What's better a UHD display or a 120hz 1920x1080p display?

[go7hic13]

What's better a UHD display or a 120hz 1920x1080p display?

Trying to narrow down choices and prices on a new laptop. the 120 is smooth and the UHD is fine but they both seem to have their advantages.

 

[jdog2pt0]

Quite honestly it depends on what you plan on doing with it. Personally, I've got a laptop with a 17inch 1080 screen, i7 with a 970m I use for occasional light gaming. I'd take the 120hz over the UHD myself. However, if you plan on doing like picture or video editing, I'd go for the UHD.

 

[jfkeenan]

If you're not gaming get a nice big 4K monitor.
If you are gaming...

1920x1080p @ 120Hz is really smooth but lacks real estate.
UHD display you'll be lucky to get anywhere near 60fps.

Why not split the difference?

I'm running 2560x1440 @ 165Hz with G-SYNC and it's amazing. Nice size desktop, great for web browsing, movies, pictures, etc and buttery smooth frame rates with 77% more pixels than 1080p

Unless you wait for the GTX 1100 Series this summer (rumored) and a 4K 120Hz HDR G-SYNC monitor...

 

[k1114]

I believe they are talking about the laptop display not connecting external so choices would be limited and laptops won't be getting those features all together anytime soon. Because of laptop sizes, 1080p would be fine and is already higher dpi than normal monitors. Going from 60hz to 120 will be a lot more noticeable.

 

[Karadjgne]

Personally I'd go with the 1080p. UHD takes a huge amount of power, 4x what a 1080p requires from the gpu. The 120Hz will put more load on the cpu, but that can be curtailed with settings in games, but the UHD is going to suck juice even in Windows. I'd not expect any serious longevity gaming without being plugged in.

 

[jdog2pt0]

Personally I'd go with the 1080p. UHD takes a huge amount of power, 4x what a 1080p requires from the gpu. The 120Hz will put more load on the cpu, but that can be curtailed with settings in games, but the UHD is going to suck juice even in Windows. I'd not expect any serious longevity gaming without being plugged in.

The refresh rate of the monitor will have no impact on the CPU, only battery life. However, I'm pretty sure the UHD will not only eat way more battery than the higher refresh rate 1080p, but it will definitely have a negative impact on performance due the higher resolution that the system is rendering at.

 

[Karadjgne]

Refresh of the monitor has a high impact on the cpu. The cpu decodes the game info, same info for 4k or 360p. Sends it to the gpu to paint the picture. Gpu puts the picture on screen according to its ability at whatever resolution. For standard monitors, it paints at 60Hz, even if it's trying to paint at 300fps. The cpu still has to supply that fps to meet the 60Hz minimum. If the minimum is moved to 120Hz, that's a considerably higher load the cpu has to deal with, even if the gpu is still trying to paint 300fps. For 120/144Hz monitors, it's mostly the cpu that's any kind of bottleneck, not the gpu, for high resolutions like 1440p/4k it's mostly the gpu that's the bottleneck, especially on lower tier processors.

4k DSR on my gtx970, even in skyrim or metal gear solid, I'm looking at 99% usage to get 60fps. I'd expect a laptop to cook under that kind of pressure. 4k video playback is one thing, can be done on an old GT 710, 4k gaming is a whole different Beast.

 

[jdog2pt0]

Refresh of the monitor has a high impact on the cpu. The cpu decodes the game info, same info for 4k or 360p. Sends it to the gpu to paint the picture. Gpu puts the picture on screen according to its ability at whatever resolution. For standard monitors, it paints at 60Hz, even if it's trying to paint at 300fps. The cpu still has to supply that fps to meet the 60Hz minimum. If the minimum is moved to 120Hz, that's a considerably higher load the cpu has to deal with, even if the gpu is still trying to paint 300fps. For 120/144Hz monitors, it's mostly the cpu that's any kind of bottleneck, not the gpu, for high resolutions like 1440p/4k it's mostly the gpu that's the bottleneck, especially on lower tier processors.

4k DSR on my gtx970, even in skyrim or metal gear solid, I'm looking at 99% usage to get 60fps. I'd expect a laptop to cook under that kind of pressure. 4k video playback is one thing, can be done on an old GT 710, 4k gaming is a whole different Beast.

Bruh I can't tell you how flawed your logic is. A monitors refresh rate has no impact whatsoever on a system (other than possibly drawing more power if it's a laptop). The CPU/GPU are all going to do exactly the same thing regardless of what the display is doing. The GPU is going to pump out as many frames as it can regardless of the refresh rate, unless you have a hard limit set below the GPU's maximum. It is as simple as that.