Will you find RTX 3050 cards in the wild, let alone at prices 25 percent lower than the 3060? We're not optimistic. But if you do, be warned: even with proprietary tricks like Nvidia DLSS in its pocket, the RTX 3050 will still generally leave you fiddling with settings menus to get modern games running at 60 frames per second... at 1080p resolution. This is a card that, for the most part, maxes out at 1080p for reasonable PC performance, not only for the newest games but for some of the best games of the past seven years.
900p Vs 1080p Vs 1440p Vs 4k
But the above and below charts emphasize something that is critical in any graphics card benchmarking tests: how a GPU handles overkill settings and higher resolutions so that a given workload is GPU-specific and can be compared across cards. That default scenario sadly assumes that you have a lot of choices in the marketplace. In the here and now, however, seeing that the RTX 3050 disappoints in all-settings-maxed 1440p situations isn't necessarily useful; you can't expect to buy a rival card that is either cheaper or more likely to be future-proof.
If you're still reading this review, you're likely eager to just get a working graphics card with 1080p performance as a baseline. Will the RTX 3050 cut it? In a word: mostly. I have found that its strengths emerge on a case-by-case basis, but there are few legitimate 1440p applications.
To simplify the 1080p vs. 1440p debate, it is best to look at individual factors representing these resolutions. For instance, it is pretty easy to run modern AAA games at 1080p even if you have lower-tier current-gen hardware. On the other hand, running games at 1440p will require considerably more powerful GPUs and CPUs.
As you can see, by bumping up the resolution to 1440p, the PPI drastically increases, resulting in better sharpness. This is the key difference between 1080p and 1440p displays. If the display size is always the same, 1440p will always be sharper. Keeping this in mind, 1440p will allow you to increase the display size without losing any crispness.
In general, 1080p only looks good on 24-inch or smaller displays. Go any larger, and you will start to see pixelation (individual pixels become visible), which diminishes the quality of on-screen content. On the other hand, 1440p allows you to rock a much larger display with acceptable sharpness. For instance, a 27-inch 1440p display has a better PPI than a 24-inch 1080p display.
Put simply, running games at 1440p resolution will shave quite a few frames off. Compared to 1080p, to drive a 2K display, the GPU has to do a lot more work. Maintaining 60fps on 1440p will be harder for your GPU than doing 1080p 60fps.
The next factor you need to consider is the cost of the display. Unsurprisingly, 1440p displays are more expensive than 1080p displays, if we keep all the factors like refresh rate, panel technology, and response time the same.
However, if money is not a concern, look towards monitors with high refresh rate, low latency, OLED or IPS panels. But if money is tight, a decent 60Hz 1440p TN will be a lot better than a 1080p 60Hz TN panel.
That said, for competitive gaming, it makes sense to get the fastest panel you can afford regardless of the resolution. For instance, a 1080p 240Hz display will give you a competitive edge over folks with 1440p 60Hz monitors.
Considering image sharpness, hardware cost, and gaming performance, 1440p is the best all-around resolution for gaming. It is the sweet spot between blurry 1080p and ultra-sharp but expensive 4K. 2K resolution is also not as heavy on the GPU as 4K, so frame rates will be high, provided you have modern mid-range/high-end hardware.
Considering the Yakuza games were 1080p 30fps on PS4 Pro at 4.2Tflops and 900p 30fps on base PS4, the fact a Series S at 4Tflops runs it at either same resolution but double the frame rate or 1440p and same frame rate as PS4 Pro is quite impressive imo.
The GPU in the Xbox Series X has 12 teraflops of power, while the PS5 GPU has 10.28 teraflops of power. There is also the Xbox Series S, which is an entry-level next-generation console designed to run the same games at the lower resolution of 1080p or 1440p, while the Xbox Series X and PS5 are designed to run games at 4K resolution.
There was a 42% power differnce in GPU between the PS4 and XB1, and it only resulted in 900p vs 1080p.The differnce between the PS5 vs XSX is like 16-18% or something, and the differnce will probably be minor between most games.
