Is Watching a video at 1440p on a 1080p monitor the same concept and quality improvement as Resolution Scaling?

[Guest PhatRATTY]

Does it need to be exactly four times the pixels to work for videos (Fours pixels are combined to form one square pixel) Or does any resolution increase still have an effect however noticeable. Does it work at all?

[AlwaysFSX]

Don't think of it as resolution scaling like in a video game, the reason YouTube videos (for example) look better at higher resolution presets than 1080p is because of the higher data rate for frame information. 1080p is incredibly compressed and that's what leads to artifacting. 1440p and 4k are less restricted in that regard.

Edited July 10, 2021 by Spotty
Removed quote of deleted post

[wanderingfool2]

On 7/1/2021 at 11:53 AM, PhatRATTY said:

Does it need to be exactly four times the pixels to work for videos (Fours pixels are combined to form one square pixel) Or does any resolution increase still have an effect however noticeable. Does it work at all?

To answer your question in your title "is watching a video at 1440p on a 1080p monitor the same concept and quality improvement as Resolution Scaling" as directly as possible first.  No it doesn't.  However in practice choosing 1440p or 4k (even on a 1080p monitor) might be better (due to bitrate)

 

The slightly longer answer is it depends, on things like youtube 1440p and 4k work better since it's sending more information (just glancing over it...not 100% sure, but it seems it's about double the bitrate for 1440p vs 1080p).  So you will get quite a bit less macroblocking...and in theory each macroblock is a smaller size (so less noticeable).

 

Longer winded answer.  If you exclude something like youtube, which has quite the difference in bitrate...and were just consuming media that was 1080p vs 1440p then 1080p would win.   That's because pixels would match one to one.  With 1440p you can't easily scale down the image without overlapping some pixels.  One of  my 4k monitors for example is terrible when displaying 1440p, things look blurry (I have it scaled to 4k with the video card instead).  4k content on a 1080p is a bit different in that 4 pixels evenly go into 1 pixel (so in theory you might slightly benefit but only because 4k content is likely to be at a higher bitrate as 1080p content).   In practice though, most higher resolution videos have higher bitrates so likely would appear more crisp on a 1080p monitor...but it doesn't have to do with the fact it's 4k or 1440p...but rather that the bitrate is higher.  Actually that's where choosing 1440p (with a higher bitrate) can counteract the overlapping issue caused by a 1.333 reduction.  (You get the scaling issue, but each pixel is better defined)....it would depend how good the downscaling is (which in general is pretty good)

 

[RageTester]

It's a waste of bandwidth and might also lead to dropped frames. Pushing your graphics card to use more power for no reason.

[RejZoR]

It's more like NVIDIA's DSR or AMD's Virtual Super Resolution. You render or play content in higher resolution and output it to a smaller display. Generally that's pointless, but in case of games downscaling creates higher detail image on small or thin objects like leaves and fences or electrical wires hanging across electric poles. It also replaces anti-aliasing.

 

With videos, especially Youtube, it can help with sound quality as higher quality videos use higher bitrate audio and lower video compresion, resulting in better video image quality.

[The_russian]

1 hour ago, RejZoR said:

With videos, especially Youtube, it can help with sound quality as higher quality videos use higher bitrate audio

Not exactly relevant to the original question, but as far as I know that hasn’t been true since 2013. I didn’t find an official source for it but I remember looking into whether or not video quality affects audio quality for YouTube, and every source I found said the video and audio streams are handled independently so increasing video quality won’t improve audio quality.

[RejZoR]

18 minutes ago, The_russian said:

Not exactly relevant to the original question, but as far as I know that hasn’t been true since 2013. I didn’t find an official source for it but I remember looking into whether or not video quality affects audio quality for YouTube, and every source I found said the video and audio streams are handled independently so increasing video quality won’t improve audio quality.

Even if they are independent streams, it's expected 4K or 8K to also carry better audio quality. Otherwise it would be kinda stupid feeding this awesome whatever K video quality and giving it just 128kbps audio... Unless they changed that. But would again be silly since audio stream takes jus a tiny fraction of content size compared to video size.

[Guest PhatRATTY]

On 7/9/2021 at 11:33 PM, RageTester said:

It's a waste of bandwidth and might also lead to dropped frames. Pushing your graphics card to use more power for no reason.

Its a 3080

[Guest PhatRATTY]

On 7/9/2021 at 11:01 PM, wanderingfool2 said:

To answer your question in your title "is watching a video at 1440p on a 1080p monitor the same concept and quality improvement as Resolution Scaling" as directly as possible first.  No it doesn't.  However in practice choosing 1440p or 4k (even on a 1080p monitor) might be better (due to bitrate)

 

The slightly longer answer is it depends, on things like youtube 1440p and 4k work better since it's sending more information (just glancing over it...not 100% sure, but it seems it's about double the bitrate for 1440p vs 1080p).  So you will get quite a bit less macroblocking...and in theory each macroblock is a smaller size (so less noticeable).

