NVIDIA just released their latest flagship GPU, the RTX 4090, and the reviews from trusted creators are showing it to bring impressive advancements to the industry. We’ve seen it run modern games comfortably at over 120FPS at 4K, which is, in many cases, close to double the performance seen from the previous flagship card, the 3090 Ti.
(Image Credit: NVIDIA)
With so much power, the latest games like Cyberpunk 2077, F1 2022, and Portal are running at their highest quality setting, making for a stunning graphical experience, which is further improved when you enable its ray tracing function. Even with these highly demanding configurations, their DLSS tech allows the games to remain consistently at frame rates over 120FPS, but you need the right monitor to make use of this power.
The Advantage of High-End Monitors
(Image Credit: Miles Dompier | Windows Central)
Previously, it wasn’t possible to run games at 4K without having to sacrifice the frame rate, so most consumers chose 1440p displays, which offer a decent resolution upgrade over 1080p while being less demanding on the source device, allowing for a more balanced and attainable gaming experience. Now, 4K@144Hz has become the ideal standard for high-end gaming systems, offering the best possible immersion and quality. While you’ll find many high refresh 4K monitors on the market, there are certain features you should look for to ensure the best performance, compatibility, and user experience with the new graphics cards from NVIDIA.
Connectivity
Displaying a 4K 144Hz output requires a high-bandwidth connection, as it is transferring a staggering 1.2 billion pixels per second, which at 10-bit color, requires a minimum bandwidth of 43Gbps. At the moment, there are two input options offered by NVIDIA graphics cards that can run this resolution: HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4.
While DisplayPort 1.4 is capable of running 4K at 144Hz, its 32Gbps bandwidth means it can only achieve it using 4:2:2 Chroma subsampling, which will reduce the quality of the signal by transferring only half of the color information provided by the source device.
(Image Credit: RTINGS)
HDMI 2.1, when implemented according to the full 48Gbps spec, can transmit the 4K@144Hz video signal without any compression. This makes it the ideal option to take full advantage of the new high-end NVIDIA GPUs with a 4K@144Hz monitor. It is important to note whether a monitor does offer the full HDMI 2.1 bandwidth, as some monitors have reduced the bandwidth to as low as 24Gbps, making compression necessary to run high refresh rates.
On the Dough Spectrum 4K@144Hz, when paired with one of the new NVIDIA GPUs, you should ideally use the HDMI 2.1 input which features the full 48Gbps bandwidth, allowing you to run it at its full spec without any compression.
Color Performance
If you’re looking to buy a monitor for your new NVIDIA graphics card, aside from resolution, refresh rate, and connectivity, you should also look at the monitor’s color accuracy. The three main specs you should look for are sRGB coverage, DCI-P3 coverage, and Delta E.
sRGB, which stands for “Standard Red Green Blue” is the most popular color profile for consumer devices, and is used on operating systems like Windows, in most web browsers, and in many modern games. Having good coverage of this space will ensure the image displayed by your monitor represents the source content as intended. While it’s great for most use cases, it is limited to 8-bit color, and offers a reduced coverage of the color spectrum compared to a larger standard like DCI-P3.
For uses that require wider color coverage like video, movies, or modern video games, you’ll usually be able to enable HDR, which makes use of the DCI-P3 color space. Since you’re using a high-end GPU which runs games at their highest quality settings, you’ll surely want to use HDR to experience the game at its best quality, so you’ll want to find a monitor that offers good coverage of the DCI-P3 space.
Both color spaces can be found in the monitor’s specs as a percentage, with 100% being the ideal coverage of the space. Some monitors have an implementation with a coverage over 100%, which, while the higher number may make it seem better, will lead to an oversaturated image.
Finally, Delta E (or ΔE) measures how much the color displayed by a monitor will differ from the source image. To ensure the best image accuracy, you ideally want this measurement to be as close to 0 as possible, but any measurement below 1.0 will not be perceptible by the human eye. A professional calibration report, like the one provided with each Dough Spectrum unit, will show the deviation for each color, but on a product spec page, you can find the average Delta E, which will show the deviation average for all colors measured.
To ensure the best performance in these areas, you can calibrate your monitor with a professional calibration tool. These tools unfortunately aren’t very cheap, so at Dough, thanks to our community feedback, we calibrate each unit individually at the factory. This allows the Spectrum 4K@144Hz monitor to boast a 100% sRGB and 98% DCI-P3 coverage, along with an impressive 0.65 ΔE, which ensures any image displayed will be reproduced exactly as intended.
The Dough Spectrum
The Dough Spectrum is a perfect match for the NVIDIA RTX 4090, as it will allow you to experience your games at the highest quality possible through its 4K resolution and 144Hz refresh rate. You can be sure that the image displayed will be accurate to the source thanks to its 100% sRGB and 98% DCI-P3 coverage. It is available with either a matte or glossy coating.