I've heard next gen consoles may have some sort of DLSS equivalent, but thus far we aren't seeing it. So I am skeptical about next gen consoles having that feature.720p is also pretty low even for DLSS, you start to have weird visual results if the native resolution is too low. Hence, maybe stick with 1080p at least.Last, the next gen consoles can still do vastly superior visuals than last gen with 1440p+ and 60 fps. I think Gears 5 demonstrates how easily the Series X can handle an impressive looking game with ease, 4K/60 fps vs dynamic 1080p/30 fps. And still has overhead for visual upgrades.
true, probably stick with 1080p minimum . Gears 5 looks great running on series x, but once we start seeing linear game sor open world games with 10 times/50 times the detail and all the texture enhanements, post processing effects exc , the dlss and ssd will have to kick in. First few years we will see native 4k, but i think after that alot of first party might start adopting dlss like features. I know xbox series x has it in it's architecture,directmL. sure the ps5 has it to.
While you could of course simply scale up 720p to fill a 4K screen, the results often aren't flattering. Games at this resolution tend to look blurry and soft, with the scaling tech to preserve sharpness absent on many TVs. 1080p and above content fares better, so that's what we'll be targeting here - at a minimum, around double the pixels of the Steam Deck's internal display. A true native 4K is going to elude us except in simple titles, but we should be able to push image quality quite a bit regardless.
First up, we're going to be looking at some older and less demanding games - seventh generation console titles are often a good fit thanks to meagre performance demands and solid gamepad support. Half-Life 2 is a good example, running at 4K 60fps max settings without MSAA. Similarly, Deus Ex: Human Revolution hits 1440p60 just fine at medium settings, where image quality is reasonable, performance is solid, and the artwork holds up - and you can even go for 4K 30 if you prefer. Valkryia Chronicles and Dishonored both perform in a similar range at default settings at 1440p, though framerate dips may prompt you to opt for 1080p instead for a better 60fps lock. Both titles do hold up perfectly fine though and even compare favorably to their eighth-gen console ports - a big win for the Deck. Other games of a similar vintage fare worse though, such as Alan Wake, which requires 900p to hit 60fps, and Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which is probably best played on Deck at 1080p30 - equal with PS4 and Xbox One, but not ideal for a 4K TV.
Steam Deck does offer tools to push image quality a bit further on a 4K set, most notably AMD's FSR 1.0 scaling which produces a small but noticeable detail improvement over bilinear upscaling without introducing excessive aliasing. Modern console games that use AAA also perform well, where the Steam Deck is generally capable of 900p30 gameplay with the default graphical settings. This includes Horizon: Zero Dawn, Tales of Arise, and Grid Legends, though some games, like Dirt 5, are a bit heavier so 720p30 is a more suitable target. Image quality is predictably not great on the Steam Deck with these sorts of games, with most titles coming in with a resolve similar their Xbox One versions. FSR 1.0 can help somewhat and generally has a more pleasing interaction with TAA-style techniques than older post-process based AA, but it can only do so much here. One interesting point is Final Fantasy 7 Remake, released a few weeks ago, that runs on Steam Deck with fewer compilation stutters than Windows PC users face.
Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, we have games that use second-gen reconstructive techniques that use aggressive temporal upsampling to produce higher image detail, namely Unreal's TSR and AMD's FSR 2.0. God of War has an implementation of AMD's new upsampling tech, but the results are a bit mixed. Image quality in static or slow-moving areas of the screen is good and looks similar to 1080p, despite rendering with less than half the pixels internally. The downside is that the image is covered in popping and fizzling disocclusion artifacts when Kratos no longer obscures a screen element or moves quickly, while artefacts also crop up in hair and particle effects. 1080p 30fps is just about doable with FSR 2.0 on balanced mode, but ultimately I preferred the cleaner presentation of a lower resolution.
So at least in these titles, the results are somewhat mixed. God of War's FSR 2.0 reconstruction isn't quite good enough to really deliver a convincing 1080p picture, while Ghostwire is too demanding to allow us to target a 1080p output in the first place, though its reconstruction is very good. I would have loved to have shown off Deathloop as well, but that title has some long-standing stability issues on the Steam Deck and currently fails to load past the title screen for me.
However, updates to aid docked play are arriving regularly. For example, it was originally impossible to run games in SteamOS's gaming mode at resolutions higher than 1280 x 800 for instance, even when connected to a 1080p or 4K display. After a June update however, it's now possible to set the display resolution to anything between 640x400 and a full 4K, although this applies to both portable and docked play and may need to be changed per title, which I had to do for our testing. 2ff7e9595c
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