I'd be impressed if you're using a monitor that's capable of 4k at 144Hz.

While 4K and 144Hz monitors are each fairly common and inexpensive these days; monitors that do both are still very rare and expensive.

I actually am waiting for a 4K HDR 144Hz screen (which will arrive soon, actually).

Although I’ll only game on it in 1080p, I want the 144Hz and 4K mostly for easier reading.

I wish 4K (3840x2160) monitors would show a 1080p signal at a completely sharp 1-input-pixel-becomes-4-output-pixels.

They all seem to get some blurry scaler chip involved even when the numbers divide cleanly.

You can actually choose that as option in the AMD or Nvidia control.

You want to select the scaling mode Nearest Neighbor instead of Bilinear.

I think you may be imagining that, at least for AMD. Where is the option located?

You are indeed right, this was once in the Catalyst center, but the radeon controls never got the feature: https://community.amd.com/thread/195561

The GTX 1080 Ti does not reach that many FPS on 4K, it mostly strives to get 60. It does not matter which cpu you run. When you are on 4K, you could be happy with a small Intel i5.

My only concern with 4 core/4 thread CPUs like the majority of i5 models is that the video game industry is already showing some signs of optimizing for having 8 threads on the PS4 and Xbox.

Watch Dogs 2 on PC, as an example, has widely documented CPU bottlenecks on 4 thread CPUs even at 1080p. I just replaced an overclocked i5 4690k last week with an i7 to solve this issue, and is the first game I've played that was meaningfully CPU bound with my 1080 ti on 1080p/1440p displays. I think the days of an overclocked 4 core i5 being a great value choice in high(ish) end PC gaming are probably coming to an end soon. I'd certainly think twice on a new build.

http://www.gamersnexus.net/game-bench/2808-watch-dogs-2-cpu-...

Watchdogs 2 also runs surprisingly well on FX cpus, as seen in that benchmark. But one has to be careful with console ports anyway, Batman Arkham City for example would paint a very strange picture of PC performance (the port was and is a disaster)

But there are other valid examples, like Battlefield 1 in multiplayer. The 4 core era will end, and consoles might make that happen faster, but especially for 4K gaming I would not worry yet. Till gpus are fast enough to make cpu the bottleneck in those there will be a few more cpu generations to come. At least based on current performance and how gpus normally develop. We only just reached 60 FPS on high settings there, and that with the most expensive consumer gpu available.

But on 1080p and 1440p, that's a different story. Being more future proof for that development is one of the appeals of the Ryzen 5 1600 (6c/12t).

It's already ended. I have an 8-"core" AMD FX CPU, and I decided to underclock it to 1GHz to see how games reacted. You'd be surprised how playable many games are. Mostly, I guess, because the thread communicating with the GPU does not need all that much power, so frame rates stay semi-playable.

Anyway, with an underclocked 1GHz FX 8350, The Witcher 3 saturates about 5 cores in cities and nibbles on the sixth core. Dragon Age: Inquisition uses up to 8 cores. RiME uses 4 cores. TrackMania Nations uses 1-2 cores.

Generally, AAA games have been post-quad-core for years now.

I'd say it's already all but at an end. The Witcher 3 is probably the most intensive game I currently own. On my CPU (i7-4790k, 4 core/8 thread) standing still in a crowded city environment shows about 50% load across all 8 HT cores. Once you start running through the city use across all cores rises to a steady 60-70% with regular (every 2-3 seconds) spikes to 90+% on all cores. That's a two year old game. I have a feeling that when the next big wave of major AAA titles starts to hit, many of them will be severely limited by 4 core/4thread.

If your 1080 Ti "mostly strives to get 60", your game is rendering way too much heavy effects :) If you actually tweak game settings (mostly turn off Screen Space Reflections, Ambient Occlusion, crap like that), you can play many games at 4K60 with much cheaper hardware.

Well, OP talked specifically about max setting. But you are not wrong. That's a problem in general currently. Ultra/Max setting are incredibly heavy, but don't change the optics that much, especially not on a resolution that high.

Not too sure how stable your FPS will be on cheaper hardware, but not running max has to help.

Well, my overclocked RX 480 does around 80-90 fps in Overwatch with tweaked settings at 4K.

The problem is that presets tend to change everything. But at high res you need maximum texture size / mesh detail AND minimum effects.