February 25th, 2013

4K Gaming a reality with Max Payne 3

Published at 2:36 AM PST

If CES 2013 is to be believed, 4K Ultra HD is the future of television; four times as many pixels as the current 1080p HDTV format, and far more convenient than 3D could have ever hoped to be. Sounds like a dream for gaming too, all those extra pixels means much more detailed and crisp graphics.

Truth be told, if you have the money - and a lot of it, you must - you can experience some current games in the beauty of 4K. One such game is Rockstar's own Max Payne 3. It's only just over 9 months old, and it looks amazing on a 4K television, as Gavin over at the Extreme Windows Blog discovered late last week:

The result: this game holds up to 4K Ultra-HD resolution very well! Due to limitations with HDMI 1.4a, I was not able to test this game beyond 30 Hz display refresh, but in terms of detail and rendering things looked really amazing.

I was impressed by how well this game ran well at 4K Ultra-HD resolution using a single graphics card which was also driving 3 other displays. While this test showed me what DirectX 11 graphics can look like at amazingly high resolutions, I would love to experience this at 2160p60 (4K Ultra-HD display running at 60hz). At 2160p60, the motion and effects would be even smoother. With 60hz/60fps performance combined with large scale and high resolution, you’d have the ultimate PC gaming experience.

This speaks volumes for the quality of Rockstar's games, and their development of graphical detail that we can't even really notice on our current displays. Imagine what Grand Theft Auto V would look like on a 4K screen? If Max Payne 3 had this hidden amount of detail, imagine the future of Rockstar's games.