.github.io) E.g., 

 

Sketch to simplify:

 

GPU horsepower to run games is a different story XD. Especially if you want to run surround, which means you're increasing the render and display resolution of said game, which will become extremely taxing, depending on the title. 

 

Edited May 3 by Slaughtahouse

[bonami2]

Could also just run a single 48" inch oled 4k. It like having 4x1080p.  I love mine 

[Fluxmaven]

I also use a 48" OLED as my main monitor with a smaller graphics tablet/monitor below (22" 1080P). This arrangement already stresses a 3090 enough trying to maintain 4K120 in modern games.

 

What size monitors are you trying to run? 32" is the absolute minimum I would consider for 4K panels. reason being you can't run 100% scaling smaller than that and actually be able to see anything. If you're running a bunch of 27" monitors you end up needing to run higher scaling for things to be legible. So you're wasting a ton of GPU horsepower just to have slightly better text clarity and pixel density.

 

For 27" displays, you'd be better off just running 4x 1440p panels.

 

Even if you used 32" panels... I'd just get one bad ass 4k panel for the main and 3x 1440p panels for the rest.