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Better Than a Quad-Head Display: My Adventures with "4K" 2160p and Linux
While searching for an upgrade for my aging 1080i television, I became entranced with the progress of 4K "ultra-hd" monitors with resolutions of 3840x2160 pixels. It occurred to me that with all this industry focus on consumer televisions with high resolutions, certainly the next generation of computer monitors would also follow this format.  Inside the box we have the monitor itself along with a couple paper manuals, a remote control with batteries included, a base stand, and an HDMI cable.  If we look at the back side we see that there are a few mounting options. I'm choosing to attach the base stand, but there is also the option to unscrew the mounting plate if we wanted to set the monitor directly on a desk surface.  Powering Up Ok, now for the moment of truth. We apply power and watch a magnificent 4K splash image come across the screen. Excitement builds.  A few quick setup dialogs appear, but we see nothing too complex.  Testing with the C7 Chromebook So we now appear to have a functioning 4K display ready for some signals. I have a couple HDMI sources integrated into my entertainment center that might be good for some quick tests. The centerpiece device is an Asus C7 Chromebook running Fedora. The C7 is normally configured to drive HDMI at 1080i, so this is the easiest first test to try. Simply removing the HDMI cable from our main TV and plugging it into the new display gives us some instant satisfaction with the Seiki coming up in 1080i. Now playing with the monitor settings on the C7 it looks like we can hit 1080p which is a nice improvement, but no higher resolution is supported with the C7.  Well, it looks like the C7 test is pointing out an issue. The Seiki comes with a default setting that overscans the image. That's fine when watching movies or live TV, but when you put a computer image on a display you really do want to see every pixel from left to right and top to bottom. After a little fiddling with the setup menus I see that there is a "Zoom Mode" and setting it to "Just Scan" solves the problem. No more overscan, all pixels are now visible.  Well, the C7 test was nice but I'm ready for some 4K content. I have heard that Netflix is experimenting with early adopter 4K programming. They have released the second season of "House of Cards" in 4K format, so my next test is to connect my Western Digital media center to the Seiki and feed some Netflix content. How disappointing, even though Netflix has some ultra-hd content, my Western Digital box will only reach 1080p. (Making note to self to be sure to upgrade content devices when I get around to migrating our entertainment center to 4K). First experience with the Radeon R7-240 I'm ready to see some high resolution signals on this monitor, and it looks like my preliminary tests have only given it a 1080p shakedown. But, our real objective here is to get this display working on my desktop workstation, so it's time to unbox the Radeon R7-240 graphics card and move this project into the office area. The R7 card is a single slot pci-e 3.0 card, and it comes packaged with a few pieces of paper, and of all things, a CD filled with Windows drivers. Silly vendors, don't they know they could save money by just asking us which operating system we intend to use. I get some enjoyment from tossing Windows driver CDs into the trash bin, but I have friends who like to use them for target practice.  Linux configuration and tweaks The hardware installation is trivial, I just pulled out my dual DVI graphics card and plugged in the R7-240 with HDMI cabling running over to the Seiki. Now we move on to the software side. I've been using the open source "radeon" driver that is supplied with the current Fedora 20 distribution and have been quite pleased with its performance on my dual 1600x1200 monitor configuration, so I have some expectation that it will come through for me also in 4K. Booting up with the R7/Seiki attached, I am pleased to see that all the text modes are supported. The Seiki has a nice feature in that it flashes a resolution status message in the upper right corner whenever it detects and responds to a change. During bootup I'm seeing text coming in at 640x480, then 1280x960, but then when the boot process gets to the point of displaying a full resolution graphic image I am left with a black screen. Ok, this project has been going without a hitch up to this point, but now we need to figure out what's going wrong and come up with a solution. Hmmm, it's already 10PM and I'm still hoping to have this desktop hopping before I go to sleep tonight. I'm focused. Let's see what happens if we boot directly from a Fedora Live Disk. Those live disks usually "just work" these days. Nope, same black screen after the bootup. Next, let's try the Live Disk in maintenance mode. Ahh, that's better. Now we are running with graphics over the R7 to the Seiki. That's progress even though the graphics is running at only 1440x900 pixels, but at least now we are running in our target configuration and we can take a look at the internals and see what's working and what needs to be tweaked. Looking at /var/log/Xorg.0.log shows us that the radeon driver is only supporting the lower resolutions and not our 3840x2160 target resolution. Dang! I'm sure the radeon devs are going to get open source support for the higher resolutions but I want to be using this monitor tonight! I much prefer to stay with open source software for everything I do, but in this case I see that AMD provides proprietary drivers for Linux in both 32 bit and 64 bit configurations. It looks like going with the AMD proprietary drivers will be unavoidable, so I'm downloading the 64 bit AMD Catalyst Display driver version 13.12. AMD provides an easy to use build procedure which I'm running, but the build fails with a complaint that it is looking for kernel 3.7 and Fedora is already up to 3.13. Hmmm, I really don't want to regress back to kernel 3.7, and besides, that would be a lot of work. Hmmm, I see that AMD has a Beta 14.3 driver that was just released two weeks ago. Now I'm really starting to feel like an early adopter. Downloading the Beta 