Okay, if we take it vlealry on a resolution basis, yeah. 4k amounts to a feeling you get when you go to turn off your PS5 at the button and notice how insanely detailed and how absolutely crystal clear the menu is, something that doesn't matter when you're ten feet from the TV. I would prefer games to go 1080p or less native than upscale and loose image quality but there is a lot more to the question. I agree though, I recently looked through my screenshot from the last few months of gaming and only one has really clean, defined detail up close which is Cyberpunk 2077 and I never even noticed how incredibly clean it is or thought that game was leagues better in graphics than the rest, infact the best parts of games I thought looked the best and "next gen" and the reason I took some of the screenshots like FF7 Rebirth final cutscene are horrendous up close, you can barely make out any detail the pixels on the characters in the background or identify them yet the brain fills the gap when you're at a distance and you see something far more detailed than the chunks of pixels up close. 

Considering how memorized I was last month playing Yoshi's Island on SNES via CRT/S-video--thirty years after it released--- I'm going to go with graphics.

Shit graphics / pristine image quality makes me think of Persona 3 Reload on the PS5. Running around the city and especially inside the dorm, those areas looked absolutely fucking hideous, and the super-clear image quality running at a smooth framerate at 4k only made the ugly visuals even more glaring.

Shit image quality / great graphics makes me think of how Marvel Rivals runs on my PC. Full of upscaling artifacts everywhere, everything looks pixelated and weird, even then the game's barely able to hold 60fps at 1080p and I still think it looks rather pretty even though the graphics are all on the lowest settings. And this is a competitive game I should be playing at a pristine image quality and high framerate/resolution ideally.

So yeah, I'll take good graphics.

Resolution/IQ is a clear cut concept whilst "Graphics" is a more broad term to define a game's look. So what is "graphics" ? The art style/artistic direction taken by the devs and artists ? Is it the raw fidelity of the texturing and the added effect of Ray Tracing, etc ... ?

Because personally, I'll just take a game with an artistic vision that trumps a lower resolution anytime of the week, if it pleases me to begin with.

I agree graphics is hard to define and a tech minded person has a completely different comprehension of what graphics mean than someone casually playing but I just mean the term generally as it was used through the 90's when there was big jumps and you could see the clear graphical update, even though graphics and IQ are now intertwined very heavily. Rouder edges, better textures, more foliage and that sort of thing, not counting artstytle which is getting less clear also with games like GoT. Everyone knows what the term means if they gamed last century or as the kids are now mindbogglingly calling the late nineteen hundreds.  

Yeah, I know the look you're talking about, the Tomb raider 1-3 remake for example, something about the clearness of it just makes you more aware how shit it as a remake. 

We all have different tastes as gamers... So this question will never be clear cut.

But I definitely prefer image quality. A clean 1440P image will beat a 1080P one that uses every rendering trick to dress up a turd.

You game at a PC though, up real close. If you gamed on console at a distance I believe you would see things differently, like literally see things differently. Try gaming bavk 4 feet from your monitor and see how little that 1440p makes over 1080p.

However would you choose 1080p with ray traced lighting/shadows over 1440p with baked lighting/shadows?
1080p with PBR or 1440p with flat lighting?

We're not talking about dressing up turds, a turd would look even worse in 1440p :p

I game on everything, I own everything.

I have a large computer monitor.. Not a small 27" or mid-sized 32". - So at 4 feet there is still a large discernible difference between 1440P and 1080P.
On my TV in the living room, I too can also see a massive difference between 1440P and 1080P.

1440P is just a superior resolution.

Don't take me as someone who is naive when it comes to gaming on other platforms, this is primarily a console gaming website, so obviously that is one of the draw cards of me being a part of this community.

I would choose 1440P every single time... Especially with HDR and double especially if I get to run at 144hz or more.