it seems to me that while 4K may be standard in other fields (e.g. media, movies), in gaming, many prefer to trade resolution for higher FPS [1]. The middle ground (1440p) seem to be quite popular lately among 'normal' gamers, but I think that in competitive gaming many still prefer to stay on 1080p and achieve very high FPS. Competitive gamers also do a lot of other 'strange' things, for example I saw people who select a 4:3 aspect ratio and stretch it over 16:9 instead of running 16:9 natively [2]

[1] https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/steam-july-survey-re...

[2] https://medium.com/@lurppis/the-16-9-vs-4-3-aspect-ratio-arg...

1080p benchmarks are helpful for those of us on 144hz monitors at least

Mine is "only" 1080p, but at 144hz it still makes my GTX 1080 sweat in just about every game I throw at it

Definitely not every card under the sun. I have 1060 and it can't run WoW (game from 2004) at 60 fps 1080p unless I'm lowering some settings.

>Definitely not every card under the sun. I have 1060 and it can't run WoW (game from 2004) at 60 fps 1080p unless I'm lowering some settings.

I have 2x1080 ti in SL with a really nice watercooled and overcloked rig (64gb of the fastest RAM I could buy, best possible CPU and SSD). This was pretty much the best possible system you could have to play WoW a year ago and I STILL get 21fps in this weeks set of Timewalking dungeons. I have spent hours upon hours tweaking settings and it usually runs fine but this week was terrible.

WoW is CPU bound and is very, very poorly optimized for modern systems.

Well, in your case it's definitely a CPU bottleneck. In my case I just gradually increased settings and when I'm turning antialiasing to highest possible setting, my FPS drops a bit below 60 (to 50+) and GPU is loaded by 100% according to task manager, so I suppose that it was a GPU bottleneck. I'm playing with mostly ultra settings but not highest antialiasing, it provides 60 FPS for most single-player scenarios and GPU is loaded at 80-90%. Of course in raids and dungeons FPS might drop below 30 and that is CPU bottleneck indeed, can't do anything here. My friend recently bought 9900K and 2080 and experiencing FPS drops in raids, it's almost funny.

I get 200 fps in the open world with everything on ultra and view distance set to max. I get 30-40 in certain areas like Org. The issue is that the timewalking dungeons from BC are especially old and there was something odd going on with them this week - almost everyone I ran with complained of a similar issue.

That sounds like a CPU bottleneck, or else very poor optimization. I cannot imagine WoW is that demanding on a GPU.

There's CPU bottleneck, but there's also intense GPU requirements for high settings in some scenarios. At least according to task manager GPU was loaded at 100%, so I suppose, it was GPU bottleneck.

It is when you're in a raid and there are dozens of spells going off all around you. They have however made some tweaks recently, but it's still not incredibly well optimized.

Sounds like particle system batching and/or overdraw issue. Probably this could be solved by more intelligent batching and culling, or by throttling particle count/resolution when the scene gets too busy.

You've solved it!

> lowering some settings

To be picky, those settings aren't from 2004.

To he honest, I think 4k is more relevant in terms of benchmarks than it is in real-world impact. At the monitor sizes most people are using for gaming, it's barely discernible from 1440p.

The push for 4k gaming does a lot more for hardware manufacturers who want to sell the "next big thing" than it does for actual users.

I have a 4k monitor, and to me games look much better running in 4k than 1080p or 1440p..

Particularly 1080p just looks like blurry ass, the textures have no detail, objects in the distance are harder to identify--

Even 4k still looks blurry compared to the real world..so I think we need 8k :)

For FPS games the best experience is still at 1080p with 120Hz+ display IMO. Once you try it you can't go back to 60Hz, it legitimately feels choppy.

> [...] $279 for a xx60 class card, and which performs like a $379 card from two years ago.

...with 2GB less memory

1440 @ 144Hz seems to be the sweet spot (at least for now).