How to handle 4K levels design?

Development World Creation
1

Hello,

I’m finally putting my hands on Unreal Engine, and Game Dev in general, and I noticed Unreal Engine by default sets the screen size to 1920x1080, and I’m a bit confused about this.

If the player has a 2K or 4K monitor and sets the resolution to their native ratio, will Unreal just Stretch the original one to that? Or the game must be designed for 4K and UE will handle resizing it to the ones with lesser pixels?

Also, if the HUD is to be created in 4K, and we suppose UE will resize it to a FHD screen, will this affect the processing time and result in a slower frame rate? Let alone if the GPU isn’t high end, then how could it render 4K then resize it, and still make it playable?

I just need some clarification how to handle this to continue with the right HUD dimensions. I appreciate any input that can help get me on my feet on this.

2

There’s an in-game resolution, usually you want that to match what the users monitor resolution is, if it’s lower than the monitor resolution then it’ll usually stretch to fit.
Higher resolutions will always take more processing power to render.

As for your game UI it would be best to target 1080p resolution as the default, but keep in mind that some users might have 4K or they might just want to change the UI size, so you could have the option of switching to UI elements that are 2x, 3x, or 4x bigger. For example, if you run a game at 4K then the image resolution of the UI elements would need to be 4x bigger than they were at 1080p.

3

Exactly what I’m talking about.

I tried 4K for my daily routines and got a very bad eyestrain, so I’m settled on a 2K Dell one, and I tried to manually stretch a 1080 HUD I made as a PNG to my full screen just to see how it looks, and it didn’t look that clean, it seemed more grayed or something, I just can’t explain it, and I’m not saying it seemed choppy or broken, just felt like an old VHS tape.

I’ll try to see if sticking to 1080 would be okay on the long run.

Thanks for passing by, you’ve just assured me, I should just stick to 1080, since any higher will consume more resources anyway. My PC is high end, but I don’t want to create something that only similar rigs can run.