SpiceWare's Blog

Is it wrong that I thought this was going to be about you forgoing Melody enhancements and programming your next 2600 game in only 4 kilobytes?

guess you missed my comment from a couple days ago on Purty:

...I saw a great deal on Amazon for the 4K monitors I've been wanting to get, so ordered a couple of them as well as the different cables (also from Amazon) it needs as the new monitors support DisplayPort, mini DisplayPort and HDMI, but not DVI.
...

I wish you better luck with Dell monitors than what we had with the last batch we bought for work. They were garbage - we had more fail than I could count. I'll never buy Dell again. We went NEC this time around.

That sucks. I went with the Dell monitors based on nearly 20 years of experience with them for work.

 

I wonder if it's a side effect of RoHS

Don't know. We just assumed they were making cheap junk, whatever the underlying reasons.

 

The thing is - the previous generation we'd bought were fine. That's why we bought these - over 100 of the U2711 monitors in 2010. But we had about a dozen go bad within the first year (half the screen would twitch, glitch, or outright die). We gradually migrated to mostly using Wacom Cintiqs over several years anyway, and kept any working Dells as spares. I'm not sure how many finally went bad before the last ones were replaced last summer with the NECs, but we were well rid of them. Most of the Dells that were still working had started to discolor badly (becoming noticeably green - well beyond the point of being recalibrated). Maybe their 4K panels will be better.

Yowza. Hope so!

 

My computer became unexpectedly quiet when I tested out the monitor - the Mac Pro switched audio to the monitor, which doesn't have speakers. It does have a line-out though, probably makes for cleaner cable routing in some instances but not for me as my speakers are down on the floor - I was experiencing frequent audio cut-outs in Facetime when they were on the desk, moving them so the desk is between the speakers and camera's microphone solved it.

 

StarCraft II looks most excellent in 4K, but it was nigh unplayable at 13 fps. Of course all the quality settings were cranked to max, plan to experiment with setting combinations over the weekend.

StarCraft II looks most excellent in 4K, but it was nigh unplayable at 13 fps. Of course all the quality settings were cranked to max, plan to experiment with setting combinations over the weekend.

 

This has been my biggest trepidation with 4K displays. Diablo 3 has enough trouble on my 2014 15" rMBP on a non-HD Thunderbolt Display. I can't imagine how it would behave with roughly 4x the pixels. Hopefully this will be a solved issue by the time I'm ready to upgrade in a few years.

 

On the other hand, those displays looks pretty sweet

I thought you'd decided to upgrade to a 4K TV.

 

Which of the interfaces support 4K?

I'm waiting to see what happens with the enhanced color space (which I think is more important than 4K) and the new blu-ray players. Would hate to end up with a set that didn't support it.

The monitor has DisplayPort, mini DisplayPort, and HDMI(MHL). Both DisplayPort connections accept 4K @ 60 Hz, confirmed this with the Mac Pro (the monitor shows 3840x2160, 60 Hz)

I just tried plugging the HDMI cable in for the Mac, but it wasn't recognized. It worked for the iPhone though. Will have to look into that. I did find this which says it's HDMI 1.4 and supports 4K @ 30 Hz, and that it can accept a 3K image @ 50 Hz.

Ok - found this:

Connect more than two DVI or HDMI displays

Mac Pro supports a total of two DVI or HDMI displays when connected via the built-in HDMI port or using the Apple Mini DisplayPort to DVI adapter. To connect additional DVI displays, use an active DVI adapter like the Apple Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI adapter. You can connect up to six active adapter DVI displays. This requires a powered USB hub since Mac Pro offers four USB ports and you need six USB ports to connect the Dual-Link DVI adapters.

The two existing monitors are connected via DVI so I unplugged one and the new monitor started to work at 4K via the HDMI connection. Couldn't tell if it was using 30 or 60 Hz though, the monitor only showed 2160p and the Display Prefs on the Mac didn't show anything about resolution or refresh rate.

Followup on the HDMI port - I noticed the monitor specifies the max resolution and refresh rate if you're not running at the max. For HDMI the max is 3840x2160 @ 30 Hz. Photos added.