Question for Alienware 15 4K LCD owners

I assume that you guys would be sometimes needing to change the resolution to 1080p as games can be very demanding at 4k. I was wondering how does it look when bringing the res down? Is it blurry or is the ratio tight enough to where it looks good? I know that some panels do look good when at a resolution of the same ratio. Please let me know.

 

I lower the res on games that don't run well at 4k and it does look just fine. I think part of the reason is that 1080p is a perfect multiple of 4k so the pixels line up perfectly. I image it would probably look blurry if you tried another res like 1600x900 but I've never tried that before since I just either stay at 4k or 1080p.

 

How picky are you when it comes to LCDs. Some people dont care or even notice a change in sharpness or blur. Some people are OCDish and it would drive them crazy even the slightest change.
Thats how I am about the 1080p screens I have encountered. They all have had ghosting issue.. They look great while not moving but even the mouse pointer over certain colors has crazy trails.
Im hoping the 4k screen will be better.. but I also was worried about sacrificing performance etc.

 

I'm a little picky about screens and that's partly the reason why I returned the 1080p model to buy the 4k one. In my eyes, 1080p looks really good on the 4k model. I generally run all my monitors at native res since it does get blurry once you change the res but with this one, there is only a small hint of blurriness and it's not enough to bother me.

 

OK that makes me feel a bit better. You sound like me. After having a Alienware 14, M17xR3, & a M15x, The blurriness of the AW15 1080p screen was driving me nuts. Its very apparant compared to those other models. Wish it wasn't but that is just how it is it seems. The system I have coming in is a 4K one.. I cross my fingers and hope its nice.
Woot, just found out my system just shipped.

 

Let me know how you like it! I'm loving my 4k screen mostly because the colors really pop out at you. It's kind of hard to explain but you'll understand once you see it.

 

Do you know how to properly play a game in 1080p? When I try it shows up really small instead of converting.

 

First set the desktop to 1080p and then go into the Intel control panel. There's a option you need to check there. I think it's either "Maintain Aspect Ratio" or "Scale to Fullscreen". Once you check that you should be fine.

 

The only gripe I have about this screen so far is the brightness. It seems the backlight on this is much more dim then the 1080p screen.

 

I got the 4k and have mixed feelings. The ppi is very nice and the colors are great.

The scaling on 1920x1080 is not 1:4 pixel scaling. I think this panel does not have a built in scaler. If it did, I would have expected it to have used a high quality scaler that does this for resolutions that are evenly divisible. Either it doesn't have a scaler or has a poor quality one, you will get the scaling blurriness on resolutions other than 4k. Although its really not that bad at 1920x1080 in full screen games.

The screen is MST, which means it is actually two 1920 x2160 screens and uses display port multi-stream to display one image on both. The problem with this is
1)Window/desktop gadget positions sometimes get changed when switching between 4k and smaller resolutions. They end up on the border of the left screen. I actually don't know if this is MST issue or a windows issue with high res screens.
2)There are no resolution options between 2048x1536 and 4k. This is probably due to the intel gfx driver and MST panels. Current intel gfx driver also cannot make custom resolutions that use the 2 screens. It has to be the same size or smaller than 1920x2160. It's annoying if you want to play games in windowed mode that don't take up the entire screen. You will need for the game to support manual window resizing.
3)Sometimes even with vsync 60fps, I notice some tearing in the corners. It might be due to the MST panel.

Many programs are not dpi aware, including many popular or widely used software. Some windows 8.1 UI is not even dpi aware and looks ugly scaled. Changing windows scaling requires logging out. Very annoying.

If there are better non MST 4k panels in the future, I will definitely look into upgrading my laptop. I would rather have gotten the 17" if 4k was available. It remains to be seen if 4k panels will ever be made for at 17".

 

I had this issue with some games. My intel gfx driver only allows "maintain aspect ratio" for some reason. The fix was to disable the touch screen device. Thankfully I don't use it.