Comment by 4ggr0
14 hours ago
i'm actually going to do the reverse move, was gaming on a 4K display, but going to downgrade to 3440x1440 to get more performance. but of course the gaming displays i find apparently aren't ideal for working, because text looks worse. add to that that the internet seems to be split if wide-monitors are the best thing ever or actually horrible. why is it all so complicated, man.
My only gripe is nearly all common "ultrawide" models should really be thought of as "ultrashort" in that they don't offer more width, just less height.
E.g. a 21:9 ultrawide variant of 4k should really be 5040x2160. Instead they are nearly all 3840x1600. That may well be cost/price optimal for certain folks, I'm not saying it's bad for the product itself to exist, but nobody was looking at a 1600p monitor thinking "man, I wish they'd make a wider variant!" they started with 4k and decided it would be nice if it were permanently shortened.
yeah, that really confused me as well. the whole 4K, 2K, 2.5K, ultrawide, ultrahigh, microwide, 8K shit just gets confusing, especially because it's neither accurate nor standardized.
I think they are calling those 5k2k monitors. I'm quite happy with my 45" LG 5k2k OLED monitor. Much more usable than the 32:9 monitors after seeing both in person.
If the game offers it [0], set the output resolution to 4K, and the render resolution to something smaller. A multiplier of ~0.66 is roughly 1440p output, and 0.5 is 1080p.
If the game doesn't offer that, then I've found that the HUD/UI uglification isn't too bad when one sets the output resolution to 1440p.
If Windows is getting in the way of doing this, and most or all of your games have been purchased through Steam, give Linux a try. I've heard good things about the Fedora variant known as Bazzite, but have never, ever tried it myself. [1]
[0] And shockingly few do! There's all sorts of automagic "AI" upscaling shit with mystery-meat knobs to turn, but precious few bog-standard "render everything but the HUD and UI with this many fewer pixels" options.
[1] I've been using Gentoo for decades and (sadly) see no reason to switch. I strongly disrecommend Gentoo as a first Linux distro for most folks, and especially for folks who primarily want to try out Linux for video gaming.
> set the output resolution to 4K, and the render resolution to something smaller
doesn't that make everything blurry? that's the gripe i have with circa post-2020 PC gaming, barely any pc can run a AAA or AA game in native resolution and instead has to use artificial upscaling and whatnot. haven't specifically tried it.
also can't test it anymore, as my gaming monitor is now our TV (48 inch OLED gaming TV, what a blast it was). now using my "old" 32in 2560x1440 IPS display, really miss OLED :( which is why i want to buy a new monitor. but i can't decide if i should take a 27in one (seems to be the 16:9 standard right now, but seems so small to me) or a ultrawide one. i switch games very frequently and also sometimes like to play old(er) games, so a bit scared of the "ultrawides are cool if your game supports it"-vibe...
> I've heard good things about the Fedora variant known as Bazzite
haha, this message was written on Bazzite, so i got that part covered :D switched about a month ago, funny to get the recommendation now.
> doesn't that make everything blurry?
My experience for the 3D parts of a great many games that my 5700 XT can't reasonably run at panel-native resolution is that the game's art style is to blur up the picture with all sorts of postprocessing (and sometimes (especially with UE5 games) with the ever-more-popular "it looks so bad it makes you wonder if the renderer is totally busted unless you leave TAA on" rendering technique). Sometimes this blurring ends up looking absolutely great, and other times it's just lazy, obnoxious, and awful.
So, not that I notice? For the games that permit it, the HUD and menus stay nice and sharp, and the 3D stuff that's going to be all smudged up no matter what you do just renders at a higher frame rate.
For games that don't have independent 2D and 3D render resolutions, I find 1440p to be quite tolerable, and (weirdly) 1080p to be much less tolerable... despite the fact that you'd expect it to fit nicely on the panel. I guess I'm expecting a much more crisp picture with integer scaling than I get? Or maybe this is like what some games did way back when where they totally change the font and render style of the UI once they get past some specific breakpoint. [0] I haven't looked closely at what's going on, so I don't have any even vaguely-reasonable explanation for it.
> [ultrawide monitors]
I like the comment someone else made somewhere that described them as "ultrashort" monitors. Personally, even if I was willing to move my head around enough to scan the whole damn monitor, I'm unwilling to lose so much vertical resolution. But as always, one should definitely choose what one likes.
Personally, I find a 32" 3840 pixel wide monitor to be good. It's really great for doing work on, and perfectly acceptable for playing video games.
> [Linux]
Gratz on moving to Linux for gaming. Hope you don't have much trouble with it, and any trouble you have is either caused by super-invasive kernel-level anticheat that will never, ever work on Linux, or is trouble that's easy and/or fun to resolve.
[0] One such game that sticks out in my memory is the OG Deus Ex game. At 1024x768, the font for the in-game UI switched from what -at lower resolutions- seemed a lot like a bitmapped font to what seemed a lot like a proper vector font. The difference was dramatic.
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