1080p Movies on 1440p Monitor doesn’t exactly look terrible, but it looks best on a native 1080p resolution monitor. 1080p on a 1440p causes unbalanced scaling, making it look pixelated or blurry.
1080p Movies on 1440p Resolution Monitor – Is It Good?
Resolution is one of the significant things to consider when buying a monitor, especially for gaming or graphics works. Before upgrading to a 1440p monitor from a 1080p monitor, you may need to consider if your graphics card can barely even manage 1080p gaming at 60 FPS, or if a 1080p looks bad on a 1440p monitor.
Hardware Issues
An integrated GPU or a very weak graphics card can manage typical computer tasks such as Microsoft Office, browsing the internet, watching videos, movies, and just general computer use that does not require much hardware strength at 1440p. So, as per graphical unit or hardware systems, you won’t face any issues.
Scaling Issues
However, 1080p movies do have inherent issues on a 1440p monitor. Even though 4k (2160p) monitors do not have the same problems as 1440p. As 2160p (4K Resolution) is exactly four times 1080p resolution, for every pixel in 1080p, there are four pixels in 2160p. So, the ratio recreates four times bigger, and presto. It almost looks exactly like a 1080p display causing no problems whatsoever.
But for 1440p you need to use the algorithms to upscale the image so it doesn’t look exactly as it was intended on the disc. As a result, it fills the pixel gaps with approximations based on what is around it, which can potentially cause distortion or blurring.
Nevertheless, most of the algorithms are quite advanced, and this effect is less noticeable than many compression artifacts from streaming sites like Netflix.
1080p Gaming on 1440p Monitor
For gaming, it’s a whole different story. Even though the transition between 1080p and 1440p seems quite small, 1080p games are just blurry. If you got a 1440p monitor, try downsampling 4k to 1440p instead of 1080p for better results.
Most of the games look pixelated and not way less sharp than the native resolution. So, the same game running at 1920×1080 resolution looks much better on a 1080p monitor than it a 1440p one.
To Conclude
Upgrading your 1080p monitor to a 1440p one might not be worth it if your hardware components do not meet the required specifications. Also, 1080p movies and shows can not display as smoothly as a native 1080p monitor. The same goes for gaming, and you can try changing the render scale to 75% for better results.
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