14.3, and now the build completes successfully on the current kernel. Thank you AMD for supporting Linux with your products. A quick reboot into the new driver configuration and YYYYYYEEEEEESSSSS! I have perfect "4K" hardware accelerated 3840x2160 resolution. The goal is reached! Take a look at what a 3840x2160 desktop monitor can hold. It's like having four 1920x1080 monitors in a 2x2 stack but without the seam. Here you can see that I have tons of terms, a gimp edit of a high-res far-galaxy image, the current weather map, qt designer, an active wireshark, a copy of an ebook, and of course a view to the latest LXer newswire. I wish you could see this monitor up close and in its full resolution. This photo must be greatly reduced in order to post on a web page. Reduced to the point where you will certainly not see the detail that is there. When I'm sitting at a normal working distance, each teminal, each app is visible with all the clarity I had with my old dual monitor setup, I just have more screen space and bigger work surface now. It is now 2AM and I'm going to call it a successful day. A total of 35 hours have passed since the point when I made the decision to order this monitor and go ahead with this project, and a lot of things have gone right along the way. Tomorrow I plan to work with this new setup and try to see just how it will change the way I work.  Day 2: Getting used to new operational paradigms It's morning now, and I had a wonderful dream last night. I dreamt that I had replaced my dual monitor system with a new 3180x2160 high-res display on my desktop system. Wait, that wasn't a dream! The first thing I notice on walking into my office this morning is that the Seiki has automatically powered itself down even though I had disabled the "sleep timer" in its menu. I'll have to talk to Seiki on this point. I normally let my monitors run 24/7. However, a quick touch to the power button on the Seiki's remote control brought the monitor back to life exactly as I had left it last night. Well, it might not be a bad thing after all to save some power during long idle periods, so I'm going to classify this for now as "not a problem". Before starting this project I was wondering how happy I would be with 30Hz updates. Well, at this point I have to say that the display appears solid at that update rate with no noticeable flicker whatsoever. Maybe if I was using this setup to watch sports videos this might be an issue, but for me, I'm finding this 30 Hz update rate to be quite satisfactory for workstation duty. Next I'm turning my attention to operational factors. Will this new monitor configuration be workable for me on a long term basis, and what changes to my work style will I want to make to maximize the advantage of the larger workspace? For me, I spend a large amount of my time on the command line in an xterm, and I typically use the tiniest of fonts so that I can display the maximum amount of text in the space available. For this reason, the quality of tiny fonts is of deal-breaker importance to me, and I'm dismayed to be seeing some ghosting on this monitor around the pixels. Not so good. After some fiddling with the Seiki's settings menu I am pleased to discover the culprit. The Seiki "sharpness" control alters pixels for you in the hope that you will like the result. Changing "sharpness" from the default setting of 50 down to 0 completely disables the pixel alteration with the result that we now have a pixel perfect display, even for the tiny fonts that I like to use. You can see in this closeup photo how each pixel now falls into its proper place. My tiny fonts are perfect again.  While we are on the subject of tiny fonts, I'd like to do what I can to squash a rumor that seems to be spreading. The myth I keep hearing is that you must go to larger fonts when scaling up to a 4K monitor. This is not exactly true. Do the math. If you double the screen resolution and at the same time you double the screen width, you have done absolutely nothing to the size of a pixel or the physical size of your fonts. So if you are happy with a particular font setting on your 1920 pixel wide monitor, then you will also be happy with exactly that same font on a 4K monitor with twice the width. In my case, I actually see fonts slightly larger physically on the 4K since I've more than doubled the screen width during this upgrade. So, if you have the eyes to see tiny fonts on your 1920 monitor like I do, then you will see them just as well on the Seiki, or if you prefer a larger font on your 1920 monitor, then that same font will feel right for you in the large screen 4K format. Now at this point all technical issues are resolved to my satisfaction and I'm ready to accept this setup as my new daily working environment going forward. What's left is to adapt working paradigms to the new workspace. At this point I've spent a few hours doing real work on this system and I noticed something about myself. I have developed the habit, over the years, of aligning my work to the top of the display. With the new 23 inch monitor height, I am noticing some neck strain starting to emerge. To avoid this, I'm experimenting with a new layout idea. Normally I keep several xterms open with ssh sessions to remote servers doing security and event monitoring. Now I'm playing with the idea of moving these five xterms to the top of the display, with my main work area starting immediately below them. The xterms are still in my peripheral vision and a quick movement of the eyes is all it takes to scan their content. The working space available below the xterms is still much more than I previously had in my dual monitor configuration. This is keeping my eyes focused forward while still making good use of all available space. Summary All in all, I couldn't be more pleased with the way this project went together, and with the end result that emerged. Kudos go to Amazon for their prompt delivery, and to AMD for supporting Linux with their products. I have a feeling that I'll never again be content with "low-resolution" 1920x1080 or 1600x1200 monitors. At this point I'm ready to give a big thumbs-up to 4K as the next logical step for workstation displays. |
Comments (25)
5 earlier comments in the full thread.
