Are there any issues with driver support for 8k that will affect purchase choice?
I recently bought an 8k TV (which is not brutally expensive when refurbished) and want to connect my workstation to it. I went through the list of video cards from my local store and the cheapest that claims 8k support is the Gigabyte RX 6400.
Is a Gigabyte RX 6400 Eagle 4G a good video card for mostly text output at 8k resolution? I might do things like play Netflix in 1/4 of the screen and have text in the other 3/4. Definitely nothing at all challenging in terms of video. AMD drivers have a history of being reliable, but will I face some issues like lack of HDMI support for 8k?
I’ve watched a YouTube video about trying this on Windows and they got frame rates as low as 4 FPS for games which is not a concern for me. It definitely works OK with Windows driving the card. Will I be likely to have issues running the same hardware on Linux?
You will need either an Intel discrete GPU or NVidia GPU if you want to use HDMI 2.1 to render at 8k@60. The Intel discrete GPUs have physical hardware that convert to HDMI and Nvidia uses proprietary drivers. If you can use displayport, any GPU (AMD, Intel, Nvidia) supporting displayport 1.4 or higher is suitable for 8k@60.
Based on your comment, I understand that AMD GPUs aren’t capable of 8k@60 over HDMI. Why is that?
Only on Linux, because the HDMI forum didn’t allow AMD to write an open source driver with HDMI 2.1 features
AMD made an open source driver for HDMI 2.1 but HDMI forum won’t approve. They locked down the specification for 2.1 and say the driver would reveal it.
https://www.howtogeek.com/hdmi-forum-open-source-drivers-hdmi-2-1/
I don’t know if an earlier version can do 8k@60HD.
This is the correct answer. Using my 6900XT, I can’t run a 4k120hz display over HDMI without subsampling.
This hopefully will change with the new AMD GPUs, but that’s wishful thinking.
As a 6700XT owner, I use 4k@60Hz (my screens can’t do better anyway). Does that mean I would need to use DisplayPort for better output in the future?
You can go higher that 4k@60 but youll be using chroma subsampling. Which can make text look really bad.
https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/chroma-subsampling