I've been eyeing 4K anxiously since I built my new machine, the monitors are coming down a lot.  4K TV's are so affordable now, that the next time I need to buy a TV it will undoubtedly be 4K.  I have a single GTX980 and the somewhat ridiculously overpowered i7-5930k (in retrospect I probably should have bought the cheaper one), so it'd be nice to have a more appropriate monitor.  I'm going to be finishing up my PhD in 2015, so unfortunately the imminent huge life transitions are scaring me out of spending money right now.

I will say this though: the transition to either 4K or Oculus Rift will require an absurd level of computing power to maintain the level of graphical detail I get at 1080p.  Even with my GTX980, I sometimes get less that 60fps on Far Cry 4 for brief periods, and it runs slow enough that I never need vsync (that's with everything maxed out and using nVidia's proprietary voodoo).  Certainly I'd have to make some sort of sacrifice to run that game in 4K.  I don't really think this is a matter of poor optimization, the graphics just look so crazy I suspect they really do take a lot of cranking.  I suspect this may often be the case with other games, and this is for the fastest card on the market right now (although it seems designed to be the second fastest card in the market, I'm sure nVidia will release a more enthusiast version of it soon).  So, if you really want to push things to the limit on 4K, you probably need 2 cards.  

Oculus Rift will be much, much tougher.  The calculations of pixel values are not independent, so if you have twice the pixels, it will take less than twice the computational power.  But for Oculus, you'll need 90fps.  That's 3/2 the computational power (because frames are essentially independent).  That's just crazy.

Microsoft has claimed that DirectX 12 will bring us the kind of efficiency that consoles have enjoyed.  (This is why, graphically, your PC is not to a console what the console is to a cell phone, even though in raw computational power it is about that far ahead.)  If Microsoft's claim is even half true, it will solve a lot of problems.  (Though they may not enjoy showing people how inferior the XBone really is...)

By the way (and to try to answer a specific question rather than babbling on mindlessly), you will need 2 cards to play SC at 4K on max settings, period.  (They have a lot of work left to do on that front though, god, doesn't the default AA method look TERRIBLE?)

I currently have a A10-7860k with a R7-250 running in dual mode. It does a decent job in everything that I have played so far except Star Citizen that game makes my machine look like a 10yr old rig 🙂 I have been looking at the new 980's but I wanted to see if AMD R9 380/390 are going to be worth it? They are not going to come out until I think first quarter next year, which I think is a mistake on AMD part since Nvidia is taking advantage of being king of the hill. Yeah AMD technically is if you buy the R9-295X but those are $1000 and to most gamers that is untouchable.

I have thought about the Oculus and it looks to be an amazing piece of hardware, but I think that thing is going to need at least a year of patches/firmware updates to be a solid performer. I know for me personally I get headaches watching 3D movies so who knows if I will even buy one at all... money might be better spent on buying 3 4k monitors 🙂 heh

In the end I was hoping that AMD was going to work harder on pumping out good drivers for the 7850k or see if they can up the dual mode on the chip to support a R7 270,280 or 290 instead of only the 240 and 250 cards.

Not to show off my nVidia bias too much, AMD has been doing quite well with cards lately, and up until recently the R9 290X was definitely the card to buy, but I sort of have a bad feeling they will start to fall farther behind again.  Oh don't get me wrong, I'm sure they'll release something slightly faster than the stock GTX980 soon, but nVidia will have a very easy time of building a much crazier version of the 980.  One thing to pay attention to is the temperatures.  The AMD cards run very, very hot, like 92C hot.  On the other hand, even with the stock cooler I max out slightly above 80C on the 980, and if I had waited for a better cooler like I should have it would probably run as low as 70C.  It might seem like a trivial concern, but even if you're not uncomfortable running your card so hot, it has big implications for overclocking, and you can really squeeze out a lot of framerate by overclocking graphics cards.  You can get the 970 up to 980 performance, so I can probably get a much bigger margin on the R9 290X than I get from stock speeds, when the time comes.

Right now it looks like the GTX970 will be the best deal for a while, unless AMD runs into problems matching Maxwell, in which case they'll probably drop prices to compensate.

That's why I have been looking at the 970 and 980 cards from Nvidia because they both can do 4k with decent framerates (all above 30+) and I am attracted to the low heat and noise level as well. But supposedly AMD should be using a new die process on the 380/390 so it should require less voltage so we'll see. I know its always been a back and forth game and right now I give it to Nvidia because they have come out with a release that has gone unanswered for almost 6 months now and AMD is loosing ground so whatever they are building better be a jaw dropper or I might tarnish my full AMD build with a Nvidia card 🙂

Also think I have been hearing that AMD is going to ship a lot of gamer cards (more on the high end) with water coolers. I know I have water cooling on my CPU and love it and if I had one for gfx my system would be super silent.

ExpandingMan do you have SC loaded up how does the hanger and demo play on that 980?

SC runs perfectly on the GTX980 on max settings at 1080p, at a solid 60fps (actually not sure if there is a cap, they don't let you customize the graphics options much yet).  

Even though SC definitely qualifies as "fullblown cryengine craziness" (my term), I'm actually a bit disappointed in the graphics right now, although I think it is safe to assume that they haven't done much work on graphical polish yet.  They have some enormous technical challenges remaining that involve completely ripping apart the engine, especially going to double precision and overcoming whatever other issues will inevitably come along with building environments so large that they require double precision.  The anti-aliasing in particular looks like crap right now (I don't know which method they are using).  You get a ton of flickering.  I'm not really sure how much of this is a result of having such detailed textures and geometry, or the AA methods not playing nice with other post-processing effects that are going on, but it badly needs an overhaul.  I have also seen some really, really impressive lighting in some new games lately, particularly Far Cry 4 and Alien Isolation.  Whether it is the lighting itself, materials, ambient occlusion or a combination of all of these that makes it look so impressive, I'm not really sure, when it looks that pretty you don't really feel like messing around with lower settings.  Certainly volumetric lighting has come a long way, and shadows look completely real.  Anyway, I haven't seen CryEngine quite match the lighting quality yet.  Right now Dunia looks like the next iteration of CryEngine.

Still very anxious to see more Unreal 4 stuff.  They say they have some very impressive tech.  Wish devs were quicker to adopt it.  

From what I've seen of 4k, there's really not much difference. It just looks a little sharper than 1080. If it does turn out to be better, I think we will see it a few years down the road. Right now its still to early. The tech needs time to grow.