240Hz vs. 4K vs. Ultrawide
I moved from a dual-monitor setup to an ultrawide one. The transition has been good and bad.
240Hz
Refresh rate is the single most important factor in competitive gaming. Going from 60Hz to 144Hz is massive. You should absolutely do it right now if you’re gaming on 60Hz.
Going from 144Hz to 240Hz is less noticeable, but still absolutely worth it. In fact, 240Hz alone has been pulling me away from my ultrawide monitor, because it only runs at 120Hz.
League of Legends: It’s much easier to recognize animation leads at 240Hz. That means it’s easier to tell when your abilities are complete so you can cast another, and it’s easier to get out of the way of enemy abilities as they wind up. Last hitting is also easier. I get about 10% more last hits on 240Hz than on 120Hz. Lastly, it’s just all-around easier to grasp things in a chaotic team fight, particularly keeping track of your priority target.
Overwatch: You’ll find yourself landing headshots consistently more often. I’m in the top 1% of my rank for weapon accuracy and headshot percentage. Like in League of Legends, team fights are easier to track. You won’t lose sight of your priority target in the middle of a close-quarters brawl.
In short, if you play competitive games, you simply can’t do without 240Hz. It will be the best $300 investment you ever make. If you seriously can’t afford $300 then going with a $180 144Hz monitor is still a world of improvement, but I’d always recommend a 240Hz if at all possible. You’ll advance at least one tier from this advantage alone.
4K
Go with 4K, not ultrawide, if desktop activity and web surfing are your primary concerns. It’s not that you’re more productive, or that you have more real estate (although you technically do), but simply that you’re much happier with the crispness of the image. Furthermore, a good 4K monitor will be half the price of an ultrawide.
Going from 4K back to 1440p has a serious downgrade. In fact, after using 4K, it’s hard to tell 1440p from 1080p because they both look terrible.
Competitive games: Whether it’s 1080p to 1440p or 1440p to 4K, I haven’t noticed any competitive edge at all from a higher resolution. However, there, could be one that’s just overshadowed by the handicap of running at a lower refresh rate.
Adventure games: I don’t find that 4K helps with immersion, and, as soon as I am immersed, I don’t feel like I even notice what resolution I’m running at.
Productivity: I simply love 4K for coding and web surfing. Going from 1440p to 4K is a massive step up in quality of life for desktop activity. The 4K has a whopping 50% more pixels then the 1440p ultrawide. In 4K, images in chat and social media are extremely crisp, as is the text. There’s nothing else like it, and I wouldn’t hesitate for a second to pick 4K over ultrawide if desktop activities are your goto.
Ultrawide
It’s hard to find a review of ultrawide monitors that’s not a glowing recommendation. This is what convinced me to buy an ultrawide monitor in the first place. However, my personal experience has been awash at best.
Competitive games: Overwatch doesn’t support ultrawide resolution, so unless you want to lose vertical pixels, you’ll be playing with black bars on both sides. In that case it’s the same screen size as my 25" 240Hz monitor, at a lower refresh rate with more response latency — absolutely terrible. League of Legends supports ultrawide, giving you a nice view of incoming ganks, but at the cost of it being harder to move the viewport since the edges of the screen are that much further away. However, I do hear that ultrawide is nice for battle royale games.
Adventure games: This is where ultrawides shine. I do feel incredibly immersed when playing The Talos Principle or Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice on this monitor. If these type of games are your jam, I’d go with ultrawide over both 4K and refresh rate.
Productivity: The ultrawide feels like more room, but in reality you’re still going to use two windows side-by-side, and all that extra width ends up just being white space in each window. Secondly, most photos and videos are still 16:9, so you’ll have black bars on each side of the screen when viewing full-screen. Lastly, the 1440p resolution just hurts to look at when blown up across 34 inches, it’s no crisper than a 1080p at 25". Definitely go with 4K.
About me
I’m a programmer and monitor-phile. I play League of Legends and Overwatch semi-seriously. In 2014 I used four 1080p monitors arranged in a grid. Since then I’ve owned about eight different monitors. Recently I moved from a dual-monitor setup, one 1080p 240Hz and one 4K 60Hz, to a single 1440p ultrawide at 120Hz. My experience has been mediocre, which is contrary to most reviews I’ve read online, so I decided to write this article.
