Don’t Buy the Wrong Resolution - 1080p vs 1440p vs 4K

each of these three monitors has a 27-inch ips panel and all of them are from aoc and being advertised as gaming monitors but yeah as you probably have guessed from the title of this video one of them is a 1080p monitor one is a 1440p monitor and the other one has a 4k display all in the same 27-inch form factor by the way this video is not sponsored by aoc but they were kind enough to lend me these three monitors which are perfect for this comparison this video is sponsored by squarespace though more on them later in this video so how much of a difference does the resolution really make when the other specs are fairly similar i mean these are our 144hz gaming monitors of the same size with the same panel tag and they even are from the same brand okay to be fair the full hd and qhd monitors both technically have a refresh rate of 165 hertz but for the sake of this video we'll have them running at 144 hertz so the designing factor really is the resolution but does a high resolution actually look that much better even for things like gaming or is it only really usable for photo editing and stuff like that well i gotta admit that i was genuinely impressed when i turned on the 4k monitor for the first time believe it or not but despite that i've tested a ton of monitors i've never actually experienced a 27 inch 4k display and honestly having all those pixels cramped onto a relatively small 27 inch screen looks amazing so yeah you'll notice right away that everything even the text and graphics and the plain normal file explorer just look so much smoother i mean take a look at the 1440p display in comparison text by no means looks bad here but you can clearly see that this is text being displayed on a monitor that has individual pixels whereas the text on the 4k display looks much more like ink basically now i wouldn't say that i can clearly like see or even count individual pixels on the 1440p monitor at least not from a normal view and distance but despite that there is a certain roughness to text and other sharp edges that clearly makes it look worse than the 4k display but yeah text and such looking smoother truly isn't a big enough reason to sell a kidney for a 4k monitor at least not for most people i assume and let's face it high refresh rate 4k monitors are expensive the one that i have here retails for over 900 euros which is somewhat on the expensive side even for a 4k 144hz monitor the average price of the 10 most popular 4k monitors in germany right now is about 680 euros so that's still a massive 96 price jump from 4040p monitors and 1440p monitors on average are 79 more expensive than the 1080p count parts so with this 1080p monitor right here we're certainly getting a lot of screen real estate for our money and i'm going to admit that a large but affordable monitor like this seems pretty appealing at first i mean for roughly 200 bucks that's a nice and large ips screen right here that's just as big as the other two monitors which both are much more expensive but as soon as you take a closer look it's pretty clear as to why this is so much cheaper than the other two the individual pixels are just huge and easily visible at a normal viewing distance i really have to move back quite far until the image actually looks cohesive and smooth i'm a bit over one meter or about four feet away from the monitor now and only at this distance the image actually starts looking good but yeah there are probably not a lot of people who sit this far from their monitor my typical viewing distance looks a bit more something like this which is about 50 to 60 centimeters away from the screen and here the 1080p resolution does not look good at all here you can compare 1080p and 4k side by side while i tell you about today's sponsor squarespace squarespace makes starting your own website super easy they have loads of templates for all kinds of websites so i made a decent looking website in just a few minutes by starting with one of 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if you're on a budget i'd suggest getting a 24 inch 1080p monitor instead 1080p just isn't enough when you're sitting close to a big 27 inch screen now if you have a bit more money to spend and want a larger monitor you can also just go for a 27-inch 1440p monitor instead despite that the display is larger this has an even higher pixel density of 109 ppi so is this high enough to give us the perfect image well i wish it was but the 27 inch 4k display with its 163 ppi does look noticeably better but that raises the question of how many pixels per inch we really need like when does the image look perfect already and when are we starting to hit diminishing returns territory now i guess you've heard the term retinal display before what's that well that's basically apple's marketing speech for a display resolution that's high enough that you can't see individual pixels anymore so when a display is classified as retina adding more pixels beyond that should pretty much be unnoticeable and it really shouldn't add much to the image quality so would either of these monitors qualify as a retina display now back in 2010 when steve jobs introduced the iphone 4 he stated that 300 ppi was this magic number at which the human eye basically won't notice individual pixels anymore that seems pretty high at first considering the 4k monitor right here has about half of that but remember the 300 ppi number is for a phone which typically is held up really close to the face and therefore covers quite a large portion of our field of view so how can we transfer that to a monitor