21:9 vs 16:9 Monitors

[Reverze]

Don't lynch me for reviving a year-old thread guys, but I was wondering if you guys would still recommend the 21:9 screen! To be slightly on-topic: I just upgraded to Z170 with an i7 6700K, coming from an AMD FX-8350 the difference blew me away. I was expecting some performance gain but HOLY SHIT is it a step up. Obviously now my measly 1080p screen (albeit 144hz) feels woefully inadequate. I've been in the market for a more suitable monitor for DCS for a good long while now, just looking around but I just don't know what direction I'd want to take it. 4K or ultrawide. I'm leaning toward ultrawide right now for the FOV gains.

[Gunny]

We've got guys in both camps, 4K and Ultrawide. Eddie is running an ultrawide. I'm currently in the 4K 65" curved camp and love it. If I could find an ultrawide bigger than 34" I'd think about it, but Giant frickin 4K monitor gives all the real estate you could ever want. Kimi is always complaining about how I can see aircraft and ground targets 10-20nm out.

So my point is go as Big as you can possibly get or go home.

http://www.samsung.com/us/television...n65ju7500fxza/

[Oliver]

Well... The next thing on my wishlist is a decent screen to replace my 1080p. I'm unsure whether to go 21:9 or 16:9, mainly because of the following. For the sake of the argument let's assume a 3440x1440 ultrawide screen (red in the image below) vs a 3840x2160 widescreen (green).

When I set DCS to the same zoom level on both monitors I imagine it to look like this:


That is of course, both monitors at the same distance from my eyes and both having roughly the same PPI ratio.

In what way would an ultrawide be more comfortable for simming than a regular wide screen? Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to criticize ultrawide. On the contrary, I think they look great from the images I see on the web.

[Eddie]

Not quite Oliver (not at all actually). For comparison, it's like this.

1920x1080 16:9 (Most common resolution)


1920x1200 16:10 (My previous res (16:9 1080p is for consoles))


2560x1440 16:9


3440x1440 21:9 Ultrawide


As you can see, 1920x1080 gives you a noticeably smaller field of view on the screen than the others. The key with 1440p is the extra 360 vertical pixels allow you to have a slightly wider FoV (which DCS does by default) and have the same clarity of image.

21:9 gives you the same as 1440p 16:9 (or 4k 16:9 for the most part) but with an extra 440 pixels on each side.

Personally I very much believe 21:9 gives a better gaming experience than 4k (for games that support it, which is most). 4k is great for pure clarity and level of detail, but you have fundamentally the same view as 1920x1080 or 2560x1440. If I were to be going for a new monitor myself I'd go for either 3440x1440 21:9 or 2560x1440 16:9. 3840x2160 4k is still pretty difficult for even high end GPUs to drive at reasonable FPS in most games, and with little benefit over 2560x1440.

[Reverze]

Oliver you show that nicely! However for that to work out, the 16:9 screen would have to be at least as wide as the widescreen. The one posted earlier in this thread is 32.5" wide. That makes the minimum diagonal of the 4K screen around 65". That makes it a (glorious) 4K screen like gunny has. I reeeaaally want to get that one, but it's about 4 times over my budget. Also delving into a new monitor means I'll have to upgrade my R9 290 GPU since I have a feeling it won't be as comfortable at 4k or ultrawide resolutions as it currently is at 1080p.. it adds up, so for me it would probably only make sense to go wide-screen or just wait it out until ridiculous but beautiful 4K screens drop in price a bit. Smaller 4K screens could be great too, but in the end if I get a smaller sized 4K screen, say ~34" the actual picture on my monitor would have about 50% less horizontal real estate compared to the ultrawide or that 65" 4K. Choices, choices

[Eddie]

I've just split this into a new thread so it's easier to find, I think it's a topic worthy of it's own discussion.

[Oliver]

Hmm, Eddie's on the path of convincing me...

What makes a 34" ultrawide interesting besides the view itself is the fact that it's (probably) a great experience with 'only' 5MP whereas 4k will tax your machine to draw 8.3MP frames.

[Eddie]

If 3440x1440 isn't enough for you, LG are working on a 38" ultrawide with 3480x1600 pixels.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/computi...tors-ifa-2016/

[Oliver]

Yeah... 1.5k $

Skip bar night two times and you have enough to buy a more than decent flightsim setup.

[Reverze]

huh Gunny, I missed that post by a few seconds while writing my last post. And then the thread got moved while I was writing this one so I lost track of where I was I spent longer than I care to admit hitting the "last page" button to find this discussion, thinking I got stuck one page back somehow..

Anyway, Gunny, if you take an ultra-wide and your 4K screen of the same width and mount them on the wall, yours top, the ultrawide below it. Now set the zoom level to be exactly the same, such that measuring the fire handles with a ruler would put them at the same width. In that scenario I would think that what oliver says applies, or not?