Electronic Arts recently stunned the world with an awesome 17-minute demo of Battlefield 4 in full HD. It looks like something next-gen consoles would be playing and the amount of stuff going on on-screen almost certainly required some high-end hardware to power it.

Later on, EA revealed that the game was actually running at Ultra HD (4K, or 3840 x 2160) resolution. People then started asking what powered the demo and the answer, surprisingly, was an Intel Core i7 six-core processor and two AMD Radeon HD7990 graphics cards. Now, more and more people are asking the same question: can my PC play games at that resolution?

Nvidia GTX Titan Triple SLI

The main issue with answering that question is that no-one’s really testing games at the proper UHD resolution. The closest you can get is tests with three 1080p screens in portrait mode – 3240 x 1920 – but that’s still a ways away from the proper standard. Occasionally I see mention of people running triple Crossfire or two GTX Titans, but what do you need to crack playability at lower detail settings?

In April this year PC Perspective purchased a UHD 4K TV and ran some tests using FRAPS and Nvidia’s open-source benchmarking tool, FCAT (Frame Capture and Analysis Tool). I’ve used some of their results in the images below.

Battlefield 3 UHD 4K results obtained with Nvidia FCAT

Battlefield 3 Frame time Ultra

Crysis 3 Frame time Ultra

Far Cry 3 FCAT Ultra

Far Cry 3 Frame time Ultra

Skyrim FCAT Ultra

Skyrim Frame time Ultra

Sleeping Dogs FCAT Ultra

Sleeping Dogs Frame time Ultra

To interpret the results, a general rule of thumb – for FPS results, results placed higher on the graph are better; for Frame Time results, scores lower on the graph are better and smoother lines are more preferable.

PC Perspective ran their benchmarks at the highest settings possible in the games and those settings at such a high resolution ends up being four times more taxing than 1080p. However, simply taking your average frame rate and dividing it by four doesn’t give you accurate results because not all games behave in the same way.

Crysis 3 1080p results obtained with Nvidia FCAT

Crysis 3 UHD 4K results obtained with Nvidia FCAT

Crysis 3, in PC Perspective’s results mixed from their 4K benchmark test and a recent review of the GTX770, doesn’t look dissimilar, In fact, jumping from 1080p to UHD resolution only loses the AMD Radeon HD7970 an average of 10 FPS and the scores never drop below 20 FPS. At these settings the game appears to be maxing out the capabilities of both the processor and the GPU.

This bodes well for games that will use Crytek’s CryEngine 3.0 for rendering – the jump from 1080p to UHD 4K doesn’t cost you much in terms of performance.

Battlefield 3 1080p results obtained with Nvidia FCAT

Battlefield 3 UHD 4K results obtained with Nvidia FCAT

With games that run on EA’s Frostbite 2.0 engine, like Batttlefield 3 (and including a wide range of EA titles), the differences are noticeable. The jump from 1080p to UHD 4K almost chops off 3/4 of the average frame rates of all the cards. The only card to provide decent performance is the Nvidia Titan.

Because the Titan and the GTX780 are less than 8% apart in terms of performance, this is a rough representation of what the GTX780 would be like as well. The Frostbite 3.0 engine, which powers Battlefield 4, will also be used in many other games and it remains to be seen how the two engines compare.

A quick shopping list

If you’re still on older hardware and wondering what you’re going to need for playing at UHD 4K with minimum frame rates of 30fps, the quick-and-dirty lists above should point you in the right direction. The hardware you’d need for a fluid experience on low settings isn’t that bad – at the most, you’d just need a card with a Displayport 1.2 port.

Going up the rungs, aiming for 60fps and high details is where your wallet would hurt. There are no conclusive tests available, but I think that a Sandy Bridge-E Core i7 and the GTX780 or even a Titan at High settings would be good enough. Perhaps we’ll discover later on that the configuration barely cracks 40fps minimum, but so long as its a smooth experience it should be fine.

More Hardware news:

Asus 32-inch ultra high definition 4K monitor unveiled

Intel Haswell’s silly box art

Nvidia Geforce GTX770: performance vs price roundup