that typically isn't that close in your face well it turns out apple calls a display retina when it has at least 57 pixels for every degree of our field of view this might sound a bit complicated at first but once we've done all the math it's actually pretty straightforward so here are the ppd numbers for some common display resolutions and sizes remember the goal is to hit 57 ppd and yeah even the 24-inch 1080p monitor manages to qualify as a retina display so how's that possible while the 24-inch 1080p monitor only qualifies as a retina display when we type in a viewing distance above 90 centimeters which is pretty far 60 centimeters would be far more realistic and well at this distance only 4k monitors qualify not even the 27-inch 1440p display i gonna have this dock linked down below in case you want to play around with these numbers so 4k monitors actually make sense even with a reasonably small 27-inch panel so why are 4040p 27-inch monitors so popular then well even when ignoring how much money you can save by going with a 4040p monitor instead of a 4k1 you just can't ignore these numbers this is called warzone running in 4k on a relatively decent gaming pc with competitive low settings and this honestly is not much fun to play we're averaging just shy of 70 fps which isn't exactly great for a fast paced game like warzone also tried lowering the render resolution to 75 percent which brought me a bit closer to 100 fps but at this point you could also just get a low res monitor instead and save some money a 1080p monitor will of course achieve the highest fps my fps took a 23 hit from 1080p to 1440p which is kind of acceptable for an upgrade like this i mean going from about 150 fps to 115 fps is definitely noticeable but so is the better image quality we're getting from 1440b the 40 fps hit from the upgrade to 4k though is just too much in my opinion the additional sharpness and detail just isn't that noticeable while playing fast paced games having 40 less fps is very much noticeable though and such an fps hit is not just exclusive to warzone or my particular hardware i crunched some numbers from hardware unboxed who tested 12 games on 15 different gpus and on average the 4k upgrade reduces the fps by 47 while going from 1080p to 1440p leads to 28 lower fps so as an easy to remember rule of thumb planning to lose about a quarter of your fps when upgrading from 1080p to 440b and be ready to lose half of your fps from 1440p to 4k however there are exceptions to this for instance if you heavily cpu limited in certain games you might not lose any fps with a resolution upgrade or just very few for example this is veteran running in 4k with competitive settings and my 2070 super has no issues pushing close to 300 fps in a crowded death match i used the spike pen scenario as a benchmark and here i got a whopping 371 fps and 4k with my somewhat dated pc hardware both the 4040p and 1080p numbers don't really look that much better so there really isn't a noteworthy fps hit with esports titles like velerand visually though there is a difference rounded edges for instance like on the head of the dummy look a lot more like they're actually round with a high resolution monitor everything looks less fuzzy and that's especially noticeable between 1080p and 1440p now better looking edges or details is clearly not something that would win you rounds and competitive esports titles though take a look at what happens when the character model is at a 50 meter distance on the 1080p monitor it becomes somewhat difficult to even tell the head and torso of the dummy apart it's clearly not as easy to see as with the 1440p or even 4k display and in my opinion this is enough to make hitting headshots just a bit more difficult in this distance with the 1080p monitor considering that upgrading to 1440p only has a minimal impact on the framerate it's maybe about time to move to 1440p for games like veteran unless of course you're looking for the absolute highest refresh rate because only 1080p will give you these crazy high refresh rates above 300hz at least until the 360hz 4040p monitors arrive but even then 1080p would probably continue being the default option for the highest refresh rate monitors and if you're after that i'd really suggest getting a smaller 24 inch display and 4k well there's no doubt that this is the superior resolution even on a 27 inch screen if a sharp and clear looking image for working with text consuming content or playing slow paced cinematic games is your number one priority then go for it if you can also afford the hardware to drive all these pixels of course it does look noticeably better than 4040p that's already true for a 27-inch monitor and for larger monitors 4k becomes even more important though for fast-paced games like first-person shooters and such it's really not worth the additional investment 4k monitors are so much more expensive and decent graphics cards aren't cheap either so yeah it really makes sense that 1440p monitors are so popular as these really are great compromise between resolution fps and cost i'll leave some of my favorite 4040p monitors linked down below and in case you're wondering if you should get a monitor with an ips panel or with a v8 panel instead i've made a comparison video about that as well which is linked on screen right now thanks for watching this next video

Channel: techless

Views: 917,719

Keywords: 1080p vs 1440p, 1080p vs 4k, 1080p vs 1440p gaming, 1080p vs 1440p monitor, 1080p vs 1440p vs 4k, 1440p vs 2160p

Id: vEKtElvxl8A

Length: 12min 27sec (747 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 08 2022