For this photo, I tried to mirror the image quality of the display as closely as possible.
(There’s also the vain hope that it will somehow improve my game by a few percentage points, but that’s a story for another time.)
A little back story: since December 2014 I’ve been running with a Dell P2715Q, a 27-inch, 60Hz, 3840×2160 IPS display that was a substantial upgrade from the U2711 display I had previously. It’s pretty nice, with a few caveats: since my primary usage is with the display attached to my MacBook Pro, running it a native res means things get pretty unreadable unless I’m pumping up the size of everything. It’s fantastic when using a scaled resolution (I use a tool called EasyRes to switch between resolutions quickly), as it gives the quality of a “Retina” 2560×1440 display (3840×2160 downscaled to half that), making everything as crisp as the freshest iceberg lettuce.
But I don’t usually use it at native res, because things tend to slow down a bit, and the fans are audible all the time. I bought the best graphics card that Apple offered at the time, so maybe the Oculus CEO has a point when he says he’ll offer VR on the Mac when Apple decide to put a powerful enough GPU in their machines. (Stringent heat and power requirements mean that probably won’t happen in the MacBook Pro lineup anytime soon, as much as it pains me to say that.)
So I run my wonderful series of pixels at a non-Retina 2560×1440 when plugged into my Mac, even though text looks worse that way, and I have no more screen real-estate than I did with my previous screen.
My PC is a different story entirely. I like to think I have a pretty great graphics card in the GTX 980, which lets me run whatever resolution I like a a near-constant 60 FPS. And because I hardly play anything other than Dota, which runs on the Source 2 engine, it means I can run that game at the native res of my monitor without getting any noticeable frame-rate drops. Newer games like Dragon Age Inquisition, Fallout 4, or The Division are more of a toss up – I can either choose between maxing all the settings at a lower resolution, or turning down the fanciness for more resolution, and what’s “better” mostly depends on the game.