It's reportedly game over for 8K before it even got going as display industry support 'dwindles'

Ars Technica is reporting that's it essentially game over for 8K display technology. LG is apparently no longer making 8K TV panels and membership of the 8K Association industry body is "dwindling". So, is 8K basically dead as a display format and does that include the PC?

Ars Technica's reporting focusses, inevitably, on TVs. But where TVs go, the PC monitor market often follows. See 1080p and 4K resolutions for proof. Of course, TV and monitor formats and resolutions are not all exactly the same. See 1440p and ultrawide monitors for proof, equally, of that.

Ars points out that the first 8K TV was announced by Sharp way back in 2012, with the first 8K OLED being released by LG in 2019. But wider adoption has been slow. While there are now, by the estimates of data firm Omdia, around one billion 4K TVs out there, only 1.6 million 8K TVs have found homes since 2015. Indeed, what little 8K TV sales there have been peaked in 2022.

Consequently, the likes of LG and Sony are entirely exiting the 8K market. Meanwhile, the number of member companies of the 8K Association has fallen from 33 at the end of 2022 to 16 today. Only Samsung and Panasonic remain as TV manufacturers.

In the context of TVs, you can understand why. Most consumers would likely struggle to see the difference between 4K and 8K at normal viewing distances on typically sized TVs. Arguably, you have to get into the realms of really massive TV panels before the benefits are going to be obvious.

Even then, all of that is assuming high-quality content. But in this age of streaming video, that's not actually an assumption you can make. The 4K streaming quality of, say, Netflix or YouTube leaves a lot to be desired. Some platforms, arguably Apple TV, are better. But the general view is that many streaming platforms are trying to reduce costs on bandwidth currently, not ramp them up with meaningful 8K support.

Meanwhile, there's the question of content production. Supporting 8K throughout the video production pipeline, from cameras to CGI and through to final editing is hardly going to be cheap. So, it's not really a surprise to find that there's very little true 8K content out there to watch.

Of course, when it comes to gaming, the question of content support is a little different. Most modern PC games support 8K just fine in the sense that they can be set to run at 8K given supporting hardware. It's the supporting hardware that's the catch.

There have been 8K monitors for years. I reviewed my first such screen, a Dell panel, about 10 years ago. But it was niche then and 8K remains niche, now. There is talk of high-refresh 8K gaming monitors from the likes of BOE. But honestly, who needs 8K?

In a PC context, you can just about make an argument for 8K on really large monitors. The closest thing to a real-world 8K gaming monitor right now are the 57-inch dual-4K panels from the likes of Samsung and Acer, including the Acer Predator Z57.

They're basically two 4K panels fused together so have the horizontal resolution of a full 8K display, but half of the vertical pixels. On a 57-inch panel, the 8K horizontal resolution does have benefits. The result is the same pixel density as a 32-inch 4K monitor. In other words good, but not actually all that fine a pixel pitch. You wouldn't want a lot less than 8K across on a screen that size, put it that way.

At the same time, modern upscaling technologies such as Nvidia's DLSS do make the basic notion of running at 8K that little bit more plausible. A base resolution of 4K upscaled to 8K using the latest transformer AI models will no doubt give pretty spectacular results while being fairly playable in terms of frame rates. Well, assuming you happen to have an RTX 5090. But then if you can afford a huge 8K monitor...

Anywho, I'm not seriously making the case for 8K on the PC. And I am sure that 8K as a format for TVs is probably toast for the foreseeable future. But PC gaming has always had something of a side quest as the ultimate application in cutting-edge display tech, and in that context, 8K almost certainly has a future here.