Resolution Game Play

[Yankee_LT]

I always had this question but never have asked it. Even though you might have a top rig for gaming, is it always best to run your games at 1920x1080? I have been running my games at a MUCH higher res with a refresh rate of 1440. So where is the "Sweet" spot for running your games at a high frame rate while keeping a great looking?

Thank you.

 

[KeyboardDemon]

This thread is nearly 1 year old and clearly nobody has responded despite it recording 292 views.

It just came up in my feed as a related topic to a thread I was looking at so I thought I would revive this as it is a subject that interests me. The original post was also made around the time that I was building my current PC for reasons that are related to the question, as in, playing at a higher resolution on a faster refresh rate monitor.

First, around 67.60% (a year-on-year increase of 0.25%) of gamers play at 1920x1080 according to the latest hardware survey carried out by Steam in April 2021. 2560x1440 was the second most popular resolution with 8.23% which is up 0.22% from the previous year.

1080p is a good resolution to play on a native 1080p up to 24" in size, but after that, the pixel size and pixel density make that resolution look more pixelated and this will require running higher levels of Anti-Aliasing in order to improve the image quality.

1440p displays key advantages are that the pixel count increases and the pixel size decreases, which means you will have greater pixel density. What this means is that there is less of a need to use Anti-Aliasing to combat issues such as jagged diagonal lines and that frees up GPU resources that can then be put towards generating more frames.

So to answer the question:

Even though you might have a top rig for gaming, is it always best to run your games at 1920x1080?

First, it is always best to run your PC at the native resolution of your monitor, this means that if your monitor only supports 1920x1080 then every pixel sent to your monitor will be displayed as intended, if your PC is running at a different resolution than the monitor then the image will need to be rescaled introducing artifacts and visual noise which produces a less than ideal output.

Second, if you have a higher resolution monitor but struggle to get a decent frame rate then you could adjust AA settings or even turn it off to increase frame rates, but also reducing overall quality settings, and turning off Ray Tracing can also help.

If your running a 4k monitor with 2160p resolution, it is exactly double 1080p, and 1080p will work and look just fine. Each 1080p pixel will use a 2x2 square of 4k pixels. In general, it is OK to use a lower resolution on a higher resolution monitor. Your GPU should be able to do a decent job on the conversion, but not quite perfect.

1080p scaled to 1440p might be playable but will be visually worse than 1080p native of the same size. Of course, 1440p is nicer if you have the GPU, but if you plan to render at 1080p you are better off with a 1080p monitor.

So where is the "Sweet" spot for running your games at a high frame rate while keeping a great looking?

The sweet spot, IMHO, will always be running at Native resolution and adjusting settings to increase frame rates or using DLSS 2.0 to help if your GPU supports it. But 1080p on a 1440p monitor can present an acceptable image quality as would 1080p on a 4k monitor, but only do this if your PC/GPU struggle to run at the higher native reolution.