What has bigger impact on fps in gaming? Refresh rate or resolution?

[Iovan Iorgovan]

What has a bigger impact on your fps in gaming? Refresh rate (60hz vs 144hz) or resolution (1920x1080 vs 2540x1440)?

or, in other words...
Which of the following setups will give me better frame rates and performance in gaming?

1920x1080 @ 144Hz
or
2540x1440 @ 60Hz

Just bought a 27 inch, 2540x1440 @ 60Hz IPS panel from Acer. The colors are simply beautiful but I can see some tearing and sluggish motion in some fast paced games. Also... coming from an old school 17 inch 4:3 monitor... this 27 inch seems humongous in the first day. I wanted a big monitor for a long time but this seems a bit of an overkill.

Is it worth compromising and switching to a 24 inch TN panel with possibly worse colors but less tearing and better response times?

Thanks in advance for your advice

 

[Barney6262]

Resolution will impact performance significantly if you do not have the graphical horsepower to support it. Your 1440p monitor can display 60FPS but your graphics card may struggle to actually produce 60fps as the resolution is so high.

Refresh rate on a monitor has very little (to no) impact on fps, it is simply how much fps the monitor can actually display.

If you think 1080p is a fine resolution (like most people do as you have to look closely to see each pixel) then the 144hz monitor would be best as it needs less power to run but still displays high fps.

If you are running anything slower than a GTX 770 I would not recommend a 144hz screen as even then, with decently high settings in a game, you will struggle to get more than 60fps.

 

[Moonstick2]

What GPU are you running?

Do you get a triple-buffering option to avoid tearing?

 

[Iovan Iorgovan]

I'm using a GTX 760 from Gigabyte. I'm asking about resolution affecting the fps because I noticed that on 2540x1440 I'm getting anywhere between 80-95 fps whereas on 1920x1080 I'm getting 60-95 fps. (60 in the most demanding environments).

 

[Iovan Iorgovan]

I'm not really inclined to switching to 1920x1080 since the game I play mostly is World of Warcraft, and playing it at 2540x1440 is Heaven, since it gives you more room for all the UI modifications. If all I have to give up for playing on a 1440p IPS panel is ~20-ish fps then fine. So be it! I just hope it's not more than 20 fps...

As I'm concerned, high resolution is more important than playing at 144Hz.

 

[Iovan Iorgovan]

So... if I want better FPS the thing to upgrade is my GPU, not my monitor, right?

 

[Moonstick2]

I'm not sure I follow all your descriptions of tearing and FPS and the like as they seem contradictory in a lot of ways, but in short a GTX 760 is underpowered for 1440p gaming. So if you love your 1440p IPS monitor and 1440p works for you on WoW, but you're unhappy with the performance and you can't fix it through graphics settings, then a new graphics card is the way to go. Either get a second GTX 760 if your motherboard supports SLI and you want to mess around with that, or get a replacement card around the GTX 780/970/R9 290 level.

Having said that, maybe you should post up the rest of your PC specs in case the issues are more down the the CPU or RAM.

 

[Iovan Iorgovan]

My rig is:

i7 4790k (with the BOX cooler) - planning to upgrade the cooler in the following months
16GB of DDR3 1866 Mhz, (2x8GB Kingston HyperX)
Intel 530 series SSD 180 GB
Gigabyte Z97-D3H motherboard
Gigabyte GTX 760 OC Windforce 3X - thinking of upgrading to GTX 970
Corsair CS650M 650W power supply unit

Considering WoW, things are fine at the moment... 60-95 fps with everything on Ultra on 1440p is quite decent.
The problem might arise in other games...

 

[Moonstick2]

If everything's fine, keep it all as it is.

If it's not, the GPU is the only (relatively) weak part of that system.

 

[Iovan Iorgovan]

Thanks for the tips. And yet, ... I still can't decide on the monitor. I'm mainly choosing between the Acer CB270HU (27 inch IPS 2560x1440@60Hz, 6ms) and an Asus VG248QE (24 inch TN 1920x1080@144Hz, 1ms). There's too many variables in the equation: resolution, fps in games, response time, frequency, tearing, flickering, blurred motion, screen size... and money isn't even one of them.

The colors on the Acer are beautiful and I'm worried they'll suck on the Asus TN panel. I'm not a hardcore gamer, used to raid hardcore WoW a few years ago, so I'm not sure if I even need that 1ms response time.

What would you guys do?

 

[Barney6262]

Like I said before, I own the 27 inch version of the Asus monitor and can say the resolution increase would not help me. however the FPS increase is noticable if your card can run games higher than 60fps.

On my screen the colours are VERY bold and you can increase the contrast if needed (although I actually decreased it as it was fairly strong to begin with). The VG monitors usually take a bit of tweaking in the monitor settings to get them looking their best but by default they look great.