 

Longer winded answer.  If you exclude something like youtube, which has quite the difference in bitrate...and were just consuming media that was 1080p vs 1440p then 1080p would win.   That's because pixels would match one to one.  With 1440p you can't easily scale down the image without overlapping some pixels.  One of  my 4k monitors for example is terrible when displaying 1440p, things look blurry (I have it scaled to 4k with the video card instead).  4k content on a 1080p is a bit different in that 4 pixels evenly go into 1 pixel (so in theory you might slightly benefit but only because 4k content is likely to be at a higher bitrate as 1080p content).   In practice though, most higher resolution videos have higher bitrates so likely would appear more crisp on a 1080p monitor...but it doesn't have to do with the fact it's 4k or 1440p...but rather that the bitrate is higher.  Actually that's where choosing 1440p (with a higher bitrate) can counteract the overlapping issue caused by a 1.333 reduction.  (You get the scaling issue, but each pixel is better defined)....it would depend how good the downscaling is (which in general is pretty good)

 

Great! this question was mainly to determine whether to upload 1080p videos to YouTube as 1440p (secondarily it was also for my own viewing) So I guess I was right for the wrong reasons? Thanks for the help!

[RejZoR]

1 hour ago, PhatRATTY said:

Great! this question was mainly to determine whether to upload 1080p videos to YouTube as 1440p (secondarily it was also for my own viewing) So I guess I was right for the wrong reasons? Thanks for the help!

To upscale 1080p video to 1440p before uploading or actually uploading a native 1440p video? Upscaling it beforehand would not do anything and would in fact lower quality. If you have a 1080p recording it'll still look good on 1440p because it's small difference and it's not 3D graphics where jagged edges appear. Just upload 1080p then as it is.

[wanderingfool2]

On 7/10/2021 at 12:25 AM, RejZoR said:

With videos, especially Youtube, it can help with sound quality as higher quality videos use higher bitrate audio and lower video compresion, resulting in better video image quality.

It doesn't help with sound quality.  It seems that youtube delivers 128kbps for mono, 384 kbps for stereo, and 512 kbps for 5.1....well for anything that is HD anyways.  The argument against your 4k and 8k carrying better audio is easily answered in your other post.  Audio takes substantially less than the video, there isn't a point in them providing multiple audio qualities...especially since we can detect audio glitches better than visual glitches.

 

7 hours ago, RejZoR said:

To upscale 1080p video to 1440p before uploading or actually uploading a native 1440p video? Upscaling it beforehand would not do anything and would in fact lower quality. If you have a 1080p recording it'll still look good on 1440p because it's small difference and it's not 3D graphics where jagged edges appear. Just upload 1080p then as it is.

Yes and no.  If you took 1080p video and upscaled it to 1440p, and replayed it on a 1080p monitor yes it would be worse [for most people likely indistinguishable though, unless you freeze frame shots].  When uploading to youtube though, resolution matters since they allocate different bandwidths for resolution...and if you upload in 1080p, others won't get the option of 1440p, or 4k.

 

9 hours ago, PhatRATTY said:

Great! this question was mainly to determine whether to upload 1080p videos to YouTube as 1440p (secondarily it was also for my own viewing) So I guess I was right for the wrong reasons? Thanks for the help!

Actually, not sure how accurate it was...but at least one site who seems to have run a test by uploading a 4k video and then checking the bitrates, they got the following results

8k VP9 - 21.2Mbps

4k VP9 - 17.3Mbps

2k VP9 - 8.5Mbps

1080p - 2.5Mbps

So at least it implies that you get quite a bit better quality as you step up in resolutions (even if it gets downscaled to 1080p).  Actually as a note as well, it means people viewing your content on a 4k monitor get a clearer picture as well, just due to the lower artifacting by the compression

[CerealExperimentsLain]

On 7/1/2021 at 2:53 PM, PhatRATTY said:

Does it need to be exactly four times the pixels to work for videos (Fours pixels are combined to form one square pixel) Or does any resolution increase still have an effect however noticeable. Does it work at all?

Do you understand that reality does not suffer from aliasing?

[Bitter]

I can't find the article on mobile now but years back there was a great piece about why higher res downscaled looks better than native res, and it had to do with how most scalers handle compression artifacts and blend them out when dropping pixels, I think.

[wanderingfool2]

2 hours ago, comander said:

The person talking about mono/stereo/5.1 seems to be referring to uploads. 

 

Fair warning I haven't really done youtube uploads so all this is based off of doing a search just for this post. 

Yea, it could have been on upload...I was skimming the article.  The VP9 results should be roughly correct.

 

40 minutes ago, Bitter said:

I can't find the article on mobile now but years back there was a great piece about why higher res downscaled looks better than native res, and it had to do with how most scalers handle compression artifacts and blend them out when dropping pixels, I think.

Yea, that could potentially be a thing...at the same time, with the same bitrate the artifacts created at a higher resolution would be bigger.  It's likely would really depend on a bunch of factors though.

 

1 hour ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

Do you understand that reality does not suffer from aliasing?

Actually aliasing is a thing, just not in the same context as video games.  An example of this being if you look at taking a picture of a brick building, you can get artifacts if the sample wrong....actually imagine taking a picture of your monitor, you get weirdness due to aliasing.  It can also happen when you are downsampling from a higher resolution to a lower resolution (although if it's a 4:1 then it cancels out)  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliasing