[Shank]

I don't really care for 4K personally. I just want "native" because I can't stand looking at blurry interfaces. I can definitely tell when I'm running a 1080p game on a 1440p native monitor and everything is being stretched up. I would take lower settings just to have a clear UI, but I can't do that.

In terms of raw quality with streaming game services, bitrate matters much more than resolution. 4K mandates higher bitrate to deliver the pixels in a timely fashion. All of the services have some upper cap on bitrate, and if you can drive that up (can downstream clients support it?) then you can increase the streamed game quality to be closer to what's actually being output. This is most noticeable in areas where it's extremely dark or shadow detail is important, less so in light settings.

But either way, quality is a combination of the game settings (what is being output to the card), the output resolution (the scale of things you see), and the bitrate (what is being sent down for you to actually view). If these three components are mis-tuned, the quality of the image you're looking at will be lower due to one of those components.

[daemin]

I agree with Linus from LTT where he said it's because the TV and Phone industry have effectively ignored 1440p as a resolution. Movies are either HD (1080p) or 4k and so TV and phone panels are made in those resolutions. Monitors may be 1440p (which I find most useful) but only native PC games actually output at that resolution.

This really goes to show that Stadia is a video streaming platform (i.e. something to help compete with Twitch) rather than a game playing platform.