Does 4K TV + 1080P Helios monitor allow for 1080P upscaling on the 4K?

[GeneralDynamics]

Hey all you Input/Output experts out there - I could really use some suggestions.

 

 

My setup (pertinent items):

 

Sony X900F 4K TV, HDMI connected.

 

Second 1080P touchscreen running Helios, DVI connected.

 

I7 8700K.

 

32 GB RAM.

 

Titan X Pascal.

 

Asus Maximus X Formula.

 

I've really come to love and depend on Helios over the years so it's a must have. I recently purchased the Sony, and I knew trying to run DCS in 4K plus the additional 1080P monitor would be a stretch (I like high settings), even with the Titan. BUT I thought no worries, if my system couldn't handle it I could always just go 1080P on the Sony, let it upscale to 4K, and still have a way better experience than with my old 1080P TV, right? WRONG!

 

Here's the problem - 4K + an additional 1080P screen is indeed too much for my system. Framerates bounce all over the place between 40 and 60 FPS, and the Titan is maxed out at 90+ percent utilization, hitting 99 percent at times. Overall, an intermittently skippy, stuttery mess depending on what's being rendered. I can't send a 1080P signal to JUST the TV that I know of. When the resolution is adjusted to account for a 1080P main viewport plus the 1080P Helios monitor side by side, the overall resolution generated is 3840 x 1080. The TV sees this resolution and says, hey, I can fit all that on my display, no problem, so I get a 1080 pixel tall "band" across the center of the TV displaying both screens, and nothing goes to the 1080P touchscreen. Because 3840 pixels is the maximum width of the TV, no upscaling takes place. If I force the TV to a 1080P resolution in nVidia settings I get output on both screens, but of course in that scanario there's NO upscaling on the TV and the native 1080P image looks horrible.

 

Has anyone been able to get around this problem and get 1080P upscaling to work on a 4K TV with Helios running on a second 1080P monitor? I've run through so many scenarios in my pea brain that my head is spinning, and everything I've come up with I've managed to shoot down after research.

 

So there you have it - you guys are my last hope. Please be gentle:-)

 

And on top of everything else, the TV was bought Sunday and I spent that afternoon and evening experimenting. I shut it off, went to bed, got up, went to work Monday, got home, and the TV was DEAD! Would not power on. Called Sony, went through all the troubleshooting steps. DEAD! Probably one in 10,000 Sony X900Fs have this issue, and I got one. I hadn't even removed the tape from the bezel yet! *SIGH* I figured I should go and buy a lottery ticket under the circumstances, but I'd probably be killed in a traffic accident on the way to the store. LOL!

 

Anyway, before I buy another 4K I'd really like to hear from you guys... Thank you!

[GeneralDynamics]

Let me ask another question. Is anyone running DCS at 4K resolution plus a Helios monitor? If so, what GPU are you running and what does your performance look like? Thank you!

[Capt Zeen]

Hello. I don't have any experience with 4k in DCS, so i can't offer any solution on that,

but i know several people that are using a configuration like you.

I really don't know how they do, perhaps they let windows 10 to increase the size of the mainviewport, but i am not sure.

So... lets see if someone can help on this.

[Greekbull]

Hello, not currently running DCS in 4K with Helios as I just went to a 65" Curved 4K so I got rid of the touchscreen helios in favor of a screen mounted at knee height and a cockpit that's life sized...but I did run DCS in full 4K high settings with a 1080P touchsceen for a while. I would suggest turning off your in game Anti Aliasing and using Reshade with Sweetfx to do the AA...you will see much better performance! I had good performance doing this setup with a 1080Ti and great performance using a 2080Ti(my current card)...but I would suggest trying the reshade route first and seeing if that doesn't get you where you need with the Titan;)

[GeneralDynamics]

Thank you both very much, Capt Zeen and Greekbull, for your consideration and assistance.

