When it comes to overall experience, there are few things that affect that more than your monitor. It can be a bit of an afterthought for some users—it's easy to get caught up in parts selection for your actual PC and forget about the thing you'll actually spend time looking at with your eyeballs. Among the specs to consider when buying a monitor are things like refresh rate, response time, panel type, and, of course, resolution.

Resolution refers to the actual number of pixels displayed on the screen, and for many years, has been a barometer for builders to aim for. Building a PC to target a specific resolution is common practice by many enthusiasts, and has been for some time, but I no longer see resolution as something worth caring about.

4 Upscaling has leveled the field

DLSS, FSR and XeSS have made resolution a non-factor

For the average user, technologies like Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling and AMD's FidelityX Super Resolution have done a lot to not only make games more playable on lesser hardware, but also look better overall. Resolution is a big part of why games look so crisp, and while upscaling tech does take a little bit of sharpness away from the final image, it's still able to elevate the experience, either visually, or by increasing pure framerate.

But for those that fall on either extreme—the RTX 5090 owners and those still clinging onto their RTX 20-series GPUs, for instance—these upscaling technologies make resolution even more of a non-factor. The 5090 owner might still turn DLSS on at 4K to squeeze out framerates that are more in line with their refresh rate, and the GTX 20-series owners will turn it on just to get playable framerates. The result of this is that both users end up playing with a visual quality that's quite different from what their native renderer can supply. While yes, the 5090 owner will obviously have better visual fidelity, you're sacrificing a bit of sharpness, and there's a bit more artifacting. The RTX 20-series user can have a visual experience that's better than native if the conditions are right. The image quality difference begins to drift towards a median of sorts. Both users end up playing at a resolution that isn't their "true" resolution, but rather, something that looks a little better, or something that looks a little worse.

3 Consistent frame rate is more important to me

I'll sacrifice visual fidelity for smoothness

When it comes to how I like my games to look and feel, smoothness will always take precedent over visual quality. I'll take a semi-variable 120 FPS experience that looks a little worse, over a locked 60 FPS one any day of the week. Resolution plays a big part in that, and I have no problem turning a game down below my native 1440p to squeeze a little more FPS out. Even if I did have a 4K display, I'd still be turning the settings down enough to make the purchase of that resolution mostly moot.

2 1440p is the sweet spot

The horsepower required to drive 4K is still too expensive

Gaming at 4K once seemed like an insurmountable challenge. You needed 4 GTX 980 Ti GPUs in Quad-SLI, the best Core i7 overclocked to the max, or some other ridiculous setup to even try and run games at 4K. Now, 4K gaming is definitely within reach with a single GPU, but in AAA titles, gaming at 4K 60FPS still requires a setup with an eye-watering cost. Anything less than an RTX 5090 still can't run most games at a steady 60 FPS at 4K native. Sure, you can use upscaling tech to get there, but again, what's the point of having that extra resolution if you can't push it natively?

To me, 1440p is the ultimate sweet spot. You can natively drive it easily with most mid-to-high-range cards while maintaining a high enough FPS to take advantage of high refresh rates. It looks noticeably better than 1080p, but not noticeably worse than 4k. Display size obviously matters here as well; a 30-inch 1440p display will have slightly worse pixel density than a 4K display at the same size. If you're buying a really large display, you're going to want at least 1440p, and that's one scenario where I can see 4K being applicable.

1 Having a nicer panel is worth more to me

I'd rather pay for fewer, nicer pixels

Panel type is a huge part of what makes your display nice to look at, and while resolution does wonders for image clarity, it doesn't affect pretty much anything else. The type of panel dictates so much of how you experience things through your display. A 1080p TN display and a 1080p QD-OLED are so different, and that, to me, is worth paying more for. I'd rather have a lower-resolution OLED with deeper blacks, lower response times, better motion clarity and better contrast over a slightly higher-resolution TN panel that will struggle with all those aforementioned things.

There are diminishing returns when it comes to resolution

To me, resolution is just another part of the equation in 2025. Instead of it being the thing you base an entire build on, it should just be one consideration among many. For most people, 1440p will be the ultimate sweet spot, and I have a hard time seeing how that will change in the coming years. 4K can look really magnificent with big displays, but outside of TVs, 4K is already overkill, and anything above that is almost certainly not worth caring about.