1080p Ultrawide vs 1440p, pros and cons?

[Gall Cohen]

Hey guys, I am planning on buying a new monitor soon, I am debating whether to get a 29" 1080p Ultrawide or a 25"-27" 1440p monitor, both will be 60 Hz and IPS.

I am using my computer for internet, a lot of videos(youtube,tv shows,movies), studying and gaming(corrently on a gtx 670 but I will prob get a Pascal GPU when they come out).

All the threads I found through google are quite dated and I wanted a fresh, current opinion.

Which screen would you go for and why?

Thanks!

[Tylerebowers]

1080p as an ultra wide is UGLY

[Memories4K]

Get a 27" 1440p 16:9 display. You'll be happier

 

[Krzych]

2560x1080 is easier do drive and of course it is 21:9 that is great for many movies and games, but other than that, 1440p display obviously gives much sharper and better quality picture, and if web browsing, watching tv shows and youtube takes most of your time, you won't benefit from 21:9 aspect ratio. 

 

As long as you compare 1080p vs 1080p and 1440p vs 1440p obviously ultrawide is better, but standard 1440p vs 1080p ultrawide... I experienced both upgrades, from 1080p to 1440p and then from 16:9 to 21:9, and I would have very very hard time to choose between expanding 1080p to 21:9 or upgrading to 16:9 1440p. For games upgrade to 21:9 makes better impression than upgrading resolution, and it is easier to run, but if you are not enthusiast of immersive gaming experience and you spend most of time outside games, probably resolution upgrade is better.

[VZX]

1440p would suffice.

2560x1080 is weird, If you want some screen real estate, you should pick 3440x1440 instead.

Buying an Ultrawide just for watching movies and gaming is not worth it.

[LRC350]

Depending on your budget you should try to go for a 1440p, but it also depends what kind of hardware you have to drive the monitor. 1080P would be definitely easier to run especially at higher refresh rates. Also don't go with a 27 inch 1080P monitor, imo its ugly

[Gall Cohen]

Thanks everyone!

I will go for the 1440p as it is more useful anywhere but gaming(which still some would argue that 1440p over ultrawide will be better)

[Krzych]

13 hours ago, VZX said:

Buying an Ultrawide just for watching movies and gaming is not worth it.

I would rather say that ultrawide is not worth it if you don't play games and don't watch movies. Those are two major things where you benefit from 21:9 aside from productivity. Gaming itself is enough to justify ultrawide.

[VZX]

9 hours ago, Krzych said:

I would rather say that ultrawide is not worth it if you don't play games and don't watch movies. Those are two major things where you benefit from 21:9 aside from productivity. Gaming itself is enough to justify ultrawide.

Gaming will benefit a lot more from higher refresh rate over the uncommon 21:9 aspect ratio.

It's great to game on 21:9 but not the top factor why you want to pick 21:9 for gaming.

[nightmarevoid]

I'm currently running an asus 1080P ultrawide and here was my reasoning:

The 1080P resolution means that older games and such will have an easier time scaling to it. Also, my system is relatively underpowered for 1440P (gtx 780 3GB) and By going 1080P vertical I would still be able to play new titles at max graphics and a good frame rate. Finally, I only had a limited space, and ultrawides tend to take up a lot of it. with a smaller monitor and a higher resolution, text would also be smaller, and I just don't think windows scales well enough over 1080P to make the monitor usable for productivity. So I use an ultrawide 1080P monitor because I can still game without buying a new graphics card, I can read text better, it fits better for smaller monitors, and I can still snap lots of windows side by side for working on science labs.

Of course, your circumstances will be different from mine, and perhaps you could get a larger monitor to make it more viable, but I hope my input helps.

[DH]

17 hours ago, Gall Cohen said:

Thanks everyone!

I will go for the 1440p as it is more useful anywhere but gaming(which still some would argue that 1440p over ultrawide will be better)

Are you sure the graphics card can handle 1440p

[Krzych]

10 hours ago, VZX said:

Gaming will benefit a lot more from higher refresh rate over the uncommon 21:9 aspect ratio.

It's great to game on 21:9 but not the top factor why you want to pick 21:9 for gaming.

Saying that gaming in general will benefit from higher resfresh rate than from 21:9 is misconception. There are different games and different styles of playing. For fast peaced competitive games like FPS or racing games, surely high refresh rate gives more than 21:9, especially in FPS games where you are focused very mostly in center of the screen and there is no point of wider view in most cases, but for exploration games, RPGs like Witcher 3, or any story focused games with well designed worlds, that are usually demanding graphically and cannot be driven at high frame rates, 21:9 gives much more than resfresh rate that won't give any significant improvement is such games.

 

Generally there is common misconception going around that gaming are shooters and nothing else. All of gaming monitors are advertising themselves with features for FPS games, people keep throwing rubbish in forum threads that gaming=144 Hz 1ms and everything else is bad... and etc. There are a lot of gamers that value visual quality, game quality and storyline over some primitive shooters, you cannot generalize that gaming is high resfresh rate and period. This is why Nvidia lost me as customer, because FreeSync is not only much cheaper, but also has various monitors to offer, while G-sync ones are strictly FPS gaming oriented, terribly overpriced, and if it wasn't enough, they are produced by very poor manufacturers with zero quality control. 

[byalexandr]

On 4/30/2016 at 0:22 PM, Tyleredbowers said:

1080p as an ultra wide is UGLY

Very pretty actually, my mom got one and it's really nice to look at.

 

http://www.brandsmartusa.com/images/product/addl/large/22670.jpg