Looks like I'll have to spring for a new video card. Oh well, I can afford $98.
I did some Steam (Portal 2) gaming with this Haswell laptop with Intel 4400 integrated graphics card. It worked great at 1600x900 which is exactly 1/4 the native pixels but looks fine. I don't care about super high-res for games as it is limited by the textures anyway. But I do so appreciate it for the text.
Reading about this and seeing the photos was irresistible to me and I placed an order for the same monitor and card. I'm looking forward to seeing how this goes!
Hey penguinist. Now that you've been running on a 3840x2160 monitor for a week, are you still cool with it?
Any quirks we should know about?
I'm really ready to spring for this, it's just too boss.
Any quirks we should know about?
I'm really ready to spring for this, it's just too boss.
Quoting:Now that you've been running on a 3840x2160 monitor for a week, are you still cool with it?
Well, after working on a 3840x2160 monitor for a while, I now can add a few things to my report.
1. I will NEVER go back to my old dual low-res monitor setup. This large seamless work surface is definitely a major improvement.
2. I found and fixed an issue with tearing. When playing videos, some minor tearing was noticeable during motion sequences. It turns out that the AMD driver has a setting that fixes this. Setting "Enable Tear Free Desktop" in the driver forces the driver to always wait until the vertical refresh time before painting a new frame. This requires more resources in the graphics adapter to implement, but the R7-240 has 4GB of memory, and that card handles the extra workload with ease. After making this change, I do now have a tear-free desktop.
3. I have been annoyed by the monitor's habit of doing an automatic power-down even though I've set its sleep timer to "Off". I've filed a ticket with Seiki on this point asking for a workaround or a feature addition in the next firmware update. I'll drop their response into this thread when I get it.
4. The last thing I will note is not technical, but is psychological. After getting used to this large display surface, I found myself settling into a screen organization that was working well for me with two pdf viewers looking at documentation, an ide, about ten open xterms, and two firefox windows. Then I wanted to open yet another document and found to my amazement that I had no screen space left without having to minimize something I already had up. Then I realized that it is human nature to let your work expand to fill the space you have available. There is never enough space. For a moment I fantasized about a triple 3840x2160 setup arranged in a U configuration along with a custom-built desk with me positioned at the center, but then quickly settled down to the tried and proven working techniques of minimizing, overlaying, and using multiple Linux workspaces.
In the end, I'm still giving the large surface 3840x2160 monitor a huge thumbs up.
Hello. Can one of you run the command:
xdpyinfo and tell me what it says for dimension and resolution? xdpyinfo | grep dimension xdpyinfo | grep resolution
I want to verify how it will behave for LibreOffice. I've been working on making it look good (http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?p=3444), but it needs to detect the DPI correctly and there are a couple of ways to do that on Linux ;-)
xdpyinfo and tell me what it says for dimension and resolution? xdpyinfo | grep dimension xdpyinfo | grep resolution
I want to verify how it will behave for LibreOffice. I've been working on making it look good (http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?p=3444), but it needs to detect the DPI correctly and there are a couple of ways to do that on Linux ;-)
$ xdpyinfo | grep dimension dimensions: 3840x2160 pixels (1015x571 millimeters)
$ xdpyinfo | grep resolution resolution: 96x96 dots per inch
I must finally take keyboard in hand and thank you, penguinist, for this waaay cool article. I may not have the funds (yet!) to try this excellent monster monitor solution, but you can sure bet it's high up on my wish list. Thank you for all your legwork and wonderfully detailed write-up. I bookmarked all of it and have sent the links to a couple graphic artists who I know do have both the jingles and the interest. ;)
Thanks for the info penguinist. At 96 dpi, it won't necessarily kick-in by default. That is what my laptop says so it isn't necessarily a problem, but it depends on other factors.
