1440 looks nice up close, on smaller screens, but it’s definitely not got the pixel density to compare to 4k on larger panels. Both have their place and use cases.
I realize everyone has their own preferences but I opt to run my PS5 in 1080p more often than not, and that's on a 55" 4K panel. To me the smoother experience is completely worth the trade off in density. I hate running things in performance mode and getting 20-30fps. It looks choppy, feels sluggish, and is an inferior gaming experience for just about every type of game in my experience. On desktop I also prefer to force 1440 when playing on the TV. That display can only do 60hz but still feels better to me. The desktop card can put out a much better 4K experience, but I still feel like it's not worth the fps drop. I'll take stable 60fps vs a wobbly 40-50 all day.
What ps5 games are you playing that get 20-30 fps in performance mode? All the ones I own, which is almost every major ps5 title, has performance modes that either do 60fps dynamic resolution, 1440p60 wrapped in 4k, or 40fps at 4k120, or dynamic 4k60. Some get 45+ on average with unlocked framerate and dynamic refresh rate.
What desktop card do you have? Must be a pretty pricey one to outperform the ps5 at 4k. My 2070 is smoked by the ps5. I’m going to upgrade to the 5070 when it comes out.
Does the ps5 still not support native 1440p? Is that why you pick 1080p?
Most games don't give the option of resolution, it's just "performance" or "quality" in the game menus. So I set the system to 1080p in the settings primarily because the PS5 thinks my display won't support 1440, which holds water because I have to force it on my desktop. I don't have the option to force on my PS5 I don't think. Do I?
And yeah, I get awful jittering on just about every quality mode but I don't think I've tried it since setting it to 1080. I probably should! The ones I know for sure were horizon FW getting CRAZY slow on quality, that was def 4K because it was one of the first games I got. Ghost of tsushima was a little better but iffy in entire sections of the game. Returnal was probably the best, and the only one I can remember not forcing to run in performance mode. Lords of the Fallen is most recent and it is BAD in quality mode. It's rough even in performance mode in big sections, but makes sense because it's one of the first UE5 games available.
My GPU is a Gigabyte 3070 of some kind. For all the hate it got for having low RAM (justified) it still smokes most games I run but again - I do 1440 almost exclusively, and disabled ray tracing for the lost part. It's a giant leap up from my 1070 which honestly was fine, but could only do 1080p 50-60fps for most games when I finally upgraded, and def struggled with some of the newer games.
Ahh you said performance mode was getting 20-30, I think that may have been a typo?
Horizon gets a pretty solid 30, but it’s much better at 40 for sure in the performance mode. Ghost you should just run in performance mode also, it’s a PS4 game, so it can crank the graphics pretty high and still get a solid 60fps. I don’t think I’ve ever even tried the quality mode in that one. Returnal is 60fps no matter what if I remember, but I could be wrong. Most games run at 60 in performance, which is why I was confused when you said 20-30. Performance mode will also automatically adjust internal resolution while still outputting 4k in most cases, so you still get your interface at native resolution. Demons Souls for example, runs at 1440p60 with 4k interface and it’s so gorgeous.
Oh yes that's my fault, I meant quality mode for anywhere I said that I don't get 60 fps pretty much. I feel like I get 50-60 in performance mode on horizon but some of the more lish sections are pretty bad. I run basically every game in performance mode because to me the smoother experience in play is worth the dip in graphical fidelity.
Yeah Horizon really struggles when you’re trying to get 60, it’s much more stable at the 40fps 120hz mode, but that only helps like… 3% of people at most.
Yeah I think that’s definitely what we should thrive to achieve, 4K @ 30fps is stupid, frames per second are way more noticeable than pixel density on most gaming setups