1440p vs 4K for Gaming
In the world of gaming, what display you are playing on can make a massive difference in how much you enjoy your gaming experience. There’s a myriad of options, from resolutions and refresh rates, to response times and input latency, but in this video I want to focus in on the resolution. My top picks these days are 1440p – that’s 2560×1440 – and 4K – that’s 3840×2160. Remarkably, 4K and 1440p monitors often share the same price bracket, so it’s a pretty fair comparison and I’m sure makes your decision even more difficult! Let me walk you through the key differences and arm you with enough information to make an informed decision for yourself.
The first point to cover is all about the visual fidelity. If you are the sort of person who enjoys how beautiful modern games have become, who enjoys the crisp visuals of a high resolution display, then 4K is for you. It’s beautiful to look at, especially on a smaller display like a 27” or 32” panel, with an unparalleled level or sharpness and fidelity. On larger displays, like 42” and up you will really want 4K to help cover the larger area in the display, although that’s not to say that 1440p is some C tier visual experience. Especially at 27” 1440p looks perfectly crisp and sharp, and when sitting at an appropriate viewing distance, your eyes really can’t make out much of a difference. Still, it’s hard to argue that 4K doesn’t have the edge in visual quality.
The next point is compatibility. While both of the most recent generation of consoles now support 1440p displays, the PS5’s support of 1440p displays seems pretty tepid. You have to enable the 1440p setting in the menu system, and even then, at least as far as I’m aware, variable refresh rate support – better known as adaptive sync or FreeSync – isn’t enabled when running at 1440p. I’m not entirely sure why, but it shows you what Sony’s priorities are here, and means you’d likely be better off with a 4K or 1080p display instead. For a PC this isn’t an issue, although you might find that 1440p displays are a better fit as even older HDMI versions can run 1440p at at least 120Hz, if not higher, whereas an older HDMI version might only be able to run 4K at 30Hz which is no good.
It’s also worth noting that a 4K monitor perfectly scales to 1080p, so one 1080p pixel gets split into four on a 4K monitor, whereas 1440p isn’t a native scale. If you end up viewing 1080p content – whether that’s from a console that only runs at 1080p, or maybe even cutscenes that are pre-rendered at 1080p – a 4K monitor will generally look better than a 1440p monitor for that. It isn’t a massive problem generally, but I thought it was something you should know before splashing your cash!
The next, and pretty major point is all about performance. Because 4K has more than double the pixels of a 1440p monitor – 125% more in fact – a 4K monitor is considerably harder to drive than a 1440p display. For a console that means games are likely to run at just 30FPS, maybe 60FPS at an absolute push, whereas at 1440p they are often capable of 120Hz. For a PC, that means on a 4K display you are likely to either be running at a lower framerate, or will need to lower your settings to make the experience playable, which somewhat defeats the purpose of having the higher fidelity display! You are likely to need higher end hardware, namely a higher end graphics card than you’d need for 1440p, especially if you want to enjoy the same quality settings.
I also wanted to mention response times here, mostly as a point regarding TVs. See, a lot of gamers who do game at 4K do so on their main living room TV. That’s of course fine – and actually a great experience outright – but TVs aren’t generally meant to be gaming displays. Unless it’s an OLED, there’s a very good chance that the response times – as in how long it takes for the display to change colours, or change what’s shown on the screen – to be really, really slow. That makes for a less than smooth, less than enjoyable gaming experience, and can make it really hard to aim at anything fast moving – whether that’s an enemy in a first person shooter, or a racing line in a driving game. 1440p displays generally won’t have that limitation as they are more often than not marketed as gaming displays, and therefore have tuned overdrive modes to help with slower panels.
That also applies to the input latency – as in how long it takes between you starting an action and that action showing up on screen. TVs are notoriously bad for this, taking 100-300 milliseconds to start showing an action – compared to a proper gaming monitor which is normally within 1 or 2 milliseconds. This makes playing any latency sensitive games really difficult – Rocket League is my go-to for that, as your precisely timed inputs are what makes or breaks how you perform in game. Even with 10-20ms extra latency I find it really difficult to even hit the ball, let alone line up shots and get really power behind the ball. I couldn’t imagine having 100-300 milliseconds of input lag between me and the game.
The other thing to mention here is refresh rates. While Asus just announced a 4K 240Hz OLED, and there are a couple of 4K 144Hz displays too, generally speaking those are astronomically expensive, and require equally expensive hardware to make use of them. 1440p by comparison requires considerably less power to push higher refresh rates, with 1440p 240Hz monitors being relatively affordable, especially by comparison. 1440p 144Hz or 165Hz monitors are incredibly common, and much, much cheaper than basically any 4K 144Hz display, and it’s a lot easier to drive 1440p at 144 FPS.
In general, I’d say that if you have a PS5 or Xbox Series X, you probably want either a 1080p or 4K display. The Xbox I think has better compatibility with 1440p, so that’s still a perfectly good option go get a little more visual fidelity at a pretty minimal performance cost, but for the PS5 in particular I’d probably want to stay away. For a PC I really like 1440p monitors and would happily recommend anyone with around 70 class GPUs or higher dive in with a 1440p panel. It’s a considerably better experience than 1080p, without the drawbacks 4K comes with. If you plan on gaming in the living room, of course your TV will be your best bet. Make sure to switch on any game modes it might have which often lowers the input latency a fair bit, and if you are still making a purchasing decision, OLEDs are an amazing experience for gaming even on a TV, or failing that try to find one with a dedicated gaming mode. Both resolutions have their place, and I hope this video has been useful in filling you in on their differences.
