Nvidia’s RTX 4090 is an impressive GPU, and one of the best graphics cards out there; it can push triple digit frame rates at 4K without breaking a sweat. But YouTuber Golden Reviewer has pushed things to another level, by playing Genshin Impact at 13K resolution. Incredibly, the game managed a playable 30 frames per second at this crazy high resolution.
If you’re unfamiliar with the game, Genshin Impact is a highly popular open-world action RPG, that has over 60 million active monthly players. You’ve probably heard about the title as a mobile game that is difficult to run on most smartphones, but it is also available on PC, PlayStation 5 and PS4 (in addition to Android and iOS).
As a result of the game’s requirement to run on mobile devices, it isn’t that demanding on PC – despite its reputation in the mobile space. The minimum requirement is a Nvidia GT 1030, and the recommended GPU is a GTX 1060.
In the video, we can see Golden Reviewer running the game on the high and highest graphical presets in the game, at a resolution of 13760 x 5760 which translates into 178.32 megapixels per frame (or 13K). For reference, this resolution is almost 1.4 times greater than 8K, and 8.5 times larger than 4K.
With the RTX 4090, the game is surprisingly playable at this daunting resolution, with an average frame rate of 30 fps. It isn’t a perfectly locked 30, but its still impressive considering the resolution. For reference, this is an upscaled image to 13K – since there are no 13K monitors on the market that we know of today.
At 13K, aliasing is effectively deleted from the image, with all edges looking very realistic. Even in zoomed up images of the game session, pixelation is nowhere to be seen.
This is one of the great advantages of running upscaled resolutions, especially at ridiculously high resolutions such as 13K. Image detail is crisp, sharp and lacks any jagged edges you might see at native or sub-native resolutions without anti-aliasing techniques. In fact, at 13K, you could probably disable AA completely and still not notice any jagged edges what so ever.
But it is easy to tell that this game wasn’t designed to run at resolutions anywhere near 13K. Texture esolutions are no where close to 13K, resulting in blurriness all around. Plus, the overall lighting presentation is sub-par in comparison to what you might see in a modern AAA title designed to run on a PC. But this is to be expected, for a game designed to be scaled down to run on smartphones.
Still, it’s amazing to see a game that is playable at 13K at all, and is a testament to the insane capabilities of Nvidia’s RTX 4090.
If you have an RTX 4090, and want to mess with upscaling yourself, plenty of games have built-in upscales for you to play with – and you don’t have to go all the way to 13K to get really crisp graphics, generally any resolution beyond twice your native resolution is good enough. But if you want to lessen the performance impact of upscaling, you can play with Nvidia’s DSR feature in the Nvidia Control Panel which features AI enhanced upscaling to reduce the performance impact of running a game at higher than native resolution.
