What monitor resolution is best for gaming?

This isn’t a simple question. It depends on your budget, the type of games you like to play and how powerful your gaming system is.

However, instead of coming up with an inherently incorrect objective answer, we’re going to go over the things you should consider before deciding on the best monitor resolution for gaming for you.

You’re going to need to ask yourself some questions still, in order to work out which resolution is ideal, but the structure below should help you understand what's important.

Regardless of how powerful your system is, there’s going to be a trade-off between resolution and framerate. Essentially, which do you value more? The game looking spectacularly detailed or the game running ridiculously smoothly?

Despite this choice being subjective and therefore impossible to pass authoritative judgment on, we can provide some guidance thanks to the fact that different types of games benefit from various aspects of the display in question.

Single player story-driven games, for example, benefit from high fidelity. We're talking high resolutions, ray tracing, global illumination, and all the other accoutrements that make PC gaming so special. Additionally, these things help to create a greater sense of immersion, which suits a strong story-driven experience like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor or System Shock.

However, visual features, especially higher resolutions, are computationally expensive, meaning that it’s very difficult to achieve them at a high frame rate.

The CORSAIR XENEON FLEX is a good option for single-player games, as the ultrawide aspect and bendable OLED panel help to fill your field of view, immersing you in your virtual worlds. Additionally, the superior contrast of OLED technology results in colors far more true-to-life than other panel types.

On the other hand, there are some games that do not benefit from such visual additions, with higher frame rates being strongly preferable. This is the case with highly competitive games, such as VALORANT and Counter-Strike 2. It’s been proven that higher frame rates help improve performance, which is the name of the game for competitive FPS.

Many players, in fact, like to turn down the visual settings of these competitive shooters to both ensure a consistently high frame rate, and to remove extraneous visual features for less distraction. It’s a puritanical way to play for sure, but it gets results. Many pro gamers sometimes set their aspect ratio to 4:3 instead of the now-standard 16:9, this goes to show the lengths some will go to guarantee peak performance.

The best option for such players is the new CORSAIR XENEON 27QHD240. The refresh rate goes all the way to 240Hz with a 0.03ms GtG response time. This means you’ll always have the latest visual information with no noticeable delay, allowing you to perform at your best. If your system struggles to provide the 1440p resolution at 240Hz, you can always adjust the resolution to consistently achieve top performance.

For those who spend time in both single-player, and competitive games, 1440p is a great sweet spot between the parochial 1080p and the opulent 4k+ resolutions we’re seeing more and more of these days.

So, no, there is no ‘best’ resolution for gaming, at least not for everyone. However, now you know what to consider next time you’re shopping for a monitor or upgrading your system:

• Competitive games want high refresh rates
• Single-player games want high resolution and settings

Check out our full range of gaming monitors over at our official retail website.