Can You Answer My Dumb Questions? (Non-native res & dci-p3 vs sRGB)

B

BenWah

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 21, 2014
Messages
98
#1) How bad is it to game at 1440p on a 4K monitor?

I've always read that playing at a non-native res is worse. How much worse? Is this still true on newer displays?

Reason for question: I'm sure I'd game at 1440p and never 4k but I could occasionally benefit from 4k in non-gaming applications.
The price diff between 1440p and 4k displays is smaller than i expected.
I'd be content to just get a 1440p display if there is a significant compromise gaming at non-native res.


#2) Long ago, I read advice to avoid DCI-P3 displays unless your primary application uses this, because otherwise the colors would be oversaturated and unrealistic.
The games and applications I use are not DCI-P3, they are designed for sRGB.
I don't care about movies.

Question: Is this still true? I have seen that some DCi-P3 monitors also have a setting for sRGB, does this solve the problem, and if so do most DCI-p3 monitors have this ability?

Reason: Sure are a lot of DCi-P3 displays out now, wondering if I still should avoid them or not.
 
Last edited:
Running the monitor at non native scaling introduces some amount of processing lag. Not good if you hope to go pro in CS:Go. May not matter if revisiting Myst is more your style.

Don't know anything about the rest of the question - GL
 
1) Really depends on the monitor. Some of them are pretty crap at scaling so it looks real blurry. Others are quite good. An example of one that is good would be LG's new 27GN950. TFTCentral says its 1440p scaling looks almost as sharp as a native 1440 monitor. Though also to note is that if you get a newer high end video card, 4k gaming is not off the table.

2) Many wide gamut monitors do have the ability to do sRGB emulation. How good it is varies monitor to monitor so you want to check on it. The LG I listed can do it, the Alienware I own cannot. That said, I find the crying about it overblown. For desktop applications like web browsers what you do is have a proper ICC profile loaded (the monitor should come with one) and they will use their internal color management to properly map the sRGB content. So websites, Youtube videos, etc all look correct. For games, well I like the wider gamut actually. I find that the extra saturation looks good. It makes the world more vibrant and colorful.
 
Non native res will always have a bit of blur if it cannot be integer scaled. Using Nvidia Control Panel image sharpening feature can help mitigate this so if you play at 1440p then apply a bit of that. Nothing stops you from running at say 2880x1620 or 3200x1800 either by adding it as a custom resolution if you want something in between.
 
1) Unless you only want this monitor for gaming and can get a higher refresh monitor for the same price with the lower res, I wouldn't worry about scaling that much. It will be worse than native, but you probably won't even notice unless you look for it on most modern displays. And for a 27" monitor for example you always have the option to go down to 1080p with integer scaling instead until video cards catch up to run even newest games in 4k (they mostly have already but are yet to be widely available).
 
BenWah said:
#1) How bad is it to game at 1440p on a 4K monitor?

I've always read that playing at a non-native res is worse. How much worse? Is this still true on newer displays?

Reason for question: I'm sure I'd game at 1440p and never 4k but I could occasionally benefit from 4k in non-gaming applications.
The price diff between 1440p and 4k displays is smaller than i expected.
I'd be content to just get a 1440p display if there is a significant compromise gaming at non-native res.


#2) Long ago, I read advice to avoid DCI-P3 displays unless your primary application uses this, because otherwise the colors would be oversaturated and unrealistic.
The games and applications I use are not DCI-P3, they are designed for sRGB.
I don't care about movies.

Question: Is this still true? I have seen that some DCi-P3 monitors also have a setting for sRGB, does this solve the problem, and if so do most DCI-p3 monitors have this ability?

Reason: Sure are a lot of DCi-P3 displays out now, wondering if I still should avoid them or not.
Click to expand...
Before I answer, let me mention that these are not dumb questions at all. They are well justified sources of doubt, that many advanced users don't know well. That said:

1) While scalers can be really good, you should usually expect a degree of blurriness due to a) the lower resolution and b) the fact that it doesn't line up well with the 4K pixel grid. You can partly solve this by playing at 1080p on a 4K monitor, as then each pixel will be quadrupled and scaling can be absolutely perfect. That doesn't mean all 4K monitors will perfectly scale, again, because some scalers are better than others. But technically, there's little to nothing really to do when you go 4x from 1080p to 4K - it's a best-case scaling scenario. Depending on the size of your monitor, you could also consider using a different aspect ratio that maintains native resolution: for example, I use a 27" 2560x1440 monitor, but regularly game with a custom 21:9 resolution of 2560x1080. This means that while the resolution is lower, I'm essentially just cropping above and below to get an ultrawide format but I'm not scaling, because I maintain the horizontal dimension - therefore, it all looks native (because it "is", with an asterisk of being cropped native).

2) As others have mentioned, normally monitors will bring ICC profiles that you can switch in and out from. That said, the complaints about color saturation are greatly exaggerated. My monitor, a Pixio px275h, has a %95 DCI-P3 coverage. I used a simple colorimeter (Spyder) to create my own ICC profile - takes 10 minutes - and it created a perfect sRGB color profile. Colors only look saturated when they're supposed to be, not all the time. The monitor looked fine from factory, but creating your own ICC profile usually improves things further. Bottom line - most monitors will deal with this for you and Windows 10 is getting smarter about how to manage this (nowhere perfect yet though) so you really don't have to worry about this unless you're doing color critical work (image or video editing). You will not get crazy psychedelic colors just because you buy a DCI-P3 monitor, nobody would want that. I would, though, suggest you invest in a basic colorimeter (the cheapest Spyder is $150) as you'll improve every single monitor you own for the rest of your life.
 
On 4K you can use GPU integer scaling and play at 1080p. Both AMD and Nvidia should have it at this point. I can confirm it on Nvidia though.
1440p look worse imho. The only real upscaling I like is DLSS 2.0 and in games which support it it is the best option.

As for wide gamut colors: DO NOT BUY MONITOR WITHOUT sRGB EMULATION!
Color management in Windows is completely broken and if you want to avoid headache get one with sRGB emulation.
Especially those monitors which have sRGB mode have even more accurate colors than native sRGB monitors - it is easier to correct gamut in software than build perfect combination of W-LEDs and color filters.

Some games look great in DCI-P3 while other look atrocious. Some applications have fairly good CMS (Color Management System) support while other application do not. Then you can run in to other issues like banding, gamma calibration being lost, applied twice, etc. If you do not have to use CMS anyway then it is better to make sure you never have to.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top