Monitor Confusion QHD 27” vs UHD 32”

[He$$eeTant]

I am a bit confused. I’ve recently been using a 32” TV at 1080p and for everything except sitting about 3-4ft away it was rubbish. It did however confirm to me I have the desktop space for a 32” monitor.

This week I bought a 27” QHD monitor. It’s lovely and all the areas where the TV failed are perfect - word, excel, coding in notepad++ and photographic image manipulation. But I am suffering from thinking should I get the 32” UHD instead? I have a couple of days to decide.

The monitor I’ve bought is AOC - Q27G2U/BK Quad HD 27". The one I would swap to is SAMSUNG U32J590 4K Ultra HD 32" LED Monitor.

The area I am struggling is will the 4k run ok at 4k or will I have to run the monitor at QHD? If I run at QHD will it be ok when I am sat 45cm/36” away or will it be pixelated like the 32” tv was and will it display some programs badly due to “scaling” - to be honest I don’t even know what scaling is but what I’ve read o line tells me I need to be aware of it and the issues it brings??

Your help would be appreciated

Thanks

 

[Fnord Velkor]

I use a BenQ 32" 4K monitor - I run Elite at 2560x1440 - no need to run at 4K.

I would recommend getting a 4K monitor

P.S. You def want 32" rather than 27" - no doubt about that.

P.P.S. Windows lets you scale the desktop so that your icons etc are not teeny-weeny likkle things.

 

[DjVortex]

Whether your PC will be able to run the game at 4k depends entirely on how beefy it is. ED is notoriously heavy to render, so you'll likely need a quite beefy GPU to run at 4k at a good framerate.

(I have an RTX 3080, and ED:H runs very nicely at 4k, and the GPU doesn't even get warm. But that's a quite beefy GPU. But what I can say is that it looks razor-sharp and really cool.)

P.P.S. Windows lets you scale the desktop so that your icons etc are not teeny-weeny likkle things.

Windows' scaling system indeed works quite well. (It doesn't scale the entire image, as in making all pixels larger. The pixel resolution remains at 4k, what Windows does is to make the size of things, like windows, fonts, icons, images etc. larger so that everything with look bigger yet still use the full 4k resolution, ie. it will not scale pixels. For example fonts will still look razor-sharp. It's just that it uses bigger fonts by default.)

When I bought a 4k display for the first time, I let Windows use its default 150% scale, and I used that for quite a while. However, I eventually found everything to be perhaps even too big, so I switched to 125% scale. Then, after many months I found that to be needlessly big, so now I'm using it at 100%, ie. completely unscaled. If you have only used a 1080p display and then try a 4k display at 100% scaling, everything will look really tiny (after all, it's literally four of your old 1080p displays stacked in a 2x2 grid). However, you get surprisingly quickly used to it, and you really, really start to appreciate the extra real estate that you get, and any scaling larger than 100% will start looking awful.

 

[Morbad]

The one I would swap to is SAMSUNG U32J590 4K Ultra HD 32" LED Monitor.

A distinctly mediocre display and only 60Hz. I wouldn't recommend it for a gaming display, even if one was dead set on that size and resolution.

The area I am struggling is will the 4k run ok at 4k or will I have to run the monitor at QHD?

You can run the monitor at native resolution, but depending on what you are trying to play and how powerful your GPU is, you may need to run those at some lower internal resolution.

If I run at QHD will it be ok when I am sat 45cm/36” away or will it be pixelated like the 32” tv was

A 32" 4k display has four times the pixel density as your TV and considerably higher pixel density than your current 27" QHD display. It will be sharper/less pixelated than either.

and will it display some programs badly due to “scaling” - to be honest I don’t even know what scaling is but what I’ve read o line tells me I need to be aware of it and the issues it brings??

Scaling is exactly what it sounds like. When you push images to a panel with a fixed number of pixels, any image that does not have the same resolution will need to be scaled up or down to fit.

Running at non-native resolutions generally looks worse than native, but modern GPUs have excellent scalers and the downsides to running non-native are far lower than they used to be.

 

[He$$eeTant]

Well I swapped it for a 32” UHD screen. Feels better but tbh still meh. I love VR, putting that headset on was the last OMG moment I’ve had for years. Monitors are just not that exciting. However I’ve managed to ween myself off solely playing games in VR and have learned to enjoy a day sat at the screen, VR and HOTAS can be quite intense whereas a screen, cup of tea, couple of biscuits and an Xbox controller is more relaxed.