Gaming at 1080p on a 1440p monitor

Hey everyone

I have a i7 4790k with a Gtx 770 4gb and therefore will not be able to game at 1440p.

however to plan for the long term im looking at getting a 1440p monitor.

How do games look in 1080p on a 1440p monitor?

Is it noticeably bad?

I have a gtx 680 4 gig and I'm able to game at 1440p. I'm not able to run at 60 FPS, but I can pretty much play everything at the highest settings.

You will be fine with your current setup.

To answer your question, games look a little less sharp and bit blurry running at 1080p, but nothing too crazy.

What you mean you can't play games at 1440p? This whole ideology that you need to play games maxed out @60fps+ or else it is unplayable needs to go away.

You can play 97% of all PC games maxed out at 1440p, and you can turn down the settings, which you won't have to by much, for the other 3%. Always play at your monitor's native resolution.

A 770 definitely can game at 1440p. Just turn AA down.

Playing a game at non-native resolution is old school. Pre 2008 pc gamers did that all the time.

If you're gaming at 1080P, you should get a 1080P monitor. As in - if you don't plan to keep your system consistently upgraded so you can max all the upcoming next-gen games at 1440P, probably would be smarter to stick with 1080P (if you game a lot).

@KHAndAnime:

Well i am planning to upgrade my GPU when the 800 series is out, so i dont want to buy a 1080p monitor and then a year later buy a 1440p, i will be expecting to play at 1440p in a year or so.

what kind of frame rate will i end up getting in challenging games at 1440p on high settings with a 770?

Turn down some settings and run w/e at 1440p. You can live without AA and 16x AF I'm sure.

AA is a band-aid for poor resolution. With 1440p, you'll find 2x AA is plenty. With my "3k" ultra wide monitor, I sometimes don't even need AA at all.

In short: 1440 isn't that hard to drive because of less use of AA. It translates to a little over 30% harder to drive - which is nothing for most games.

4k on the other hand...

We also used CRT's where 'native' resolution was pretty much irrelevant. CRT's had lots of options on resolution and refresh rate but my old 24" Ilyama was huge and weighed a ton, still loved it though :)

@GarGx1: i played on a CRT monitor on my dads pc from october 2003-april 2005. Man they were big.

1440 is pretty hard to drive. Maybe not significantly more so than 1080P, but cards are already having a tough enough time maxing the newest games at 1080P. SLI 780 Ti can't even get 60 FPS on Watch Dogs at max settings 1440P. First next-gen game hits PC and you already have to have a crazy super-rig to max it at 1440P. Why bother?

You're already trading graphics options and playability (framerate) for a negligible boost in sharpness. We haven't even gotten any particularly graphical intensive games this generation. People with 1440P monitors are going to be shit out of luck unless they always have $1k saved for the newest cards...for every other new title released. The diminishing returns of 1440P are way too huge for me to even give slight consideration to - there are more important things for me to pour money into. No point in spending a ton of money to get a less than ideal experience. Of course people who have all the extra money don't need to worry - I'm just warning people who aren't comfortably wealthy.

97% games that are already released. And what % of future titles? 25%? Who the hell wants to limit themselves to past titles? If you're spending tons of money on a nice rig and monitor, wouldn't it be at least be nice to max some new games at an ideal FPS? Who pours money into their rig just so they can play games at a mix of medium-high settings? Seems dumb, frankly. The OP clearly indicated this would be for long term. Playing no new games at high settings is the polar opposite of long term.

Of course, it depends what the OP is mostly doing. If he spends most of his time doing productive things requiring screen space, 1440P is fine. But if gaming is his primary thing, I'd think twice before going higher than 1200P.

Yes, one of my favorite features of a CRT monitor and one of the reasons I used one until just two years ago.

I agree that you don't always need to play maxed out, but you definitely need to be playing at 60 fps if it's a game that requires speed accuracy and reaction, so basically anything that isn't a strategy game or a point and click flight sim.

I don't know about you, but I prefer by many folds over to play a game at 1440p at High or Medium settings than to play a game on Ultra at 1080p. Resolution makes a big difference and is easily the most noticeable thing when playing a game. A few settings dropped down a level or two? Sometimes unnoticeable.

Resolution only makes a big difference depending on the size of your screen and how close you're sitting. If you're sitting the proper distance from your monitor (at least a couple feet), the difference in sharpness would be extremely negligible - 1080P with AA would be indistinguishable from 1440P. Turning down settings on games on the other hand is always a blatant visual change. First thing you'll be bumping down is texture resolution (due to biggest memory hog at high resolutions)- it'd be difficult to not to notice all the textures growing 10-25% blurrier, particularly when you're using a sharper monitor to view the blurrier textures.

Of course it's all preference. I've used 1080P Panasonic Plasma on 42" only 4 ft away as my monitor, and with 2x MSAA and FXAA, I found it impossible to spot jaggies. I'm extremely picky about IQ - resolution and PPI aren't that important when it comes to IQ. It's a bit further down the list, really. 720P and 1080P when viewing Bluray movies are indistinguishable unless you're at a relatively close sitting distance. The difference between 1080P and 1440P is even a lot smaller and you'd have to be a lot closer to spot a difference (if 1440P movie content existed).

@KHAndAnime: Wash Dogs is an extremely poor example for any measure of performance.

1440p has been here for a long while now, there is plenty of games/cards/people to safely say it's a great gaming option.
You raise a good point with some games being hardly playable at even 1080p, but a good majority of the time that is never an issue.

I have a gtx 670 and play everything ay 1440p....

its pretty much native res or gtfo

game at 1440p and turn down the settings. You don't need to run every game at max.

Please don't bump ancient threads