The *complete* list of 8K monitors

[rafale77]

In other words, no.

I'm not quite sure why you think this is relevant in a thread about 8K UHD monitors. 8K UHD 60Hz has been supported since M2+ Pro/Max/Ultra and M4+. Pro Display XDR runs on 2019 Thunderbolt 3 Apple hardware, not to mention all M1+.

Agree: Processing power on the macs are not an issue and is not a technoiogy challenge and more of a solution availability problem. The signal transmission really is getting to the edge of what is available at the moment. 6K/60Hz is already at the limit of TB4 bandwidth. 8K/60Hz and beyond really needs TB5/HDMI2.2 if using a single cable.

The benefit of high DPI depends a lot on the application and the working distance from the display and there is unquestionable benefit for a lot of use cases.

 

[leifp]

There are other display problems besides UI space. It would be nice if there were Retina-class screens larger than 32" -- but I find it a bit difficult to feel sorry for people complaining about no Retina ultra-wides when that sector is flooded with good options these days, like the Dell 52" ultra-wide 6K.

Not sure what you mean by "pixel peeping" -- I mean, look at the world around you and the colors in it, then look at your screen. There is a *lot* of room for improvement.

The six-page Tom's Hardware review of the ASUS may have said it best: "An 8K picture is something that needs to be seen to be understood. […] The PA32KCX has many positive attributes that include a phenomenal pixel density of 275 ppi. That means you won’t be able to see the dot structure in any circumstance."

Colors and gradients in imagery and art have qualities that even Liquid Retina (264+ ppi) will struggle with, not to mention standard Retina (218+ ppi). You can't see the dot structure, but you can see its effect.

As best I can find right now (I may have missed something), Apple has six current classes of Retina:

Retina (LCD)
Liquid Retina (LCD)
Retina XDR (LCD + mini-LED)
Liquid Retina XDR (LCD + mini-LED)
Super Retina XDR (OLED)
Ultra Retina XDR (Tandem OLED)

This is going to grow out of control. Apologies.

My pixel peeping comment is specific to a 32” 8K monitor. Anything beyond 220 ppi is of no use to me. I cannot see the difference. Can I tell panel quality? Oh yes. Do I think there’s a lot of air up there for improvement? Hell yes. Do I want a 40” 8K monitor? Sure do! But use case matters. Nothing in isolation.

What is offered is 32” 8K and that is nothing but negative for me. No visual improvement that I can actually see vs 6K at identical size (on macOS), much higher price, much larger hit on the GPU. The fascination with numbers out of context is a bugbear. 8K doesn’t mean anything without context. I don’t even need 8K per se! My historical use case for it, however is how well it scales lower resolutions: anything upscaled from old standards has ideal scaling ratios (rather than fractions):

4K is 2x, 1440p is 3x, 1080p is 4x, 720p is 6x. 480i breaks down because it’s a different aspect ratio created for a different technology and is interlaced, as the i denotes. But it’s VGA with 640x480 and using only horizontal scaling we get 12x.

And thus for game enjoyment and development 8K is ideal +/- to play scaled content. But that is so niche as to inherently not support a market. And now we’re talking Windows rather than macOS, typically.

At some point pixels will be the low hanging fruit and increasing resolution will be its own victory. At the moment, colour accuracy and gamut, luminance (in all of its facets), speed (Hz, GtG, plenty of other aspects), and contrast matter infinitely more than moving from 220 ppi to anything higher. What does pushing pixel density past “retina” mean? Reduced moiré. Not nothing, but I’ll stop there. This response is already unwieldy and may have pushed well past my point.

 

[leifp]

In other words, no.

I'm not quite sure why you think this is relevant in a thread about 8K UHD monitors. 8K UHD 60Hz has been supported since M2+ Pro/Max/Ultra and M4+. Pro Display XDR runs on 2019 Thunderbolt 3 Apple hardware, not to mention all M1+.

I apologize. I was just thinking that this got sidetracked from the point of this thread before reading your response. If you would like, I can remove my posts.