What does your machine return for this? xrdb -query | grep Xft.dpi
Depending on what DE you run can also play a factor. Anyway, I hope LibreOffice 4.2.3 looks good for your screen.
What does your machine return for this? xrdb -query | grep Xft.dpi
Depending on what DE you run can also play a factor. Anyway, I hope LibreOffice 4.2.3 looks good for your screen.
keithcu wrote:What does your machine return for this? xrdb -query | grep Xft.dpi
$ xrdb -query |grep Xft.dpi Xft.dpi: 96
I'm running the Xfce DE and as far as I'm concerned the screen is perfectly behaved in this environment. The fonts are precisely drawn with every pixel in its place. There are no unresolved technical issues for me with fonts or display in general except for the inability to disable the auto-powerdown feature which I reported earlier. I'm still waiting for a response on that from Seiki.
Regarding LibreOffice 4.2.3, as far as I'm concerned it looks identical to what I had on my old 1600x1200 monitors. The physical size of the fonts is about the same as before, it's just that now I can have more documents open simultaneously on this larger work surface. Liberation Serif 12 pt looks quite nice, when reducing the font size down to 6 pt then the characters are extremely tiny but still readable. I respond to screen photo requests if there is some test you would like to try.
I think keith that there will be a difference between your hi-res notebook display and my hi-res large screen display. On your screen it will be necessary to use a larger font size in order to get a correctly sized character. On my hi-res large screen display, the physical size of the fonts is about the same as I had on my previous low-res (and smaller) monitors. So I have no need to change font size, and in fact if LO went into an automatic large font mode it would probably be undesirable in the case of physically large dimensioned screens. What worked on the small low-res monitor works also without modification on the large high-res monitor. Double the screen resolution and at the same time double the screen width and the resulting character size will be unchanged. Am I making sense?
Hi Penguinist,
LibreOffice HiDPI mode won't kick in for your screen. But I calculated the DPI of your monitor and I agree that don't want it to.
Thanks for this info. I only have one laptop / OS to test it on so I don't know what will happen and should happen on other hardware.
LibreOffice HiDPI mode won't kick in for your screen. But I calculated the DPI of your monitor and I agree that don't want it to.
Thanks for this info. I only have one laptop / OS to test it on so I don't know what will happen and should happen on other hardware.
Hi Keithcu, I think we are on the same page on this. I would be curious to know the dpi reports for your 13" hi-res screen.
My DPI is 192 for rdb -query, although X reports it is 96 dpi resolution. The monitor itself is actually 276 dpi, but working at 192 dpi looks great.
Thanks for the input - I was looking at exactly these monitors for myself to use under linux. Currently I run 6x 1920x1200 displays in eyefinity mode under linux which is great, I wanted to replace them with 3x of these.
Do you use composited desktops? Using kde with kwin compositing or ubuntu with compiz, I have to disable compositing as neither can keep up without causing flickering on my 11520x1200 framebuffer, wondering how even a single 4k display holds up.
Keep up the good work, let us know how your adventures fare with steam or some other gl gaming - really want this more for desktop use, but curious how the amd drivers are.
Do you use composited desktops? Using kde with kwin compositing or ubuntu with compiz, I have to disable compositing as neither can keep up without causing flickering on my 11520x1200 framebuffer, wondering how even a single 4k display holds up.
Keep up the good work, let us know how your adventures fare with steam or some other gl gaming - really want this more for desktop use, but curious how the amd drivers are.
Thank you, mikebutash, for the comments.
One postscript that I can add to my adventure: the native video driver that comes with Fedora 21 now drives this combination directly with acceleration, so there is no longer a need to use the proprietary AMD driver.
Now that I have been using a 39" 4K monitor for nearly eight months, I am still very pleased with this solution. I doubt that I will be going back to those tiny monitors ever again. A couple months ago I bought a second one of these 39 inch 4K monitors so now I have them running at home and at the office. I've found that I can be pretty productive when I have 3840x2160 pixels of space to work with.
One postscript that I can add to my adventure: the native video driver that comes with Fedora 21 now drives this combination directly with acceleration, so there is no longer a need to use the proprietary AMD driver.
