When will (realistically) 8K be the standard?

[u/pcEnjoyer-OG]

[u/celzior]

Literally never. 1080P has been the standard for the past 10 years and I don't think it'll be replaced properly until 4K is actually viable for the layman.

[u/bbalazs721 → u/celzior]

I think 1440p is a very good resolution, and based on the steam survey, it's getting more and more popular

[u/celzior → u/bbalazs721]

1440P will never fully replace 1080P. 1440P has been skipped in the TV market and therefore it'll never have as much hegemony over 1080P.

[u/Malefoy__Flipper → u/bbalazs721]

Popularity =/= efficiency, I read somewhere that if the switch was so fast from 2 to 4k it was because it’s not a real optimized resolution and that the upgrade isn’t that interesting for manufacturers (so they won’t really push it nowadays or so I believe)

[u/Warcraft_Fan → u/celzior]

1440 seems to be creeping in as the new mainstream standard. 4k is still barely a blip on the radar due to heavy processing power required to render and the fact on most sub-30", some people can't tell the difference between 1440 and 4k. I don't think anyone's going to get a 50" 4k panel just to count the` hairs on a hobbit's feet.

[u/No_Interaction_4925 → u/celzior]

For gaming 1440p replaced 1080p. 1080p is budget now

[u/f0d- → u/No_Interaction_4925]

there are more people playing at 1080p than every other resolution combined going by the steam hardware survey

1080p is the standard

[u/No_Interaction_4925 → u/f0d-]

Steam Hardware survey includes everything. Even 10 year old laptops playing the equivalent of solitaire. It would also be nice if they surveyed by region because Asia really skews the results.

[u/celzior → u/No_Interaction_4925]

LOL no. 1080P is still very much dominant in all PC use cases, including gaming.

[u/tutocookie]

Not for a while, for a few reasons.

1. It's unnecessary. The nature of pc gaming is to play on a monitor, usually on a desk. You sit quite close, so a monitor large enough to justify 8k simply doesn't make much sense. Tv's might get 8k reasonably soon though since the distance between you and the screen is large enough to justify larger screens (maybe they already exist? Idk)

2. As hardware gets better gen over gen, so do the requirements of games. A game from 10 years ago you could run on pretty modest current gen hardware at 8k, but games of today not. Hardware capabilities aren't outpacing requirements, meaning hardware that is strong enough to run the games of its generation at 8k is continuously the expensive high end.

3. There is little demand for it. Between the impracticality of it and the difficulty to run it, few people actually care for it. Most people are on 1080p looking to move to 1440p, or at 1440p looking to move to 4k. Hell, I'm at 1440p and not even looking to upgrade to 4k, I'm happy with this resolution for the foreseeable future, upgrading from ips to oled was a much more impactful improvement to me.

4. The price of 4k is still relatively high, only recently has 1440p started dropping to the price range 1080p used to be at. So only now will we start seeing a 1440p takeover. Prices for 8k would still be at the very top end, keeping it out of reach for the mainstream.

I think we'll see 4k replace 1440p in maybe 5-10 years, and only then there might be space and reason for the proliferation of 8k.

Also note that hardware increases were already slowing down, which is why there is so much focus on upscaling and framegen over raw performance increases. And with AI hardware eating up silicon and vram supplies of gaming cards, I'd expect gaming cards slowly moving over to trailing edge nodes rather than cutting edge. This'll slow the hardware improvements necessary to drive 8k in games with increasingly demanding requirements as well, so we're likely to stagnate at the current level for a while until supply sorts itself out

[u/Plavlin → u/tutocookie]

The only obvious (undeniable) benefit of higher resolution is head zoom. Everything else is mostly cosmetic past certain point (differs based on use case and eye capabilities).

[u/Plavlin]

8k will never be a standard. 4k is very much enough for 38 degree horizontal viewport (32" at 1m distance) for all practical and media applications. Unless there is a widespread use case which clearly benefits from 4K, even 4K won't ever be a "standard".

For productivity programs, anything higher than 4K makes no sense because content zoom is available.

If higher resolution is required it will be rather done through VR glass which allows FOViated rendering and unlimited content size.

[u/Toyota__Corolla]

2560 x 1440 has been the sweet spot for almost 15 years. Hardware was capable already in 2010.

[u/IrrationalRetard]

Considering the GPU market has been sort of stagnating sinds the 1080 Ti days, probably not soon

[u/doomston3]

Stop trying to make 8k happen, it's not going to happen

[u/justrivaj]

4k is with us like 12 years now, and still means unreachable hights for most gamers. Back then gtx980/r9 390 was a 4k card now even 9070xt struggles with it. 8k will be realistically standard when the fusion reaction shut down in the Sun.

[u/ShanePhillips]

Given the trend towards optimisation of games getting worse, not better, a lot of cards below the $1K mark still struggle to even run 4K without compromised settings in a decent amount of titles, we're a long way off 8K even being remotely viable.

