1080p or 1440p

kitnoman · January 20, 2022

I'm currently using a 2yr old 144hz 1080p monitor. I play AAA games and occasionally apex legends and dota 2 for competitive gaming(though I'm not competitive at all), and using 3060 ti, would it be ok for me to get a 1440p 144hz-165hz monitor?

RONOTHAN## · January 20, 2022

A 3060Ti is plenty for 1440p 144Hz. 1440p 27" is the sweetspot for monitor size, and the price for it especially with high refresh rates are very competitive.

Chris Pratt · January 20, 2022

3060 Ti is enough to drive 1440p and high refresh, depending on the game and quality settings. I get a solid 60+ FPS in AAA games with everything cranked with mine. If you lower the quality or are simply playing less demanding titles like eSports, you can easily get much higher FPS. I don't really play eSports titles, but I can get 200+ FPS in Diablo 3, for example.

That said, if you want to still play titles at 1080p for even more FPS, the image will be subpar. LCD displays can't actually display non-native resolutions, so if you feed 1080p to a 1440p monitor, it has to actually upscale the image to 1440p, without any of the FSR/DLSS/etc. smarts. in that regard, if the game does support upscaling algorithms like those, you can use that to feed a 1440p image of much better quality, while still rendering in 1080p, though.

There's actually a new crop of multi-resolution displays starting to come out specifically to address this issue, which is actually pretty exciting. They can display both 1080p and 4K natively, for example, so you get the best of both worlds: use 1080p when you want the high FPS and use 4K when you want the quality.

Stahlmann · January 20, 2022

32 minutes ago, Chris Pratt said:

There's actually a new crop of multi-resolution displays starting to come out specifically to address this issue, which is actually pretty exciting. They can display both 1080p and 4K natively, for example, so you get the best of both worlds: use 1080p when you want the high FPS and use 4K when you want the quality.

4K displays being able to display 1080p is nothing new. Every 4K display can do that when you set the resolution to 1080p and set your scaling mode to integer. They simply use 4 pixels as one.

I think you mean some of the laptops that were announced with "hybrid" 4K60 or 1080p240 modes. But these are essentially just 4K240Hz displays that are limited to 1080p in their higher refresh rates for bandwidth reasons. If they'd just implement DSC in these laptops the display would just be a 4K240Hz one all the time. But that doesn't sound as interesting i guess. We already have the technology for permanent 4K240Hz, seeing as the first monitors with these specs were announced around CES.

IPD · January 20, 2022

If your monitor is 2 years old, I vote you just keep it for the time being. The jump to 4k will eliminate the non-native scaling issues; you are already used to 1080p, so playing at 1080p on 2160p monitor won't cost you anything. And the 120hz 2160p displays are not far away from critical mass. Heck, 144hz-160hz 2160p displays will probably be everywhere in another year or so.

Don't buy a monitor because it's "just barely enough" for your existing hardware. Buy a monitor that will give you room to upgrade your hardware.

Best case (all of us) can hope for, is that 5120x2880 becomes a standard resolution in the future--and keep the leapfrogging going. (720p>1080p>1440p>2160p>2880p). That would make 1440p scaling as easy on 2880p as 1080p is on 2160p.