I've taken a source image at 160x90 and blown that up to 1280x720 (using nearest neighbor and bicubic interpolation) in Photoshop. There are pros and cons to any of those, but all look worse than the native image. One option is to use nearest neighbor interpolation, or you can do bilinear or bicubic interpolation. We run into a problem of not easily being able to scale the image, and there are different techniques. Now try to stretch that image to 256x144. When we shifted to LCDs and digital signals, suddenly all the pixels were perfectly square and running at a different resolution than native presented more visible problems.Ĭonsider a simple example of a 160x90 resolution display with a diagonal black stripe running through it. I hated dealing with pin cushioning, trapezoidal distortion, and the other artifacts caused by CRT technology far more than the potential blurriness of not running at a higher resolution. However, CRTs were inherently less precise and always had a bit of blurriness, so we didn't really notice. There are also games like Rage 2 where even going from maximum to minimum quality will only improve framerates by 50 percent or so.īack when we all used CRTs, running at a lower resolution than your native monitor resolution was commonplace. Dropping from ultra to medium on the other hand might be too much of a compromise for some. Look no further than Control, Gears of War 5, and Borderlands 3 if you want examples.ĭepending on the game, it might be possible to play at 4K with a lower quality setting, and the difference between ultra and high settings is often more of a placebo than something you'd actually notice without comparing screenshots or running benchmarks.

Still, there are plenty of games where even the fastest current hardware simply isn't capable of running a new game at 4K, maximum quality, and 60 fps. These days, I have multiple 4K and ultrawide monitors, and the difference in graphics quality is amazing. I started gaming back when we hooked up bulging TVs to our computers (C-64), and we were happy to play at 320x200. In a perfect world, you want to run all of your games at your monitor's native resolution.

Is my monitor 1080p or 720p