Ultrawide 21:9 monitor, 1080p or 1440p?

[zarugal]

I will shortly be upgrading to a Devil's Canyon i7 4790K CPU, and I have two MSI GTX 970 TF V Gaming GPUs in SLi.

My question is fairly simple, but I am struggling to decide for myself. Is 1440p going to be significantly better than 1080p in all areas. My usage will consist mainly of gaming and movie/tv watching and I wonder if the scaling from 1080p to 1440p in movies is going to result in a worse picture. Obviously for gaming it will look sharper and reduce the need for AA.

I guess what I'm asking is for someone who has a 1440p monitor to let me know what 1080p content looks like when run on a 1440p monitor. Is it a massive improvement, or not a crisp, or just not noticeable?

My reason for going for an Ultrawide monitor is that I'm currently running a triple-screen setup and I'm going to college/university this september where a triple-screen won't be convenient in terms of space and travelling to and from. Also, the requirements to run my triple setup it is higher than even a 1440p 21:9, so I'll be able to achieve higher FPS without sacrificing too much horizontal resolution - 16:9 gaming feels like I'm wearing horse blinders.

Thanks in advance.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

1080 is going to look like 1080 on the 1440 screen (windowed) .... a bit worse full screen as it will be bigger .... kinda like walking up a few steps closer to a ya big screen TV than ya normally sit. The issue with 21:9 is scalling....not all games / programs do it well.

 

[Xyos]

Running games at 1080p on a 1440p monitor looks very bad. It comes out blurrier and less defined than running the game on a native 1080P screen.

You could however run the game in a window at 1080p, it just wont take up the entire monitor, but it will look good.

 

[pasow]

if your concerned about image quality on 1080p content playback, go with the 1080p screen. i have some 1440p displays and while they are gorgeous for 1440p content, 1080p playback is on the muddy side (it will never have that crisp feeling).

 

[zarugal]

So I'm thinking I would be better off going for a 1080p 21:9 that will run 1080p content well and benefit from the better colours of the IPS, and then running AA as high as possible for games instead of getting a 1440p monitor for gaming and 1080p content suffering.
Paying a third of the price is also quite appealing.