8K gaming: we there yet? Gears 5 running in 8K brings Titan RTX GPU to its knees

Most gamers still prefer to use sub-4K resolutions in order to get as many frames per second as possible, especially for competitive shooters. 4K is seeing increased adoption as more and more UHD displays hit the mainstream, yet these high resolutions require more expensive hardware to hit that sweet spot at around 60 fps and above. Now that the next gen consoles promise to run 4K games at 120 fps, the next logical step would be to start optimizing things for superior resolutions. Some new games like Gears of War 5 already offer 8K support, but are current gen GPUs able to handle those monstrous resolutions?

The guys over at TweakTown put the most expensive GPUs on the market to the 8K test and it looks like uncompromised 8K gaming is not yet a thing. We will probably have to wait a few more generations for the hardware to catch up, but this is not necessarily a bad thing, since 8K displays are nowhere near mainstream adoption right now (cheapest 8K TVs are still over US$7,000).

We could argue that less demending titles like CS-GO could be tweaked to work flawlessly on 8K, but what about triple-A games launched in 2019? Since Gears 5 is the newest example to support 8K resolutions, TweakTown tried to run it on the most expensive consumer gaming GPUs of the moment including the Titan RTX, the RTX 2080 Ti, AMD’s Radeon VII and the older GTX 1080 Ti.

Forget about ultra details in Gears 5 8K; the expensive cards could barely hit 30 fps on “mere” medium details with motion blur and vsync turned off. Yes, not even the 24 GB of GDDR6 and that high US$2,500 price tag of the Titan RTX managed to impress Gear 5 8K, as it was only able to crunch 27.4 fps. The US$1,000 RTX 2080 Ti is surprisingly close with 25.6 fps, while the Radeon VII is barely on par with the older GTX 1080 Ti at around 19 fps.

For comparison’s sake, the results for 8K ultra settings look quite pathetic. The Titan RTX manages 19.1 fps, the RTX 2080 Ti is close behind with 18 fps, and Radeon VII is yet again the slowest with 12.8 fps.

If you ask me, Gears 5 does not even use the most demanding engine right now (does not support real-time ray tracing), and if anything, all these results prove the lack of interest for 8K optimization. While 8K hardly makes any sense for movies, especially on smaller displays, resolutions over 4K could still be appealing to gamers in the near future, but do not expect to see 60 fps in 8K games any time soon, not even with SLI setups.