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.

4k on a 1080p monitor