Of course 1440p is your favorite gaming res, but I'm kinda stunned there are as many 4K gamers as 1080p ones in PC Gamer's ranks

by adminApril 10, 2026037

The moment I hit publish on this poll I knew what the top result would be. I don’t care what the Steam Hardware Survey has to say about the dominant resolution in its database, I knew that PC Gamers would be 1440p gamers in the majority.

And lo, it has come to pass. Most of you fine folk who responded to our last weekly poll have lined up behind the resplendent resolution of 2560 x 1440.

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favourite gaming res results — (Image credit: Future)

But you can see (if you squint or click the fullscreen button) that we’ve got a result from all of our respondees that corresponds to 22% each for 4K and 1080p gamers. I’ve got to admit, I was expecting the number of people gaming at 4K to be far lower than that.

If you get into the details, you can see that there are more people gaming at 1080p in terms of the raw numbers. We had 6,476 readers answer the poll, and of those 1,445 sided with 1080p and 1,416 with 4K. But that delta does not even add up to one percentage point.

I expect that, with the rise of upscaling, and DLSS and FSR both being actually really good at making an already good-looking 1440p image look great when upscaled to 3840 x 2160, it’s far easier to get high frame rate 4K gaming than ever before. Because I doubt many of the 4K respondents are actually playing at a native 4K res.

You 1080p gamers, however, probably are playing at 1920 x 1080. So, I guess you win the moral victory there.

But if 4K users are upscaling from 1440p then you can probably bump up the 36% majority who game at 2560 x 1440 by a fair way.

The next biggest share went to all the ultrawide lovers out there. Cheers to you, my 21:9 droogs. The 3440 x 1440 res garnered 14% of the vote and, proving there are precious few laptoppers out there, only 2% clocked in at the modern gaming laptop res de jour of 2560 x 1600.

I chucked in the weirdo 1920 x 1440 resolution for our Jacob Fox and his strange Counter-Strike 2 stretchiness, but interestingly there are another 181 people who match his penchant for peculiar competitive pixel positions. While a solitary 1% of voters showed they were the elite esports pros, still gaming at 1280 x 960.

Gotta keep them frame rates high, amirite?

This week it’s one of those divisive, contentious questions. One that could divide families, split up relationships… Where does your PC live? And maybe more importantly, if it’s not on top of your desk, why not?