[Brybry]

There's nothing wrong with 1080p gaming though.

You can get a $200 to $300 microcenter cpu+motherboard+16GB DDR5 bundle [1], then $300-$400 GPU, and you'll be able to play nearly every game on the market just fine at 1080p.

I'm sure there are pre-builts using stockpiled RAM that are similar $1000 price range.

And if you buy used you can do even better. $300-400 might get you a 5060 or a 9060XT right now [2][3] but if you go used you can get something like a 3080 instead.

I play games at 1080p with a 1660 Ti and, outside of some newer UE5 games that heavily rely on frame gen for performance (Monster Hunter Wilds performance was too poor to play), everything I've thrown at it has been playable and some games even 100+ FPS.

[1] https://www.microcenter.com/site/content/bundle-and-save.asp...

[2] https://pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/#c=594,593&sort...

[3] https://pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/#c=596&sort=pri...

[wing-_-nuts]

There's not necessarily anything wrong with gaming at 1080p, but I shudder to recommend anyone use a 1080p display for productivity. I feel like 27" 1440p is a good minimum experience. I also think that you're doing yourself a disservice going with an 8GB gpu in 2026, even for 1080p

[SapporoChris]

How do you reconcile your comment with the fact that computers were used productively for decades before the invention of 1080p and larger formats.

[bigfatkitten]

Because decades ago, applications didn’t waste anywhere near the absurd amounts of screen real estate that they do now.

Look at how much you can fit onto a 1920x1080 display running Windows 2000 compared with a recent release of GNOME.

[Sohcahtoa82]

Screens got larger and higher resolution, and UX engineers decided we should fill the extra real estate with white space because...reasons? Because they're trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator that finds more than 3 elements on their screen confusing?

Bring back skeuomorphic design. Make buttons look like buttons again.

[acdha]

We also have decade of studies showing that one of the best ways to boost productivity is to give people more screen real estate. This was true in the 80s, it was true in the 90s, and it didn’t really seem to plateau until something like 5-6K displays. The only reason people didn’t use bigger displays back then was due to the cost — a friend’s dad ran a prints go in the 90s and he really benefited from a display big enough to fit a whole page legibly, but that and an 11x17 printer cost enough that he needed a small business loan to buy them. He could justify it on productivity grounds but most people just accepted the hit.

[tree-hugger]

Do you have links to any of these studies? I'm curious since it does not align with my personal experience, I find myself most productive on my single 720p screen -- perhaps I am missing something?

[acdha]

It varies from task to task, and operating system support is a confound, but basically it comes down to how often you have to scroll or switch windows to do whatever you are working on. For example, a print designer might do best with a single monitor large enough to hold the full document they’re working on at comfortable resolution while a programmer might be limited by having their editor and something like a debugger, browser, simulator, etc. simultaneously usable so two monitors might be better than one big one until it’s so big that those all fit.

https://www.jonpeddie.com/news/jon-peddie-research-multiple-...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1375718

http://infovis.cs.vt.edu/oldsite/papers/Shupp-HCI.pdf

[saltcured]

Approximately the same way we reconcile with centuries of scribes being productive with quills and velum?

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

Happy 1080p poweruser and gamer here.

I get to spend less and still play any game at max, and I can actually run 2 instances of some heavy games for local coop using Nucleus (Nightreign specifically).

I use Niri as my desktop environment on linux, zero need for 4k. My screen is 27'' since 8 years ago when i bought it

[Sohcahtoa82]

> There's nothing wrong with 1080p gaming though.

Hard disagree. Once I went 4K, I could never go back to 1080p.

Sure, in an action-packed scenes of close- to moderate-quarters combat, I don't really notice it.

But in long-distance combat? Having 4x the pixels per square inch is noticeable. In slower scenes and cut scenes it's definitely an appreciable improvement.

[SapporoChris]

I had a 4K 26 inch monitor and yes it was nice. But I travel too much and didn't enjoy moving it from place to place. Gave it to a good friend that I was visiting. Missed it for a little bit but quickly got used to using laptop screen. It is to the point that even if I'm in a hotel room with a large monitor/screen I usually don't bother to connect to it.

My point. Once you get better things yes it's easy to think you could never use the lesser tools you once had. But if the incentives are there, it's really not that difficult to adapt.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> I had a 4K 26 inch monitor and yes it was nice. But I travel too much and didn't enjoy moving it from place to place.

Basically the same specs here. 4K, 27".

How often were you traveling with it? I go to a PC gaming event twice/year (PDXLAN) and bring it. I don't think it's that bad moving it to the event venue and back.

> Once you get better things yes it's easy to think you could never use the lesser tools you once had.

You're probably right.

[rasz]

You really need 4K to appreciate all the hallucinated details in games.

[ahartmetz]

>There's nothing wrong with 1080p gaming though

Yeah. 4K is nice for text, but doesn't seem like a great deal for gaming given the 4x hardware requirement and/or weirdo interpolation technologies that may or may not work on AMD + Linux anyway.

[jansommer]

4k is really nice for text. Always annoyed by 1080p screens for work. But yeah gaming - 1080p is fine. I have a 9060 XT and I play games at 4k like Mortal Kombat X, Fallout 4, Evil Within 2, Dead Space Remastered and Wolfenstein: The New Colossus. All 60+ fps on Linux and an ancient cpu.

Doom: The Dark Ages is 1440p and still looks great.

Total waste of money paying so much more for a gpu unless you want local ai, and those weirdo interpolation technologies are a pain in the a* to get working.