 

 

Greekbull, are you saying that you had great performance with the 2090ti at 4k res while using the Helios monitor? Was the performance stutter free, even while flying over say Las Vegas and/or large cities in the Persian Gulf map?

 

I see that you have your 8700K OCed to 5.0 GHz? I've tried that as well and also had a stable OC at 5 GHz, but in my experience that has always resulted in more stutter rather than less, forcing me to return to stock settings. All I do is fiddle with multiplier and voltage. Are there other BIOS settings that need to be addressed for an overclock to perform without increased stutter, or is that all you do as well?

 

My 65" 4K TV sits at desk height, but my flight seat and controls are mounted on a platform on casters so I can roll it all out of the way in one go for regular gaming. The platform is 10.5 inches in height, so while I'm using it with the 4K TV my eye level is roughly center of the screen, but I still have room enough to lower the Helios screen to the point that the line of sight when looking at the top edge of the Helios screen extends to the bottom of the 4K TV, give or take. The touch screen is mounted on an adjustable articulated arm attached to the desk, so I can also swing it out of the way when not being used. That aspect worked out very well.

 

Sounds like there's hope, but wow, a 2090ti RTX on top of a 4K TV... If I go missing from the forums and there happens to be an area of disturbed earth somewhere out behind the house, then that's likely where my wife hid my body. LOL!

 

Thank you again, both of you!

[Mr_Burns]

Have you tried plugging the 1080p touch screen into the onboard graphics of the MOBO and not onto the GPU?

[sharkfin61]

Have you tried plugging the 1080p touch screen into the onboard graphics of the MOBO and not onto the GPU?

 

That's the setup i use for my 4k TV(43")@1080TI / 1080p 24"@ Core i-5 IGP combination.

Works like a charm. But I think I will try the Reshade/SweetFX option to gain some extra frames.

 

(Actually my 4k is only QFHD TV (3840x2160 px). Frames are in the mid 40's (says FRAPS) at a reasonable picture quality on the main display. MFD's are exported to the 1080p display.

 

I tried a 1080p resolution on the TV but I didn't suceed. Also experimental 30Hz on the TV was a mess.

Edited March 2, 2019 by sharkfin61

[GeneralDynamics]

Thanks everyone. I haven't tried running the Helios screen through the onboard adapter yet but will give that a try. I tried the 30 Hz route as well at 4K resolution, it was smoother but everything moving was blurry.

 

Part of the problem is that I don't understand how the screen mapping works from the sim, then through Windows, then to the Titan and out to the displays. I'm back to the old 1080P tv now since the 4K blew up, and as far as I can tell, both the touchscreen and the tv are getting discrete 1080P signals. So, as it stands, the defined resolution in DCS is 3840x1080. That goes through whatever trickery is involved in the multi monitor setup in either Windows or the nVidia Control Panel, and somehow the Titan knows to send 1080P to each monitor. Again, that's with two 1080P displays I'm currently using.

 

So now the question is, when using a 4K plus the 1080P touchscreen, why does the TV hijack the 1080P signal from both outputs and display both on the 4K TV side by side??? Arrrgh.

 

Best I can tell, I need to somehow spoof the TV into thinking it's only getting a 1080P signal in order for it to upscale to 4K.

 

A couple of additional ideas have crossed my mind:

 

1. Set the 1080P touchscreen as the primary monitor and the TV as secondary, and then reverse the screen layout in Helios so the overlay goes to the primary monitor, and change all the screen coordinates for the viewports to match. Then, will I get a 1080P signal going to the touchscreen, with the remaining spillover 1080P signal going out to the 4K which would then be upscaled? I dunno, we'll see once I replace the dead 4K TV with another one.

 

2. Purchase a Matrox DualHead2Go adapter, which I believe WILL send a discrete 1080P signal to both the touchscreen and the 4K TV, in which case the TV should upscale that signal as desired. Need to talk to Matrox about this, but from what I've read online that seems to be the case.

