Let's Discuss 4k vs 1080p on a laptop.

Competitive gaming is another thing entirely. I can be a heavy gamer without being a competitive gamer. And my "Action RPG" looks much better in 4k 60hz than 1080p 120hz.

 

I'm a competitive gamer, so I don't care about looks.

I don't see the sharpness and prettyness since I play fast paced games where the sharpness is absolutely useless to begin with. I'm playing the game, not looking at it like a picture. To me there is nothing worse than high resolution which makes more useless details that will only cause me to avert my eyes from my goal and the slow reactiontime ruining my reaction times. 4k is terrible for most gamers, there are only very few people who would go for 4k and call themselves "heavy gamer".

Especially given your hardware, most games are going to be absolutely garbage. 4k on a GTX 1070 is just bad, unless you for some reason play old games.

 

Those are my laptops. My 40" curved AOC at 60hz is the display I'm using for my 1080TI with a 6 core CPU.

 

An absolute nightmare. Not only are your games more pixilated at 4k than mine @ 1080p due to crappier pixel density (110ppi vs 127ppi).

Your monitor only has 60hz and worst of all, it has a 25ms black to white response time, compared to my MSI 120hz 1080p panel which only needs 5.6ms, yours is extremely slow and for some reason your cuved screen has less color coverage than my gaming panel, which is weird. It's an oversized mediocre monitor.

Sorry but your setup is to gamers like me nothing short of a disaster.

 

PPI would SUCK on a 40" 1080p monitor. And I never said that you nor I were indicative of the gamer market. All I was saying is that for a NON COMPETITIVE gamer, I'd rather have the additional resolution. Which is also of great benefit to me in non-gaming related tasks.

As far as response time, I'll defer to the judgment of someone to whom such trivialities actually matter. I do know that a true 4k competitive-level monitor is going to set you back about 5x what I paid for mine...and that's a dubious sales proposition. Naturally, this leads to people who insist on better/faster 1080p--even though it's a god-awful piss-poor resolution.

p.s.
Your definition of "pixelation" only means that gaming on a 10" monitor gives a better experience. I call shiens. Every single review of my monitor says that casual gamers will benefit greatly, as will those who use it for productivity. I'm not saying it's the be-all, end-all...far from it. But to judge what is acceptable quality (or advisable quality) based on what will stand up to top-level online competitions...is foolhardy.

 

My argument is, if you're bothered about the pixel density of a 1080p monitor on a notebook, but you buy yourself a monitor that has lower pixel density I.E picture is less detailed, you just showcase hyprocisy.

Gamers neither like ghosting or long reactiontimes.
There is no such thing as a 4k "competitive-level" monitor. It simply doesn't exist. We don't have enough data volume for 4k 144hz so far.
Also I literally quoted a review of your monitor saying it's terrible for gaming, which you obviously ignored.

It has nothing to do with pricing, since monitors are not that expensive to begin with, it has to do with most gamers disliking their game to be at trash FPS, having ghosting, bad reactiontime etc. Difference between 60 and 120FPS is pretty big as well. Everything beyond 144FPS seems to be niche for hardcore FPS gamers, as they do see a noticable difference, if not mentioned that one is 144hz and the other is 240. I only read about it, never tried myself since I never owned a 240hz monitor so I'll just go with the couple of tests I read about.

Playing my games on a competitive level and someone saying reactiontime is trivial is like a guy who drives a car in his spare time telling a racecar driver that his NM of his car is trivial.

I have the feeling you have never owned a proper gaming monitor thus far. you should try it, once you see how fluid games are and how they don't have horrible inputlag, you'll gladly throw away your oversized monitor.

 

How about you shut your trap and let @imperfectdarkness enjoy what he likes?

 

How about you shut your own? I was suggesting to him to try something new and maybe he will enjoy it more.

If he doesn't, then let him enjoy his oversized monitor, but him spreading dung about how non FPS games don't benefit from higher FPS, that reactiontime is overrated and that people just say that a faster 1080p is better because those who say it don't have money is nothing but garbage.



Video about why responsetime etc. matters, even for non competitive gamers.

 

There is no reason to be so corrosive to each other. Some people like 4K, some people like FHD, some people like something in between. Cool.

 

So, turning this into a more productive debate, would you say that high refresh combined with high fps is more important than higher resolution for non-competitive gamers who want the highest image quality?

 

Oh yeah, it defnitely is, even for non competitive gamers. The feeling when playing on high fps and refreshrate is very different. The game is much more responsive and is more fun overal.
Also you don't really lose image quality, if anything, on many titles the image quality on 1080 / 1440P is better when you consider a couple of things. Some games have lower resolution shadows and particle effects which really look extremely bad on 4k, since not everything scales to 4k, not only that but not all games can run at 4k, no matter your setup as well, unless you plan on playing with low settings.

the 1080p sharpness can be improved by adding mods to your games, which enhance your sharpness, shaders, colors etc. The game looks overall much better than 4k vanilla, if implemented on 4k, your FPS will suffer extremely and overall you would have a slideshow.

