Today, I sat browsing at monitors and thinking about the future of design. Then, it suddenly hit me that the market for 4k resolution screens is still fairly stagnant. There are many reasons why the market has yet to boom, but with all the technology we have available, it is incredibly difficult for me to understand why some are still skeptical about 4k resolutions coming to PC.

As an avid gamer, all I’ve ever experienced in the PC gaming world has been in increase in resolution, texture quality, processing power, memory, and so on. So why should we consider stopping at 1080p resolution? Most people would agree that 1080p can look better, and want better. Moreover, high resolution displays are not even new to the market. Back in 2001, for example, IBM introduced a 4k monitor. You may be asking yourself : “Well then, what’s going to make 4k monitors boom nearly 13 years later?” The answer is rather simple: the efficient manufacturing practices, hardware to support the resolution, and affordable pricing.

For one, AMD announced earlier this year a dual GPU graphics card. That translates to double the power in the same amount of space. SLI two cards, and you got yourself 4 GPUs! If you’re a computer geek like myself, you’ll probably drool at the thought of quad SLI with dual GPU cards. Hell, even if you’re a scientist or Bitcoin miner, the idea is mesmerizing. So clearly, the graphic processing power needed for 4k resolution is here — even for gaming.

Secondly, as I mentioned earlier, the adoption of mobile devices with high-density pixel screens has already boomed. As we bring the PC, tablet, and phone closer to each other, there will little reason for all the devices to keep separate resolutions. Besides, computer programers and designers-alike inherently lazy creatures (I do not mean this in a bad way) — we create libraries, reusable classes, and frameworks to keep us from spending hours, upon hours, having to recreate what’s already been done. We are also moving towards open information with services like Github and Codepen, as well as reusable systems in general.

But, lets pretend that both of those points a null or invalid. It’s impossible to deny there has been a greater adoption of higher resolution screens in the last decade. What we have struggled with in the past was not the ability to manufacture 4k monitors, it was the ability for computer hardware to support it and production practices that made it affordable — and we’ve made it!

Where does it stop?

If 2014 is about 4k, then what about 2015? Will it be 8k or even 16k? It’s very possible — as long as the hardware support exists, I am predicting an upward trend in resolution.

The stopping point will most likely to come when we have successfully mirrored reality. At that point, I am not even sure we will use pixels as reference. We may end up describing “monitors” with a measurement much small than a pixel. Something closer to nature — the atom.