Dell P2415Q 4K + 1080p monitor for aux and gaming at 1080P?

Melt My GPU · February 7, 2015

Hey guys,

basically what I was thinking of doing was getting another monitor since I'm tired of alt tabbing out of full screen applications/games etc to use other windows. I was thinking of using my current 1080P IPS monitor for the auxiliary and then getting a new monitor as the main one. Would it be possible to get a Dell P24415Q to have the benefits of 4K for desktop usage but because it's 24 inches when I render games at 1080P it should look the same as playing on a 1080P 24 inch monitor since the pixels that make up the internally rendered game image would just need to be duplicated 4 times on each axis? As 1080P fits into 4K 4 times? Or have I completely got my facts wrong?

I currently have a GTX 670 which has display port but would that card manage to naively output 4K for the desktop? (again not gaming at 4K) and would having a 4K monitor + 1080P monitor cause weird scaling issues on either monitor or something? My current OS is Windows 7 64 bit.

Also if you have any other setup configurations/different monitors that you'd like to recommend please feel free to let me know

Thanks for reading!

Glenwing · February 8, 2015

1080p won't scale up perfectly as if it were a 24" 1080p monitor, no, but the P2415Q does a very good job of scaling so you probably won't be too bothered by it.

It is a common misconception that running 1920 x 1080 on a ‘4K’ UHD monitor will automatically provide equivalent sharpness to a native 1920 x 1080 display. That belief is held because the UHD resolution has exactly twice as many pixels vertically and twice as many pixels horizontally as the Full HD resolution. In practice monitor interpolation processes aren’t perfect.

In the case of the Dell P2415Q, though, the interpolation process is surprisingly good. In fact we’d go as far as to say it’s excellent. If you run the monitor at 2560 x 1440 (WQHD) or 1920 x 1080 (Full HD) then you do lose a degree of sharpness compared to running that resolution on a 23.8” model that has a similar screen surface. This loss of sharpness is fairly minor, though, and is in fact one of the lowest losses of sharpness we’ve seen from an interpolation process on any monitor.

https://pcmonitors.info/reviews/dell-p2415q/

Melt My GPU · February 8, 2015

1080p won't scale up perfectly as if it were a 24" 1080p monitor, no, but the P2415Q does a very good job of scaling so you probably won't be too bothered by it.

Oh very interesting information about the scaling, thanks for providing that for me! So it just happens that for interpolation the P2415Q is really good, and on weaker games running at 1440P seems to work out good too. Would you happen to know if scaling windows on the 4K monitor to be readable would cause odd scaling on the 1080P monitor?