Now that I have been using a 39" 4K monitor for nearly eight months, I am still very pleased with this solution. I doubt that I will be going back to those tiny monitors ever again. A couple months ago I bought a second one of these 39 inch 4K monitors so now I have them running at home and at the office. I've found that I can be pretty productive when I have 3840x2160 pixels of space to work with.
$ xrdb -query |grep Xft.dpi
Xft.dpi: 240
Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro 13.1" laptop, 3200 x 1800
Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro 13.1" laptop, 3200 x 1800
number6x: on the Seiki 39" that looks like this:
xrdb -query |grep Xft.dpi Xft.dpi: 140
I'm very interested in this setup, but I read a lot about terrible latency issues. Other reports mentioned that the 4k TVs are not usable as a computer monitor because the latency is so high that the mouse cursor keeps moving noticeably although you stopped the mouse movement already. I did not read about this issue in your post. What is your experience in this regard?
mrumpf:
Regarding latency, it is essential with 4k TVs that you drive them with a graphics card that is capable of hardware acceleration at the 4k resolution AND that you use a driver that is capable of enabling that hardware acceleration.
When I first attempted to run without hardware acceleration, I noticed the high latency that you refer to. The response time was so slow as to be unusable, but with a good graphics card like the Radeon R7-240 (<$90 at Amazon or Tiger Direct) that I'm using I'm seeing splendid latency performance. The mouse moves as fast as I want it to move and it "stops on a dime". Also, I can grab a window with an app running in it and swing it around the screen in large circular motions, and the response is nearly instantaneous.
As I mentioned, it is important not only to select a good graphics card, but also to back that up with a driver that is capable of enabling its hardware acceleration. In my first experiment, as I detail in the article, the default Fedora 20 driver did NOT enable hardware acceleration. This might be the source of the latency reports you have read. There are two better ways to go. I installed the AMD proprietary linux driver which performed flawlessly with Fedora 20, but since then I notice now that the default driver shipped with Fedora 21 DOES support hardware acceleration on the Radeon card, so it's no longer necessary to use a proprietary driver. I'm guessing that the situation is similar with the other major distributions, but right now my only experience driving this combination is from Fedora.
Having said this, you are limited by the HDMI interface to a 30Hz update rate, but that has just not been an issue with me. Bear in mind that I'm not a gamer, and faster than 30Hz might be more of a careabout if I were, but as a desktop monitor for the kind of development work I do, I couldn't be happier. The 30Hz update rate certainly would not cause the kind of latency you describe. Remember, televisions have been playing fast moving sports programming with 30 HZ updates for decades and few have complained.
You asked a good question, and I hope my response sets your mind at ease a bit. Let me know if you have more questions or would like me to run some specific performance tests on the Seiki/Radeon 4k combination.
Regarding latency, it is essential with 4k TVs that you drive them with a graphics card that is capable of hardware acceleration at the 4k resolution AND that you use a driver that is capable of enabling that hardware acceleration.
When I first attempted to run without hardware acceleration, I noticed the high latency that you refer to. The response time was so slow as to be unusable, but with a good graphics card like the Radeon R7-240 (<$90 at Amazon or Tiger Direct) that I'm using I'm seeing splendid latency performance. The mouse moves as fast as I want it to move and it "stops on a dime". Also, I can grab a window with an app running in it and swing it around the screen in large circular motions, and the response is nearly instantaneous.
As I mentioned, it is important not only to select a good graphics card, but also to back that up with a driver that is capable of enabling its hardware acceleration. In my first experiment, as I detail in the article, the default Fedora 20 driver did NOT enable hardware acceleration. This might be the source of the latency reports you have read. There are two better ways to go. I installed the AMD proprietary linux driver which performed flawlessly with Fedora 20, but since then I notice now that the default driver shipped with Fedora 21 DOES support hardware acceleration on the Radeon card, so it's no longer necessary to use a proprietary driver. I'm guessing that the situation is similar with the other major distributions, but right now my only experience driving this combination is from Fedora.
Having said this, you are limited by the HDMI interface to a 30Hz update rate, but that has just not been an issue with me. Bear in mind that I'm not a gamer, and faster than 30Hz might be more of a careabout if I were, but as a desktop monitor for the kind of development work I do, I couldn't be happier. The 30Hz update rate certainly would not cause the kind of latency you describe. Remember, televisions have been playing fast moving sports programming with 30 HZ updates for decades and few have complained.
You asked a good question, and I hope my response sets your mind at ease a bit. Let me know if you have more questions or would like me to run some specific performance tests on the Seiki/Radeon 4k combination.
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The specs on your card should list it's maximum resolution.