Question Does your 1440p monitor downscale 4K and make the picture look better?

[igor_kavinski]

MSI Optix MAG274QRF-QD Review

The MSI Optix MAG274QRF-QD is an excellent gaming monitor. It has a native 165Hz refresh rate with FreeSync and G-SYNC compatibility to reduce screen tearing. Mo...

www.rtings.com

This monitor supports almost everything from the Xbox Series S or X, but since its HDMI ports don't support HDMI 2.1 bandwidth, it doesn't support 4k @ 120Hz gaming. Even though the native resolution of this monitor is 1440p, it still accepts a 4k signal and downscales the image. It results in a sharper image than if you were to send a native 1440p signal.

That's a pretty desirable feature, no? Getting picture quality better than even native!

Yes, I know it's mostly for people with plenty of GPU headroom like the 4090 but it could work for older games that are not so hard on a mid level GPU these days. If you are sure that your monitor supports this 4K downscaled sharp, please reply with its model number. Thanks.

 

[carrotmania]

It has an AI chip in it to do this?
Cos 4k > 1440p is not linear, a quick and dirty downsample will NOT look better. 4k > 1080p "might", but still doubtful.

 

[igor_kavinski]

It has the above specific feature. Must be some advanced scaling technology using a dedicated chip for it to fool Rtings.

 

[mindless1]

What am I missing? I mean if your GPU can output 4K @ desired FPS and refresh rate, why would you want to pick a 1440p monitor and downscale that? Because you have multiple sources and some of them are limited to 1440p for acceptable performance?

Does it input 4K, downsample, then use some wizardry to artificially increase the refresh rate even if there aren't (new) frames to do it?

 

[dr1337]

How do you even set that up? The monitor makes a fake 4k input or do you have to go into the driver and setup a custom display output to force send the 4k signal?

4k downsampling AKA supersampling definitely looks better than just running 1440p, but I don't see how this is any different than just forcing SS in the driver/game settings.