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Pemalite said:
Zkuq said:

According to the latest Steam Hardware & Software survey, about 65 % of Steam users have 1080p as their resolution. 1440p comes next at 13 %, and it's followed by 1366x768 at 5 %, and only then do we get 4K at a little over 2 %. I'd say that if tests need to get rid of one resolution, it's something other than 1080p.

1080P as a resolution is mostly CPU bound these days as GPU's have grown exceedingly capable.

Pardon my ignorance, but wouldn't that imply there being only minor differences, if any, between different GPUs, especially between generations? A quick look reveals that this is definitely true for some games, but for some games, there is a noticeable and significant difference compared to older GPUs. (I searched for RTX 4090 reviews and looked how it fared compared to older GPUs.)

Pemalite said:

Even budget 27" monitors are coming in at 1440P now.

For GPU tests, 1080P is a redundant resolution.

This is my personal preference, but I'm currently quite happy with 1080p and on the other hand not too happy about the performance cost associate with upgrading to 1440p (let alone 4K). This, of course, implies having to get a more expensive GPU to get the same performance, which is an idea I'm not too fond of. This is not affected by price of 1440p monitors but by that of GPUs instead. I imagine not a lot of people think about it this way, but I would guess that given a limited budget, many people would agree with me if they thought about it more. From this point of view, I don't think pushing for increased adoption of higher resolutions is really justified.

Pemalite said:
Zkuq said:

Well, it's still 1080p performance that counts for those laptops, if that's the case. Anyway, I'd be wary of dropping 1080p tests anyway, because they seem to be in surprisingly much use. I mean, I was expecting to find lots of 1080p usage with Steam, but the actual number just blew up mind.

The thing with 1080P testing is that review outlets are concentrating on desktop components, not notebook.

And there is a reason for that... Notebook hardware is often not equivalent to the desktop model.
I.E. Notebook RTX 3060 will perform worse than the desktop RTX 3060.

And what skews things even further is that different manufacturers impose different TDP's, clockspeeds and memory configurations... There are Notebooks where a RTX 3050 Ti will outperform the 3060 in another device because it has higher TDP headroom and/or more VRAM than the 3060.

Thus when it comes to 1080P and Notebooks, we need to benchmark notebooks individually and judge each notebook on it's individual merits.

This is certainly a fair point, and one I can't really argue against. I suspect 1080 is still a very popular desktop resolution as well, but unifortunately Steam Hardware & Software Survey doesn't really seem to provide, and at least a really quick search doesn't really give much better results either.

However, looking at Amazon's top sellers in monitors, a quick look at the monitors reveals 1080p to be an incredibly popular choice, even among gaming monitors, and in fact there's only one 1440p monitor on the list (well, there are probably more, but I couldn't see any among the top monitors, and Ctrl + F revealed only that one). A similar glance at some popular online retailers in my country also implies that 1080p is still a very popular resolution, although you can see much more 1440p monitors on top sellers lists here. This is certainly a fairly narrow look at the situation, but it definitely seems like 1080p still is a very popular desktop resolution, and that's even excluding monitors for non-gaming purposes.

Pemalite said:

Consequently... 1440P can be supersampled down to 1080P for a very crisp image.

If you are going for the low-end, then it's going to be 720P... For CPU testing, it's also going to be 720P as it removes all possible GPU bottlenecks.

Thus I would argue, even if you have a 1080P display like in my notebook, 1440P performance is still relevant.

Maybe if you have a top-tier GPU, but that seems extremely wasteful for anything else unless the game is CPU-bottlenecked. To each their own of course, but I imagine supersampling would be just about the last thing I would try in any game unless the game looked absolutely awful without it. There's usually better use for processing power than supersampling (although I've got to say that this is coming from a guy who would gladly sacrifice resolution in favour of just about anything else graphically).