 

[thenewepic]

The signal transmission really is getting to the edge of what is available at the moment. 6K/60Hz is already at the limit of TB4 bandwidth. 8K/60Hz and beyond really needs TB5/HDMI2.2 if using a single cable

that's not true. DP1.4/TB4 can handle 6K@120, let alone 8K@60 (with DSC). Of course, DP2.1/TB5 would be needed for 8K@120. But all modern GPUs already support DP2.1. So I'm sure the reason we currently don't have 8K@120 monitors (or even 8K@60) is not in the interfaces or GPUs.
For example, it was only in 2026 that 5K@165/6K@120 monitors began to appear on the market, despite the fact that GPUs with support of these resolutions had arrived a few years ago, no later than 2023.

 

[StevenJobsJr]

I have no interest in doing so. As mentioned, 6K exceeds my ability to see the pixels and it makes the system work very hard indeed just to display those invisible dots. And costs way more. IF you can tell the difference, and it matters to you, and you can afford the prices, have at it. But I’m not even remotely interested in exceeding somewhere in the neighbourhood of 220 ppi (Retina in Applespeak). And I’m certainly not willing to pay for it.

Now, having the display be tandem OLED… or if Apple backs off its horse (Windows has a magnificent OS-level display tech that Apple used to license and the 42” 4K OLED on my gaming PC is eminently useable, which I cannot say about my 32” 4K on my Mac) and that opens up so many good display options that are firewalled behind Retina…

Windows just have better font and display management period. It's one of the few things that OS does well, and it does it very well. I also have a 42" 4K oled on my gaming PC and it's specular. It looks like crap on my mac.

 

[tenthousandthings]

Windows just have better font and display management period. It's one of the few things that OS does well, and it does it very well. I also have a 42" 4K oled on my gaming PC and it's specular. It looks like crap on my mac.

Credit where credit's due. Here's what @waydabber says about it:

"Also important to note that HiDPI rendering for low PPI screens will not make text look any sharper on macOS - for that another technique, subpixel rendering would be needed (this takes into account the red, green and blue subpixel structure of an LCD screen to effectively triple the physical resolution and with some clever tricks render fonts in a way that looks more pleasing - and feels sharper - to the eye). This was removed from macOS a while back after Apple transitioned its own product line to high PPI displays (subpixel rendering is fundamentally incompatible with fractional bitmap scaling which is the cornerstone of Apple's current approach with macOS - subpixel rendered structures do not survive raster scaling - so the removal should be understood in this light, not as something sinister on Apple's part). This is why text does not look as nice with low PPI displays on macOS like it does on Windows or Linux (modern Windows apps and in a large part the Windows desktop in general is vector based which is actually superior to how macOS does things - but it in return it wasn't an easy thing to implement it with all that legacy code - it took Microsoft years and multiple iterations - riddled with horrible user experience - with their approach to get to where Apple jumped in under a year with the raster scaling method in terms of resolution independence)."

 

[rafale77]

that's not true. DP1.4/TB4 can handle 6K@120, let alone 8K@60 (with DSC). Of course, DP2.1/TB5 would be needed for 8K@120. But all modern GPUs already support DP2.1. So I'm sure the reason we currently don't have 8K@120 monitors (or even 8K@60) is not in the interfaces or GPUs.
For example, it was only in 2026 that 5K@165/6K@120 monitors began to appear on the market, despite the fact that GPUs with support of these resolutions had arrived a few years ago, no later than 2023.

Not from raw calculation and assuming 10bit signal. Try this calculator: https://trychen.com/feature/video-bandwidth

6K120 requires DP2.1 and TB5 just as 8K60. Heck my TB4 cable struggle already with connection inconsistencies with 6K60 and even 5Kx2K 120Hz.

 

[thenewepic]

Not from raw calculation and assuming 10bit signal

with DSC this is not a problem. And since all modern GPUs and monitors use DSC by default I don't understand why are you talking about those imaginary "limits".