Steam is getting 8K streaming - but why?
Because that’s a thing we needed
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If you’re lucky enough to own both an8K TVand an overpoweredgaming PCcapable of matching such a high resolution in games,Steamhas announced that itsRemote Playfeature can now be used to stream up to 8K resolutions across your home.After all, if you’ve already dished out the cash for one of the most expensive TVs on the market, on top of kitting out a gaming PC with the world’s most powerful components, then also buying an8K monitoris what will likely break the bank.
Gaming for the 1%
It’s unlikely that this latest feature from Steam will be utilized by many considering the lavish hardware you’d need. Any gaming PC capable of running games at8Kwould need to be equipped with pricey components like aRyzen 5950x CPUand anNvidia GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card, but even then you’d likely enjoy games more at a lower resolution.Yes, a7,680 x 4,320 resolutionsounds impressive, but if you’re forced to play gloriously beautiful games at a sluggish 25-30 FPS you would likely be happier scaling down to a meager 4K to improve the framerate. This feels very much like a classic Ian Malcolm moment – you were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, that you didn’t stop to think if you should.
As we’ve seen in our tests, where we’ve played titles likeCyberpunk 2077,Crysis RemasteredandGears 5at 8K resolution, even the RTX 3090 and RTX Titan, two of the most powerful (and expensive) graphics cards in the world, struggle to hit playable frame rates.So, this is all likely more intended for future-proofing, rather than a practical use for the everyday gamer. Even so, congratulations to the five of you who can use the feature immediately.
ViaThe Verge
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Jess is a former TechRadar Computing writer, where she covered all aspects of Mac and PC hardware, including PC gaming and peripherals. She has been interviewed as an industry expert for the BBC, and while her educational background was in prosthetics and model-making, her true love is in tech and she has built numerous desktop computers over the last 10 years for gaming and content creation. Jess is now a journalist at The Verge.
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