4k or 1440p?

[Massconspiracy]

I am about to go and pick up my new gtx 1080 and i want to also buy a new screen. I have a cheap 1080p screen at the moment and im not to sure if i should get a 4k screen or a 3440x1440p ultrawide 34 inch curved screen. I like the size of the ultrawide but the quality of 4k would be great aswell. It is mainly just going to be used for gaming.

[UL_42L]

As far as I know, a lot of people really like ultrawide. 4k would be good as well. Since the card can handle either just fine (from what I would infer), it's up to your preference.

[DarkEnergy]

I guess it depends on what you're doing. If you do 4k, get a nice large monitor. An ultrawide looks nice but you could run into problems such as finding a wallpaper (not that big a deal) or game recording (If you want to upload to YouTube, I would assume it won't match youtube's player very well). Another thing is that some games might look weird on a ultrawide. 

[vanished]

I like the idea of ultra-wides personally but I would worry about support since they're a fairly non-standard aspect still, and another benefit to 4K is you can always just run things at 1080p and get  close to the same quality you would with a 1080p monitor, if you have to.  Not sure the same would work well with ultrawide.

[Apathetik]

Not sure what kind of games you play. This may be completely irrelevant to you. But, with the improvements to Nvidia Surround gaming that Pascal provides. It might also be worth considering if you would be interested in going to a surround setup in the future. The 1080 is a really good card, yeah. But I have to imagine that even it would struggle to draw out to 3 4k monitors in a surround setup with high/very high settings in a lot of games. 

[Badger906]

I recently moved from a 28" 4k display to a 34" 3440x1440 ultra wide.. let's just say I don't miss my 4k display at all!! 

[Massconspiracy]

54 minutes ago, Badger906 said:

I recently moved from a 28" 4k display to a 34" 3440x1440 ultra wide.. let's just say I don't miss my 4k display at all!! 

Thanks mate.  Helps heaps.  How much differance do you notice between 1080p and 1440p?

[rowanhazard]

1 hour ago, Massconspiracy said:

Thanks mate.  Helps heaps.  How much differance do you notice between 1080p and 1440p?

Its a giant difference

[Mira Yurizaki]

7 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I like the idea of ultra-wides personally but I would worry about support since they're a fairly non-standard aspect still, and another benefit to 4K is you can always just run things at 1080p and get  close to the same quality you would with a 1080p monitor, if you have to.  Not sure the same would work well with ultrawide.

You can always tell the graphics card to do the scaling and retain the original aspect ratio, that way games that don't play nice with 21:9, you can select a 16:9 resolution without distortion.

[vanished]

2 hours ago, M.Yurizaki said:

You can always tell the graphics card to do the scaling and retain the original aspect ratio, that way games that don't play nice with 21:9, you can select a 16:9 resolution without distortion.

That's true, but then you're basically at 1440p... and maybe that's good, but I like the drastic option of dropping to 1080p for some reason

[Badger906]

8 hours ago, Massconspiracy said:

Thanks mate.  Helps heaps.  How much differance do you notice between 1080p and 1440p?

from 1080p to 1440p is a giant difference, from 4k to 1440p is not so much... well not enough I'm willing to admit to lol

[CostcoSamples]

I'm in the same boat and just waiting to see if any high refresh rate 4k displays get announced next week at Computex 2016.  If nothing interesting comes up, I'm thinking 27" 1440p, 144hz will be the best overall performance at this point.

 

I mean, for sure 4k is better, but not if you have to run at 60hz.  I also think 27" is too small for 4k.  I would be much more interested in 4k at 32" or larger.

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 hours ago, CostcoSamples said:

I also think 27" is too small for 4k.  I would be much more interested in 4k at 32" or larger.

This argument depends on one thing: do you want pixel resolution or screen size to determine how much real estate you want? Even at 32", 4K is 132 PPI, which may require 125% scaling. If you want 96 PPI, which is where 100% scaling is measured from, you'll need a 46" 4K monitor. Though 40" might cut it. The thing is though, if your monitor is so big that you have to move your head around a lot, that's bad for ergonomics.

 

But I have two arguments for scaling up rather than going bigger in size:

• A lot of modern Windows apps properly scale. Even if the app doesn't scale, Windows just interpolates it. So yeah, it'll look a bit blurry, but I've had no real issue with it.
• You can use a lower resolution without noticing interpolation artifacts all that much in games. I game at 1440p on my 4K monitor all the time and it looks practically the same as my native 1440p monitor.

[CostcoSamples]

17 hours ago, M.Yurizaki said:

This argument depends on one thing: do you want pixel resolution or screen size to determine how much real estate you want? Even at 32", 4K is 132 PPI, which may require 125% scaling. If you want 96 PPI, which is where 100% scaling is measured from, you'll need a 46" 4K monitor. Though 40" might cut it. The thing is though, if your monitor is so big that you have to move your head around a lot, that's bad for ergonomics.

 

But I have two arguments for scaling up rather than going bigger in size:

• A lot of modern Windows apps properly scale. Even if the app doesn't scale, Windows just interpolates it. So yeah, it'll look a bit blurry, but I've had no real issue with it.
• You can use a lower resolution without noticing interpolation artifacts all that much in games. I game at 1440p on my 4K monitor all the time and it looks practically the same as my native 1440p monitor.

 

17 hours ago, M.Yurizaki said:

This argument depends on one thing: do you want pixel resolution or screen size to determine how much real estate you want? Even at 32", 4K is 132 PPI, which may require 125% scaling. If you want 96 PPI, which is where 100% scaling is measured from, you'll need a 46" 4K monitor. Though 40" might cut it. The thing is though, if your monitor is so big that you have to move your head around a lot, that's bad for ergonomics.

 

But I have two arguments for scaling up rather than going bigger in size:

• A lot of modern Windows apps properly scale. Even if the app doesn't scale, Windows just interpolates it. So yeah, it'll look a bit blurry, but I've had no real issue with it.
• You can use a lower resolution without noticing interpolation artifacts all that much in games. I game at 1440p on my 4K monitor all the time and it looks practically the same as my native 1440p monitor.

So do you think that 27" - 28" is the best size?  It does seem to be the most popular size right now.  But a lot of people really like the 40" 4k Korean monitors for the extra real estate.  

[themctipers]

48 minutes ago, CostcoSamples said:

 

So do you think that 27" - 28" is the best size?  It does seem to be the most popular size right now.  But a lot of people really like the 40" 4k Korean monitors for the extra real estate.  

I've really enjoyed the time I used a 40" 4k

monitor. I use my screen for a lot of apps at the same time and just not needing to alt tab and having it all on one screen has been very helpful. 

But now I'm on a 27" 1080p screen and I'm needing another monitor to put apps on.