 4K display pricing is dropping so rapidly, like it's only 250 to 350 bucks for an Ultra HD monitor or TV these days. But, it takes a lot of graphics power to drive them. So, how should you do it? The Xbox One X is being billed by Microsoft as true 4K gaming, Sony is calling their experience native 4K on Pro, and Nvidia shocked us by reaching out about doing their first ever sponsored video with us about their flavor of 4K gaming, which they're calling ultimate 4K. Let's find out what they mean by that. Intro music Okay, so why should you trust an Nvidia sponsored video about their 4K gaming solution? Because they have absolutely no reason to BS you. No matter which team you bat for, there are a couple of things that any objective person can agree on about the GTX 1080 Ti. One, it's kind of pricey. And two, it's the fastest 4K gaming card on the market. And these are both things that would be stupid to try to lie about because they can be measured objectively. We'll be looking at four games on five different platforms. The fastest console today, the Xbox One X, a modern gaming PC equipped with a GTX 1080 Ti, and three more older gaming PCs equipped with the GPU ghosts of Black Friday's past. Let's start by getting the image quality comparisons out of the way. They're an important consideration, but they're also kind of apples to oranges, since the Xbox One X costs less than a GTX 1080 Ti by itself. Let's start with Forza. This game runs smoothly at 60 frames per second on the Xbox One X, thanks to its use of dynamic quality controls that actually adjust image quality as you whip around on the track. It's a really impressive optimization technique that is actually enabled by default on the PC as well. But if you have the horsepower, you can turn it off, and it will reveal some extras that would otherwise be absent, like tufts of grass rather than texture work and higher resolution textures, like you can see here at the edges of the track. Shadow of War, meanwhile, shows that while the Xbox port does, once again, a really good job of delivering solid visual clarity at 4K, the PC version, unsurprisingly, has the capability of showing more detail and using higher resolution textures. And, as we'll see shortly, it can do this while maintaining a much smoother frame rate. Okay, neat then. But I think that a lot of people would agree that at this kind of total system price difference, more detailed grass is a pretty, uh, tuft cell. And that would be fair. But Nvidia actually doesn't make any money if you buy a new CPU and motherboard or whatever. They only sell graphics cards. So why don't we look at it a different way? What if you upgraded your old PC with one of these? To answer that question, first we need to see how exactly your old rig is holding up right now. So we tested our games at 1080p high, 4K low, and 4K high, noting any adjustments that we made to the presets. This way you can decide for yourself whether the difference between full HD and 4K, or low details versus high details, is worth it for you. Right away, we see a huge advantage in Forza 7 for our current generation 1080 Ti system, with our 4K low 97th percentile minimum actually above the previous flagship 980 Ti's average. At 4K Ultra, it actually manages up to 120 frames per second, meaning that on next generation high refresh rate 4K displays, you could see even more smoothness. Middle Earth Shadow of War shows us another huge gain for the 1080 Ti over its predecessors, even on our older systems, with 4K Ultra winding up at just shy of 60 FPS on average, and a very playable, especially with the G-Sync display, 97th percentile low of just over 40. On to PUBG, we've got a closer race here at 1080p, as the bottleneck is mainly down to poor CPU optimization. Moving on to 4K, we've got great performance at low, and then when we look at high details, um, still great performance. That is some weak CPU optimization. Destiny 2 shows a pretty familiar looking graph, with 1080p performance predictably better, but when we step things up to 4K, we find that this is the second game of the day to not only average higher than 60 frames per second, but claim a 97th percentile of 60 as well. Solid. Now, let's upgrade those old systems. If you're a 1080p high detail gamer, the CPU bottlenecking is real here, though you should bear in mind that we didn't overclock any of these older systems, and you could expect significant performance improvements in some cases. As for our 4K results, well, this is where Nvidia's story here gets pretty interesting. Since you're generally GPU-bound when you run at high resolution and high details, our last generation 4790K performs basically on par with our 7700K, which is architecturally very similar to the vaporware 6-core 8700K, and then even more impressively, going all the way back to a core i5 2500K. This was a 200-ish dollar CPU from 2011. We saw performance drops as small as 5 to 10 percent when upgrading to a brand new top-of-the-line card. So what this means is that our gaming experience is very similar, whether we buy a brand new system or retrofit an old PC, bringing the 1080 Ti's higher 4K image quality and performance much closer in price to a 4K gaming console. So there you have it. The paths to 4K have been laid out before you. What do you guys think? Would you pony up for a brand new machine? Would you dumpster dive for a secondary box or upgrade your existing one with a shiny new graphics card? Or is a new game console at the top of your wish list this year? Let us know in the comments below. So thanks for watching. If you guys disliked this video, you can hit that button, but if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description, and while you're down there, you can check out our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, as well as our community forum. Honestly, man, this video was like... We spent so much time on the screen cap and on measuring the frame rates, because even though Nvidia does almost no sponsored stuff with us, we knew that if we got even like one thing wrong, you guys were going to tear us apart. So, I'm glad that's over.