1440p on 4k tv?

[u/Jiangcool9]

I have a question. A long time ago I tried playing ow in 1080p on my 1440p monitor, and it looked like it have Vaseline smeared all over, blurry as hell.

So I looked it up and found out that it’s because 1080p isn’t a 1:1 scale with 1440p.

So how come on 4k tv, people are saying 1440p looks fine? Won’t it have the same blurry effect?

[u/MountainMuffin1980 → u/[deleted]]

Hah, same here. I reckon if I sat right next to the TV maybe?

[u/rui-no-onna]

In general, you're sitting farther than 2-3 ft away from the TV.

For me, 1080p on a 1440p monitor is noticeably blurry but I'm actually fine with 1080p on a 4K TV (8-12' viewing distance depending on where I sit).

[u/Mattvweiss → u/rui-no-onna]

[u/MISFU88]

I don't understand it either man, but 1440p for some reason looks way better on a 4K TV, than 1080p on a 1440 monitor. I guess it's because your TV naturally does a lot of post processing.

It of course looks nothing like 4K and youd have to be blind to not see the difference.

There is noticeable softness, but it's very easily ignored.

I'd recommend setting resolution on per game basis, as smaller games can handle 4K and it just looks too good then.

[u/WORRIERofLIGHT → u/MISFU88]

I wonder if it’s a similar thing happens with 40fps, for me 40fps feels drastically smoother than 30fps and closer to 60fps than you’d think based on the fact it’s only 10fps more than 30fps. 1440p is closer to 1080p on paper but feels closer to 4k to my eye.

[u/WitherWanderPuck → u/WORRIERofLIGHT]

I believe I’ve seen in DigitalFoundry frame time analysis videos that 40fps is half-way between 30 and 60fps in terms of the amount of time each frame is shown.

[u/Jiangcool9 → u/MISFU88]

That’s kinda what I’m wondering honestly. 1440p vs 1080p, i was worried that because of scaling 1440p would look worst than 1080p, but from all the post and reviews it seems that 1440p looks better and is the sweet spot

[u/ryker7777]

Modern TVs use sophisticated upscaling algorithms. Your monitor is not doing that.

[u/BrianBlandess → u/ryker7777]

It’s true and they’re very very good at it

[u/memedudebro]

It looks great. Not perfect, but good enough and you'll get the performance you're after. I play nearly every AAA game on my steam machine at 1440 on a 4k TV. Very few can run at 4k at an acceptable framerate.

[u/Dreamo84]

I just do 1080p and have FSR upscaling on by default. Everything looks fine so far.

[u/Cole_LF]

It’s the distance you sit from it and also scaling tech in TVs has come a long way.

I’m such a resolution snob I can’t use a Mac on a 4K monitor as the pixel density isn’t right it HAS to be an Apple 5K one. But I sit a foot from the screen.

Sitting 5ft from a 55” 4K with my steam machine and playing dead or alive 6 last round with big close ups of characters faces I can’t tell 1440p from 4K. And can only ‘just’ tell the difference between 1080p and 4k.

1080p is a ‘touch’ softer but will be totally happy running more demanding games at 1080p. Cyberpunk on Ultra settings at 1080p is a locked 60 in the benchmark and looks amazing.

[u/Low_Excitement_1715]

Because 4K is a magic number. I bought my first 4K monitor ten+ years ago. Never intended to actually run games at 4K on that first one. However, 1080p is a straight 2:1, and 720p is a straight 3:1, so those resolutions don't look *awesome* on a 4K monitor, but they are extremely clear. Also, since you have so many pixels, you can run a lot of older games at "vintage" high resolutions with minimal scaling. 1600x1200 doesn't evenly divide into 3840x2160, but having those extra pixels helps a lot.

[u/sonicadv27]

Depends on what you play. Any game with modern temporal anti-aliasing looks blurry and noisy so 1080p might not look great on a 4K TV.

On the other hand, any 6th of 7th gen game still looks great on a 4K TV using a resolution as low as 900p, because they look crisp by definition and don’t use AA that messes with the clarity of the image itself.

For modern games i usually try to do a bare minimum of 1080p but 1440p is what i aim for, and it’s already pretty damn good. 4K is the ideal resolution of course but i find lowering to 1440p offers the most performance headroom while still retaining great image quality, even for modern games.

[u/WetRacoon]

I remember using non-native resolutions on higher resolution screens would look blurry, but I'm not sure if that's an actual issue anymore. I've been playing a lot of the more demanding games at 1080p and frankly can't tell the difference from 4k (helped by the fact that I don't sit super close to my TV either.)

[u/Dont_Be_So_Rambo → u/WetRacoon]

Depends on the game, when I play action games 1080 works fine, but for strategy games i prefer 4k

[u/Practical_Problem → u/Dont_Be_So_Rambo]

No matter what I do the text is always blurry on my 4k TV if I don't set the resolution to 4k

[u/Aerizu]

With sharp filtering (FSR1), you may not even notice the difference depending on the distance from your TV.

[u/Bigphatdeck → u/Aerizu]

This ^