When watching Netflix and at the start it's sometimes buffering the stream and the resolution changes up you can see the difference between the bumps in resolution no problem, there is compression but still the difference in resolution is blindingly obvious! Higher resolution matters, looking forward to 4K, for the those that can't tell the difference, at least you'll save money.

"Really close"? No, i sit in the ideal distance. Sitting too far away from the TV as a "solution" to removing resolution issues is not a solution at all. There is an ideal distance for every screen size; it takes both your eye health and the ability to absorb pixel detail into account. If someone is sitting far enough to not notice the difference, than they are sitting too far; and that's their problem, in more ways than one. Not only will it hurt your eyes in the long run (too much strain by unconscious effort) but you'll also be missing out on graphical detail.

That 42" TV you talk about should not be "across the room". It should be ~5.5 feet in front of you. (less than 2 meters)

Glad to be in that 1%.

I've actually got a 46" TV which I'm sitting about 6foot from. I live in the UK, "across the room" isn't actually that far :p

I can definitely tell higher resolutions in most cases. SD vs HD is a no brainer but 30 fps vs 60 fps is where it gets complicated.

I've been trying to get people to understand this for ages. Thank you.

Also worth noting is that a difference in resolution in *screenshots* is significantly more noticeable than the difference in active gameplay/video.

So, 99% of people don't own big TVs?

I call bullshit.

then you're roughly where you should..

and it means 720p vs 1080p will be quite noticeable. Unless there's something wrong with your tv lol

Seeing as how we're on this topic, anybody here who, like me enjoys the benefits of 1080p, has tried playing a Wii U game both at a 720p TV and on the game pad? How different did it look and how many visual issues "transferred" to the pad? I don't know any person that owns one so I can't try

After upscaling, I wouldn't be able to tell you what the native resolution of a 720p or 1080p game is. I can tell SD material, but like most people, I needed digital foundry to tell me that PS3/360 games were sub HD natively before I knew that. As do most people. However I can clearly tell SD content both on TV and games consoles.

You will hate playing Wii U games on the pad if you're as sensitive as you say. I find all the artifacts degrading the image quality really annoying. (there's a lot of compression added to the image, see I can see all this, even if I don't really notice the end resolution as much ;)) there's also poor black levels with the pad. It looks infinitely better on a decent TV screen than it does on the cheap LCD display of the pad.

Tbh those beautiful 720p Wii U games look as good to me as anything in 1080p on PS4. Even if they're not as technically sophisticated. Wii U (720p upscaled to 1080p) vs PS4 (1080p native) on the same display is a big part of how I now I can't really discern the difference after upscaling.

There's a lot more to image quality than raw resolution.

I can tell the res..

as for previous gen games being sub hd, that's not very relevant because the games that were sub-720p had a resolution that was still very close to it. Think, for instance, the difference between 720p and 792p. Something like that. And yeah, that's minor..noticeable (I "saw it" the minute i started playing Tools of destruction on PS3, but took me a while to realize what was going on), but minor. Nothing like 720p and 1080p where the difference is nearly as big as 480p and 720p. 

I don't appreciate upscaling, it cleans the image a bit but things are still blurry and jaggied.

edit: I should add that games with art style like Nintendo suffer a bit less. Not necessarily because of general IQ but the lack of detail in all surfaces of "cartoony" games. To use a simple example; if a certain table is merely a splash of red from one side to another, without any holes, scratches, indentations etc, it's not going to benefit much from a higher resolution because there is no "detail" to bring out. On the other hand, a table that tries to come as close to what a real table looks like, then it'll need as much detail as possible; and in order to convey that detail, a high resolution is needed. Because the "detail is in the pixels".