Major 4K TV Problems Playing PC Games at 1080p - Help Needed!!

I recently purchased a 4K 55-inch Sony X9005b television. So far I had been playing my PS4 on it at 1080p without any issues. Last week I upgraded my PC GPU to the Asus Strix 970 to take advantage of the HDMI 2.0 connection.

I didn’t expect to play at 4K on most games so thought that I would more likely play at 1080p or 1440p and let the TV upscale by itself as it does automatically with all content such as the PS4 or standard TV/Blu-rays etc.

However, much to my disappointment and lots of hair pulling, I am having huge problems with games at any resolutions when in full screen mode.

For example, with ARMA 3, I have my desktop set at 4K resolution and when I enter the game I cannot easily navigate the menus (which I expected and read up on as a consequence of 4K incompatibility). Eventually I manage to put it into Windowed mode by guessing where to click and can change the resolution to 1080p which is what I want to play it at. Then I make it full screen again and it automatically goes to some weird resolution ignoring my 1080p selection (e.g 1650 x 1050 with 16:10 ratio) and doesn’t fill the screen even though I had selected 1080p. I get a really large black box around the edge.

Also, and more to the point, the menus still remain not properly clickable making it impossible to at least then select 1080p. The mouse does not align with the options making it impossible to select any option and I cannot click on the resolutions lower down the list once I manage to guess where to click somewhere outside what is supposed to be the clickable area due to misalignment of the mouse cursor. I have no idea why at lower resolutions that the mouse cursor still does not align properly with the menu options and allow me to actually click on the things I point at in the menu. It means that no matter what resolution I select in windowed mode where the mouse cursor alignment works fine and everything is clickable, when I go full screen it all becomes misaligned again and at an ugly resolution. I have tried everything I can think of and nothing solves this.

I have tried setting both my desktop and nvidia control panel to 1080p in both the PC and UHD,HD,SD parts of the resolution settings screen but still as soon as I launch ARM3 it reverts to 1650 X 1050 with the mouse cursor menu misalignment problem. I also tried googling this and found the following thread on these forums which gave me some custom resolution settings for the nvidia control panel (I can't link to it as I am newly registered here).

I tried the custom settings described there but they still don’t work and the game goes back to 1650 x 1050 with unclickable menus.

I have tried X-plane 10 and the same things happens. I got it to work temporarily at 1080p but none of the menu options were clickable once again as though the mouse cursor and the actual settings are misaligned meaning I cannot even select a flight in the startup screen unless I start in 4k.

Strangely enough so far Mafia 2 is the only game that worked absolutely fine with both 4k and 1080p resolutions easily selectable in the menu with no mouse cursor menu misalignment issues except when I switched in game from 4k to 1080p I got a big black box around my screen essentially shrinking my screen to display 1080p.

Can anyone please advise me where I am going wrong? I am completely lost that my PS4 works fine at 1080p but fairly new PC game menus won’t work properly at standard HD resolutions. I also can’t believe that my 4K tv won’t let me play at 1080p with normal menus especially as Mafia 2 works mostly fine.

After spending all this cash, I am understandably a little frustrated that I can’t even play at 1080p in newish games. :bang:***61516;

Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions.

 

Make sure you have the TV picture options set to "fit to screen". I have the Sony XBR65x850b (4k) and this setting makes quite the difference. I am not sure 1 970 will rock 4k properly. But make sure your PC sets the tv as main monitor @ 3180x2160 60hz. Also make sure that you plug in the HDMI cord into the proper port on TV as well. Mine has 2 regular and two with MHL, plug it into the MHL/HDMI ports.

 

Thanks for the advice. I managed to fix it using your fit to screen suggestion and also I think that by change my DPI settings in windows to make the icons bigger, this was also somehow messing up my in game menus making them misalign with the mouse cursor. Now all works good. The only downside is that to use Windows in 4K I will have to use the smaller DPI settings (meaning text and icons are very small) or to keep changing these back and forth which means logging off and on again each time.

Thanks for your help. I appreciate it.

 

Sweet buddy! Glad I could help!

 

My issue with 4K is that a lot of games (AC Unity for example), if I run lower than the TV's native res (which is what my desktop is set to), it just results in a small screen surrounded by a large black box.

Other games if I lower the resolution it just scales to fit the screen.

The way I've gotten around this is to just use my HDMI connection over displayport (displayport won't let me set 1080P resolution, only higher res).

This has nothing to do with my TV's scaling options, because as far as the TV is concerned that black box is part of the picture being broadcast by the PC.

 

I believe there is a scaling option in the Nvidia CP, see if switching between them helps.

 

So just in case anyone else ran into the same, I had been using displayport to do 4K for quite awhile to my PC from my TV. The issue is games like AC Unity for example, are not possible to run at acceptable FPS @ 4K with my 980.

So I set the res to 1440p, only to get black bars around the picture. It doesn't scale. Finally I decided to try out HDMI 2.0 to my TV... low and behold the nvidia scaling options are no longer disabled, and any game I play regardless of res will upscale to fit the TV perfectly (and my desktop is at the native 4K res).

It seems displayport is rather under-developed in the nvidia drivers vs HDMI, which I suppose makes sense...

 

I'm curious if the Sony X9005b is a true 60hz display @ 4K resolution? Is it?

I play Arma 3 also on a 37" 1080p HDTV and performance is OK with AA off. I believe you really need to get another card with CFX or SLI to really push that amount of pixels even with AA off.

 

Hey Valken,

I have the XBR65850B (4K) set, and I am getting a 60hz signal @4k. My 1080p signal goes up 240hz, then Sony's proprietary frame maker kicks in up to and beyond 480hz. Although I haven't tried it yet, it says it can do 4K 3D assuming at or above 120hz.

 

There's no optiion in the game menu ? this is something who seems particular to game settings.. ( full screen borderless or windowed borderless )

 

Awesome to know. I am waiting for 4K 60 Hz minimum before my next monitor/gpu upgrade so thanks for this.

4K 3D!! Wow!!

 

Hey VolkNasty,
I was hoping you could help me out? I'm trying to get 4k @ 60hz and have the same X850B model as you... I am only able to get it to display 4k at 30 hz. I've heard a lot of talk that the earlier model (x850A) can display at 60hz but the X850b has a cheaper chipset and is unable.

Could you tell me what settings you are using to make this possible?

Thanks!

 

Right-clicking on the .exe for individual games (& other programs) that are having the pointer misalignment issue & checking-off ‘Disable display scaling on high DPI settings’ in Properties under Compatibility¹ works too (for me at least, in Windows 7). That way you don’t need to change your overall DPI for Windows.

¹ as per Solution found in this thread: steamcommunity.com / app / 233450 / discussions / 0 / 35219681600074414 (<--- source URL w/ spaces added as my post-count here is not 10 so I’m not allowed to hyperlink)

 

I can't speak to your model, but on my Vizio 43" unit, only 1 special HDMI port will do 4K/60hz, all the others can only do 4k/30hz. Perhaps try the other ports?

Also, you may check your monitor's settings in windows. (Display settings>Advanced...) I know my 144hz monitor defaults to 60hz desktop and I seem to recall my 4Ktv defaulting to 30hz.

 

I ran into this same issue when I recently went to a Vizio D40u-D1 40" 4K as my pc monitor. Display port to HDMI cable would not do 4K (yes plugged into the correct port, HDMI-5 on the TV). Switched to a HDMI cable and worked fine.

Sam