So, a 55-inch TV, which is pretty much the smallest 4k TV you can get, has benefits over 1080p at a distance of 7.5 feet. And that is the smallest, and thus closest for the benefits… how far away do people watch their TVs from? Am I weird?

And at the size of computer monitors, for the distance they are from your face, they would always have full benefit on this chart. And even working into 8k a decent amount.

And that’s only for people with typical vision, for people with above-average acuity, the benefits would start further away.

But yeah, for VR for sure, since having an 8k screen there would directly determine how far away a 4k screen can be properly re-created. If your headset is only 4k, a 4k screen in VR is only worth it when it takes up most of your field of view. That’s how I have mine set up, but I would imagine most people would prefer it to be half the size or half the distance away, or a combination.

So 8k screens in VR will be very relevant for augmented reality, since performance costs there are pretty low anyway. And still convey benefits if you are running actual VR games at half the physical panel resolution due to performance demand being too high otherwise. You get some relatively free upscaling then. Won’t look as good as native 8k, but benefits a bit anyway.

There is also fixed and dynamic foveated rendering to think about, with an 8k screen, even running only 10% of it at that resolution and 20% at 4k, 30% at 1080p, and the remaining 40% at 540p, even with the overhead of so many foveation steps, you’ll get a notable reduction in performance cost. Fixed foveated would likely need to lean higher towards bigger percentages of higher res, but has the performance advantage of not having to move around at all from frame to frame. Can benefit from more pre-planning and optimization.