 Okay, so the theoretical benefits of 4K are pretty clear. Pardon the pun. All you have to do is consult the product page for any 4K monitor and you'll be treated to the same stock imagery that has been used to sell higher resolution displays for the last handful of decades. Except for one small problem. A human being with 20-20 vision can discern about 1-60th of an arc second. So that's about 3,600 increments per degree of their field of view. That means that you would need to be 2 1⁄2 to 3 1⁄2 feet away from a typical monitor before the pixels become indistinguishable from each other. Apple brands this as Retina. Now with a 4K display, you could get as close as 1.7 feet for a 27-inch model. But how far do people actually sit from their monitors? Is any of this even a benefit? Why don't we find out? Privacy keeps your money safe by creating secure virtual cards and completing checkout forms for you, saving you time and money while masking your card details. Sign up and immediately get $5 at the link below. ["Skype Rewind"] Would you game at this distance? Game like this? It's like 17 inches. See, it's about 22 to the laptop. Would you lean back that far while you're gaming? For gaming, probably like this. Oh, 21. What the hell is going on? What is this? Ah! Am I okay? Well, we'll get back to you on that. Okay, so as of right now, it's looking like basically everyone in our office would experience a noticeable difference between 1080p and 1440p and about half of the people in our office would experience a difference between 1440p and 4K. However, there is something that we're missing here and that is anti-aliasing. This technology takes neighboring pixels and kind of blends them together and it can make a display seem like it's higher resolution than it actually is. Now, physically increasing the pixel count is naturally better, but good AA, especially in games, can take things like power lines from being a blocky, stay-her-casey mess to a smooth arc. And one of the easiest ways to see the effects of AA is with Windows text. So here we have a 1080p monitor and by default in Windows 10, there will be anti-aliasing on the text. Although if we turn it off, you can see that, that's bad. Let's go ahead and turn that back on. There we go. That's better. But it's not even close to our 4K display over here. You heard it here first folks, higher resolution displays are indisputably better for creating and consuming text content. But games aren't a bunch of small static black lines sitting on a white background. They have motion and your eyes are often moving around as well. So how much of a difference does that extra sharpness actually make? To test this, we grabbed three gaming monitors with the major 16 by nine resolutions and with each of them locked to 60 Hertz with anti-aliasing turned on in our games, we wanna see if our test subjects can tell the difference. Go ahead test subjects. Now we know that our 1080p monitor is only a 24 incher and there's a reason for that that we'll get to later. It's still much lower pixel density than either of the others so it's fine for the purposes of our test. This one- These are drunk. That one's clear. Yeah, this one just, you know, this one doesn't look very good. Yep, this one looks terrible. This one looks like it's a lower res than this one but high anti-aliasing, which makes everything a bit blurrier. This one looks like native res with some anti-aliasing. I do think that one still looks better to me, but switching back and forth to these, this one looks really good as well. Difference between these two is harder. This one's higher res though. So that was pretty much what we expected. But here's the thing, all three of these gaming monitors cost around $500. And that is where we finally get into the main point we're trying to make in this video. It would have been easy for us to demonstrate that 4K doesn't make sense if you don't have a lot of money. It's expensive. End of story. But we're saying that even if you could afford the gaming horsepower to run 4K 60 Hertz and a 4K monitor, that's a predator monitor, it's a gaming monitor, you would be better off buying something else because there is so much more to the gaming experience than the pixel count. So these 1440P and 1080P monitors cost so much because our 4K display is running at 60 Hertz, 60 refreshes per second. Then these two run at 144 Hertz and a stonking 240 Hertz respectively. And I've been a long time believer that refresh rate makes a way bigger difference to the gaming experience than resolution. So we're gonna get doom running on all three of these and see what people prefer to play on in a fast paced shooter. This feels good. You know, it's a game. It's looking good. Oh. I got it. Got it, nailed it. Okay, hold on here, hold on, hold on. Okay. This seems smoother. I like this better than that. Perfect. Got the glory kill, bro. I feel like that one feels better than this one. Meh. I don't feel like this is significantly different from the other machine. Same, it's the same, they're all the same. What? Fascinating. Dennis, what are you firing at? There's nothing I can fire at. Okay, that's cool. I might not be the best person to ask, but to me, to be honest, I wouldn't care that much. I think this one, it shows more detail. I don't know, they are the same by this. Wait, is motion blur on? Can you tell me if the resolutions are the same between the two? Can't tell you a goddamn thing. The frame rate's not keeping up on this one. Well, we could tell you the frame rate's about 180 FPS. On here? Yeah. Then what is going on? You're running on a 60 Hertz monitor. Ah, okay. If I were going to game on something, it would definitely be this, just because it is a lot smoother. The far left one, actually isn't really smooth, but the clarity is not that great. Overall image quality is worse on this one, but does it really matter when things are exploding and you're just aiming at blobs? So basically, if you're gaming in an even remotely competitive way, higher refresh rate, at least to a point, is hands down the way to go. Those extra pixels are just not worth the response time reduction. And the problem is that you can't have both. Every display interface has a limit to how many pixels it can push per second, which is why up until very recently, every 4K monitor has been capped at 60 Hertz, making for an inferior gaming experience outside of some edge cases. Like the argument could be made for gamers who aren't frame rates knobs, that that's a more pleasing experience, or for certain types of games that are more about the cinematics and visuals, whether it's a Red Dead Redemption 2 or a Grand Theft Auto V, where you're not competing against anyone, you could make an argument there. For my part, I wouldn't touch that as long as that is an option, which I guess kind of leads into a side rant here. In the quest to have more boxes checked off on the marketing materials page, many laptop makers have even equipped their gaming models with 4K 60 Hertz panels, either as an option or even by default. And while a higher refresh rate can actually make you a better gamer, if the benefit of more pixels is minimal on a 27 inch display, even our experienced gamer test subjects hesitated being able to tell the difference, it's gonna be way less than that on a 15 inch or a 17 inch one, even if you do tend to sit a bit closer to your laptop. Now, I'm sure there are some of you wondering, well, what if I had so much money that I could wear a brand new pair of Yeezys every day? Could I have my cake and eat it too? Well, there are 4K high refresh rate monitors like this one from Asus. It runs at 120 Hertz or 144 overclocked, it's got 4K resolution, and the HDR support is practically a cherry on top by that point. I mean, it's amazing and it's better in every way than the 1440p monitor that we were just looking at, but it still has a problem, obtaining a computer to put next to it that can actually deliver all of those frames. So this right here is pretty much what you would want for greater than 60 FPS gaming at 4K, and even it struggles to get close to 144 Hertz in the latest most demanding titles. It's got a Core i9-9900K, two RTX 2080 Ti's running in SLI, and a bunch of other baller components. Like it's freaking sick. This is the best gaming experience that I've ever had. But as much as I'd love to recommend that everyone go and grab this setup, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless you really do sh** money. For the tower and the monitor, you're looking at around $6,000 worth of electronics, enough for you to have an excellent 1440p gaming setup with a GTX 1070, and then grab two more for your friends so they can have sick gaming setups too. So I guess this is the bottom line. For competitive play, the higher the refresh rate, the better. And for the affluent enthusiast, the sweet spot is still 1440p 144 Hertz. Since you are still getting the high refresh rate advantages, real competitive advantages, along with a nice clarity bump over 1080p. Are you concerned about a data breach causing your credit card info to fall into the wrong hands? Then check out today's sponsor at privacy.com slash Linus for a free, easy to use service that hides your credit card number. 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