Some examples of reshade etc.:


Witcher 3 mod @ 4k (mid 20ish FPS)






Not to mention, you don't really care about the graphics anymore at a certain point. The more you move around, the less you notice details and honestly the less you care.

Honestly it's somethinng every gamer should try. If you have a friend with a high refreshrate monitor and a decent enough rig, try it out yourself. From experience, people are always saying "once 120+ FPS, you never go back", this was also in my case.

 

It really depends on the individual and the games he/she plays. For me, the lower resolution is noticeable and annoying--even on a 15" laptop. It is all the more pronounced on a 40" monitor.

 

If I owned a 40" 4k 16:9 60Hz monitor, the first thing I would do is overclock it.
Even a small overclock can be notice-able, and with some luck, after overclocking, the overall smoothness might be "good enough".
The second thing I would do is, set the resolution to the highest supported 21:9.
Anyone try running 21:9 on a 16:9 4k monitor? How does it look?

This is an old video, but you can see Linus instantly fell in love with 21:9 when he first used it.
youtu.be/KnrxNfxRK_4?t=216

 

Agreed, I actually want a 21:9 monitor at some point.

Black bars on 16:9 will give a cinematic feel to it, I'd imagine games like witcher 3 would look awesome on it.
Do we have 21:9 1080/1440p 120+Hz monitors btw?
If you know a good budget one you could recommend I'd be happy to see it

 

I just googled 21:9 120Hz and the top two links are this monitor (seems LG is buying ad's on google)

https://www.lg.com/uk/monitors/lg-34UC79G-B
https://www.amazon.com/LG-34UC79G-B-34-Inch-21-UltraWide/dp/B01LW5CGIS

I own a 29" LG 29UM58. It's only 2560x1080 and 60Hz, but colors are beautiful and it overclocked to 67Hz (less than I hoped).
which is not much but I can see a small difference between 60Hz and 67Hz.

Years ago, I had a 3D vision setup with a poor-image-quality 120 Hz monitor.
I personally, am happy with 90 Hz or more, but even 75Hz is significantly better than 60Hz.

if I were buying a new monitor today, I would seriously consider this monster.

Is it too wide? LoL

 

I loathe 21:9. 16:9 was a horrible enough pill to swallow--only made more palatable by resolutions > WUXGA. Anything with a pathetic 1080p horizontal is ****e I will never intentionally buy.

p.s.
32:9. Cripes. 35" horizontal is already about the limits of peripheral for me. 47" horizontal would require placing the screen further away to get within my peripherals...which defeats the purpose. And that vertical is 6" shorter than mine. I hate the "Squished" feel to screens. Which again would be all the worse if I had to range the monitor to be just on the edge of peripheral...and therefore have considerable "shrinkage" in vertical display area.

And oh yeah, way less cost this way.

 

Well people like me who like a cinematic experience and love the extra space for productivity combined with the great speed 120hz+ find this option way more appealing than what you have.

I think oversized 4k monitors are garbage for low performance, ugly pixalated games due to low ppi, extremely slow responsie time and bad refreshrate which makes my games less smoother. Might as well play on a tv and console at that point. The garbage 4k resolution isn't even playable for some of my games, even with GTX 1080 TI in SLI the FPS are so bad even on lowest settings that it's pathethic. Not to mention that 4k monitors are absolute garbage when it comes to price/performance ratio. Using a 4K monitor for PC gaming is torture imo.

There are people who value productivity, especially in the multimedia industry, ultrawides are a new standard.

 

You must play some really old games.

 

Last time I checked games from 2018 are not considered old, but I do also play games such as Dota 2 and CS:GO, which you could consider old.

 

As it has now been 2 years since the thread started, i wanted to know how is the state of Windows scaling currently?
I heard Win10 Creators Update brought major changes.

I ask because I want to purchase the Lenovo X1 Extreme (15.6"), but unsure whether to go for 1080 or 4K display.

Will use for web surfing, productivity apps, Visual studio coding, running multiple VMs (has 64GB RAM)...

Also will be using remote desktop to servers, some of which are still running Win 2008R2 -> Will this be scaled?

Any feedback welcome.

Thank you


PS, i have never used a 4k display.. I only use a laptop.

 

Is there a hz difference between the two options? If 1080p has faster refresh, then you might as well stick with it and not worry about scaling for the time being. If it's equal, I'd say go with 4k.

To be honest, I don't really notice any anomalies in my 4k windows scaling...but I'm also not using much scaling. 150% or less.