 

Of course, the other option is to bite the bullet and go native 4K on the TV plus the 1080P touchscreen driven with a 2090ti. I'm reluctant to spend that much money with Vulkan in the works as I understand ED is already reworking their maps to support it. But when will it actually be complete? That's anyone's guess at this point. So, I'm looking for a poor man's solution until the architecture is updated.

 

I can currently run at 4K with the additional Helios screen at 40+ FPS with the Titan, but there is intermittent stutter and that just ruins the immersion for me. I need everything to be buttery smooth to really enjoy the sim, but at the moment that appears to be a pipe dream with my current hardware and the additional touchscreen on top of the 4K TV. I think that's all going to change eventually with the introduction of improvements to Edge, i.e. Vulkan support, but we'll just have to see. It's hard for me to justify the insane amount of hard earned money needed for a 4K TV PLUS a $1200 graphics card on top of that until all this settles out and we see what kind of performance increase comes with updated DCS architecture.

 

So, for now I'm looking to just do the 4K TV and hopefully find a way to get it to upscale a 1080P signal the way I want, and then make further decisions down the line as more news comes out regarding DCS performance improvements (or doesn't)… LOL!

Edited March 2, 2019 by GeneralDynamics

[GeneralDynamics]

Update:

 

For anyone else having 1080P -> 4K upscaling issues similar to what I described earlier, the Matrox DualHead2Go Digital SE solved the problem quite nicely!

 

https://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/gxm/dh2go/digital_se/

 

Around $150.

 

For those that may not be familiar with it, it's an interface box that connects to a single DisplayPort output on your graphics card and has 2 DVI outputs, one for each monitor. You define the resolution you want for the overall display size, in my case 2x1080P or 3840 by 1080 pixels. The Matrox box splits this into two discreet 1080P signals, one going to the 4K TV which upscales that 1080P signal nicely now for the main viewport, and the other going to the 1080P Helios touchscreen.

 

Without the Matrox interface I had and endless array of screwy problems mentioned earlier. One I didn't mention was even if I defined a single screen for the 4K TV, no Helios, and set the resolution to 1920 by 1080, the TV would upscale the main viewport but the GUI still would not scale correctly even with the "Scale GUI" checkbox ticked. Which means that the button or whatever you clicked on the screen was not where the screen displayed it making it nearly impossible to navigate the menus. Several times I had to edit the Options.lua file and set things back to where I could use the GUI again.

 

The DCS performance is nice and smooth again at 3840x1080 at max settings for the most part, and while the upscaling results in a little bit of shimmering now and again, I can live with that until ED completes their graphics optimizations. Once they get that sorted, I'm hoping I'll be able to run in 4K plus the Helios 1080P touchscreen with my current hardware. It's able to run Crysis 3 with all max settings at 4K resolution with nary a skip or lag, not to mention all my other games. Just can't quite pull it off with DCS just yet. Added bonus, I couldn't detect any appreciable input lag whatsoever attributed to the Matrox unit.

 

Thanks again for everyone's input!

[GeneralDynamics]

Last update... I give up. Folks, do NOT use the Matrox interface if you want to use a 1080P Helios touch screen with your main 4K display. I was so focused on getting the 1080P -> 4K upscaling to work, which it did wonderfully with the Matrox, I didn't get around to testing the Helios profiles until tonight. Because the Matrox makes the two displays look like one display at 3840x1080 to both Windows and nVidia, that jacks up all the coordinates on the touch screen and causes a whole new round of weirdness.

 

Even when setting both displays to run at native resolution without the Matrox and setting the DCS res to 5760x2160 to account for both displays, I get extremely thick, blurry, unintelligible lines in the exported FA-18C DDI exports on the 1080P display. I suspect this is due to DCS graphics output going out to two different display resolutions. It was the same trying the dedicated graphics card to drive the 4K plus the integrated graphics driving the 1080P touchscreen.

 

As far as I can see, a 4K main viewport with a 1080P Helios touch screen is just a no go. I'm done, boxing everything up and sending it all back, 4K TV and the Matrox.