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How to play 4K content over HDMI 2.0 with the NVidia GeForce GTX 960

If you want to experience 4K at 60 hz on your new 4K TV, there aren’t many options out there. A lot of PC and Mac’s can support playing 4K at 30 hz using HDMI 1.4 but you will need a newer graphics card like the NVidia GeForce GTX 960 in order to get 4K at 60 hz.

I purchased the NVidia GeForce GTX 960 easily through Amazon Prime and received it within a couple days.  The box contained a CD-ROM containing the nVidia drivers and small hex wrench.

I installed the NVidia GeForce GTX 960 on Asus Z97 Motherboard (the first motherboard that also supports USB 3.1 Gen 2 10 Gbs) on its first PCIe x16 slot.

Although the NVidia graphics card will output HDMI just by using the default drivers, in order to take advantage of the higher 4K at 60hz resolutions, you need to install the NVidia drivers that came on a CD-ROM bundled with the graphics card.

After the drivers are installed, you can right click the desktop to select NVidia’s display settings. From here you have a lot more visibility on your graphics and display setup compared to the default options you get from Windows.  Here you can see that you can select 4K resolutions at 60hz.

After setting 4K resolutions at the highest refresh rate, you can look at the other settings that the NVida Control Panel provides.

Playing at these resolutions over HDMI 2.0 with the Vizio M-Series 4K TV was wonderful to watch. However, getting to actually find 4K content that could take advantage of 60hz was a lot harder.

YouTube 4K videos while at X resolution, were mostly at 24 fps.

Most other video downloads that you can get are also not at 60hz. Windows video player doesn’t support many of the newer codecs that are needed for 4K video so you will need to download software like WonderShare.

This is one of the main advantages of using a PC to play 4K content- many 4K TV’s and media players don’t support these 4K formats. It’s easy to download the latest software to support different CODEC’s on a PC or Mac, but you don’t have that same flexibility on other products.  Here I could actually find and download 4K content at 60 fps.

Everything goes back though to having the right 4K content available which is scarce right now. Having a PC with 4K GPU and HDMI 2.0 provides a fat pipe to your 4K TV but now we need more content to fill it.

So until there is more true high quality 4K content out there to play on your Windows PC, you can enjoy the the default Windows background and marvel that it actually looks pretty damn good in 4K.