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Nvidia’s RTX 4090 is a beast at 4K gaming and can even handle 8K resolutions, but what about 13K? Well, there it can – pretty much – as one YouTuber proved.
The key to this 13K feat, as you might guess, is finding a game that isn’t too demanding – because that’s a lot of pixels to deal with (even 8K is, to be honest) – and in this case, that game is Genshin Impact.
Yes, this is primarily a mobile game, but there is a PC version of the action RPG (and console spins), but due to its mobile roots, the specs are undemanding (Genshin Impact runs on an Nvidia GT 1030 , with a GTX 1060 as the recommended GPU).
As Tom’s hardware (opens in new tab) reports, YouTuber Gold reviewer (opens in new tab) it ran on an RTX 4090 with a resolution of 13,760 x 5,760 and managed an average of 30 frames per second (fps).
Analysis: does this make sense? Yes and no
Now 30fps is a bare minimum for gaming palatability, meaning it’s just smooth enough to feel good – but you really want more than this for a really enjoyable frame rate. Most people look for 60fps as the magical milestone in that regard, but 30fps is playable nonetheless – and quite frankly a pretty staggering feat at 13K.
30 fps is an average frame rate, of course, so there are occasional dips to around 25 fps, and that’s without a lot of on-screen action happening too. So there will undoubtedly be moments of jerkiness, but this is more of a demonstration of an achievement than a practical exercise.
It’s worth noting that Golden Reviewer doesn’t have a 13K monitor (nor does anyone else, as far as we know anyway), so the resolution is achieved through upscaling.
In other words, the monitor can’t display that 13K natively, but upscaled 13K (on a lower resolution screen) means it offers an incredible level of detail (so much so that you don’t have to enable anti-aliasing, for example, to create jagged edges. smooth, because everything will be sharp and super sharp from the start). Golden Reviewer shows how crystal clear the displayed image is by zooming in to a level of 500% where the graphics remain absolutely razor sharp.
The downside is that, of course, the game’s textures aren’t at 13K resolution, meaning some blur is introduced on that front.
Still, Genshin Impact looks really impressive at 13K, and one of the commenters on the video tried the same trick with an RTX 3090. A pinch of spice as always required, but apparently the result was an average frame rate of 12 fps at 13K – meaning that the RTX 4090 is a huge step forward here (taking into account that there will of course be other variables besides the GPU).