[u/Rdo889]

8k would mean higher server costs, higher bandwidth use, etc. Not convenient for anyone at the time

[u/draconk]

In 20 years if lucky, for gaming it's useless, for movies it's harder since for streaming without buffering you would need a really high speed internet, and for physical media they would just ship a small hard-drive of around 120gb

[u/Slasher1738]

Depends on next gen compression standards and getting hardware support for them

[u/fatstackinbenj]

I'm pleased to see you're only seeking a realistic estimation.

[u/valqyrie]

Even 1440p is barely affordable for most people and 4K is not even close to being standart aside from TVs, at least in my experience.

[u/Efficient_Care8279]

I doubt ever 8k is overkill

[u/carnyzzle]

Never, 4k is still hard to run today lol

[u/Southern_Worker4102]

8k: Useless
4k: Only if you have the best GPU on the market
1440p: You can't see the pixels in normal gameplay (with AA enabled)
1080p: Sweet spot if your pc isn't the best

[u/TSirSneakyBeaky]

Personally a 1440p is where it stops mattering to me. I can tell the jump from 1080p to 1440 but I cant from 1440 to 4k or 8k. I could see 1440p becoming the standard. But above that I think the only changes are going to be the driving technology. Like Oled I can tell a major difference with.

[u/b4k4ni]

I doubt ever. The jump from 1080 to 4k is really noticeable, at least on tv. If you run a PC monitor at 24", it's not really that different. Larger monitors it is.

8k is only interested IMHO, with a really large TV. Here you could also see the difference with a 4k blu Ray compared to 1080, like with those wildlife docus. The difference was extreme. With 8k ... Yeah, it looks better, side by side. More details. But really only on large tvs. They had a setup at a local electronic shop here. Side by side, different tv sizes. All OLED if I remember right. One was 55" I believe. You could see some difference between 4k and 8k, but less from afar. And it wasn't that good that I would pay the premium. On the larger tv (like bug, bit) it was really noticeable. But .. well, if I could buy that kind of tv, money wouldn't be an issue I suppose :D

[u/118shadow118 → u/b4k4ni]

Basically, if you sit far enough to see the whole screen, you won't see the difference between 4K and 8K

And if you sit close enough to notice the difference between 4K and 8K, you won't see the whole screen :D

[u/Smith6612]

We can't even get proper 4K CGI or proper 4K TV broadcasts yet. Most movies still produce CGI in 2K, and virtually all "4K" TV broadcasts are still just upscaled 1080p. That and the bitrate on streaming content is still too low. Once those shift to 4K and the mass market adopts it fully, you'll see renewed focus on the gaming and PC side. 

[u/axxond]

8k is kinda pointless and expensive unless you have a very large TV then it makes sense

[u/Pinsir929]

I just got a 2k monitor and a 4k tv this year so I would assume at least roughly 17 years from now. Cause that’s when I got my first 1080p tv.

[u/food-coma]

4k is still to expensive to even stream to every one, fuck 480p is what std TV and sports are still used

[u/RenderBender_Uranus]

Ask jensen

[u/fatstackinbenj → u/RenderBender_Uranus]

I have it on a good authority that next gen Nvidia is planning to release 2 brand new features called: Mega Hyper Resolution Diffused Giga Super Sampling and Mega Ultra Giga Frame Interpolation Generation.

Performance cost will only take a single data center and all the water and electricity of a small sized town.

[u/RenderBender_Uranus → u/fatstackinbenj]

800x600 Hallucinated to 4320p, cause nvidia will force developers to use their slop development kit to tank performance further making native 1080p gaming a thing of the past.

[u/AutomaticAffect4333]

Not anytime soon. 8k is 16 times as dense pixel wise as 1080p, but 1080p has been the standard for 10+ years. And only recently has 1440p been increasing in popularity. According to the 2026 steam hardware survey 1080p is being used by 51% of users and 1440p is at 21%, in comparison to 2024 where 1080p was at 58.8% and 1440p was at 19%

[u/DisciplineNo5186]

Never. Its just not worth the cost. All 8k TV makers stopped making them because they make no sense

[u/Aeroncastle]

1080p will probably continue to be the standard until this crisis ends, so at least until 2030 then, maybe 4k will take it's place, even then it would need to make 4k gaming cheap and that's an amazing amount hope to have, IF all that happens until 2035, then maybe we could have 8k gaming around 2040

[u/anythingers]

(copied from the other post)

Probably never, the same way we're no longer getting modern slab phones in 2K screen (not counting foldables, since their inner screen is closer to a tablet rather than a phone).

Just like phone screens, there will be a limit where higher resolutions won't appear better to the human eye unless you're viewing from 1cm away from the screen. For example, if you have a phone with "1.5K" screen (let's just say basically any screen that's higher than 1080p, there's a high chance the phone vendor will set the default resolution at 1080p instead of the 1.5K, and if you change it to the higher resolution, you won't notice the difference. Same goes to monitor. 1080p to 1440p might be noticeable, but 1440p to 4K or heck 4K to 8K's difference would be far less noticeable, except if you're using a TV.

[u/CatalyticDragon]

Not soon enough