2560x1440 Gaming, want to lower the res but it makes my monitor blurry, help!!

[cannyy]

So I've got a 2560x1440 native resolution on my monitor and play a lot of games at that res, but some games start to lag and I feel like I could get a lot better fps at a lower res but lowering it starts to give my screen a blurry effect (I usually try lowering it down to 1920x1080), so I'm wondering if there is a way to remove that blurriness from my monitor and play at lower resolutions for higher fps.

 

[btmedic04]

the only way i can think of to remove blurriness is to play in windowed mode at 1920x1080 or upgrading your graphics card to one that can handle the graphical settings at 2560x1440. whats your current video card?

 

[cannyy]

the only way i can think of to remove blurriness is to play in windowed mode at 1920x1080 or upgrading your graphics card to one that can handle the graphical settings at 2560x1440. whats your current video card?

A 1080ti so I don't know why I can't run some games

 

[btmedic04]

yeah, that should have plenty of power for 1440p. do you have the latest graphics drivers? what is the rest of your system specs? (cpu, ram, motherboard) what games are you playing? what are your graphics card and cpu temps?

 

[btmedic04]

also, case and fans. hows the airflow in there?

 

[Solandri]

The blurriness is caused by the image scaling the monitor does to map a 1920x1080 image onto 2560x1440 pixels. Usually it's bilinear or bicubic interpolation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_gallery_of_image_scaling_algorithms

Try turning anti-aliasing in the game off and playing at 1920x1080. AA combined with monitor scaling can result in excessively blurry images. The monitor scaling often does a half-decent job of removing jaggies, so the image shouldn't look as bad as native resolution with no AA.

Some games have an internal scaling option, where you set the game resolution at 2560x1440, but set scaling to (say) 75%. The game will then render at 2560*0.75 x 1440*0.75 = 1920x1080, but upscale the image to 2560x1440. It will still be a little blurry, but generally in-game scaling is superior to in-monitor scaling. (The only drawback is that there's a small FPS penalty since your GPU is doing it instead of the monitor.)

Otherwise, the only way to eliminate scaling while using the full screen is to switch to an integer factor resolution. e.g. 2560x1440 divided by 2 = 1280x720. It's not so great on a 2560x1440 monitor, but works pretty well on 4k monitors (where the game ends up running at 1920x1080).

 

[drbones8472]

Ok, there is a HUGE difference between Lag and Low Frame Rate. Lag is usually an internet issue and Low FPS is a hardware issue, again...usually. I myself am running 2x 980s in SLI and I have no lag or FPS issues on my 2560x1440p monitor. So if your internet connection is stable and you arent trying to render the game at like 2-4x the screen resolution or something then by all means, you should be fine. But for a quick settings change that should get you some additional fps, turn down your Anti-Aliasing or just turn it off. And turn down the shadows in game. A lot of more modern games now have the option for Render Scaling, meaning it will render the game at 4k or something higher res then your monitor then it will artificially scale the image down to your monitors resolution. This in turn pushes your GPU harder then it needs to be for little graphics quality difference. Try turning some of those settings down and see if that helps. Otherwise if it really is a Lag issue then you need to find out who else in on your network and try to get them to stop downloading or streaming things while you are playing games. ALso, if you are on Wi-Fi and are experienceing Lag issues, try just plugging in your PC to the router if you can. A wired connection should always be better then any Wi-Fi connection.

 

[cannyy]

Ok, so I downclocked my cpu from 4.5ghz back to default 3.7ghz (i7 8700k, its cooled by an NZXT Kraken X62) but I had a feeling that the temps were getting a little high and maybe a possibility of thermal throttling perhaps. (The idle temps were like 40 degrees Celsius and after downclocking back to default speed, its around 30 now but I didn't manage to collect the under load temps unfortunately but I did keep getting warnings when playing games like Battlefield 1 and high processor demanding games, stating that my temps had reached 80 degrees or so. After doing the downclock though the fps seems to have fixed and gone back to a manageable state at 1440p on a few games. However thank you all for the help.