Many, many people on these forums and beyond very happily use 24", 27" or 30" LCDs as their daily computing screen, and I can't imagine you'll find any of them that will tell you that it's too big to be practical. Most people I know who use engineering/design programs professionally have two big, high resolution screens, and swear by them for productivity and ease of multi-tasking (and want larger/higher resolution ones at that!).
I think you're missing the point here...
With engineering work, you don't need to oversee the entire screen at once, so bigger is always better... instead of maximizing your windows, you can just make them 'large enough' and arrange them however you see fit.
With gaming or watching movies, you DO want to oversee everything, else you're missing important details.
At work, my screens can't be big enough... but at home, I don't want an uber-big screen, because I wouldn't be able to play games or watch movies when sitting at the desk.
That's because at work, I just need to work. At home I need a 'multi-purpose' setup.
I think you've created a bit of a straw-man by branching off into arguing that high resolution doesn't necessarily look more realistic.
I don't do straw-men.
What I said is a very simple and obvious point: you have to prioritize different ways of improving visual quality.
High resolution can only look as good as the material it is receiving from your video card, of course, but sticking to lower resolutions and screen sizes doesn't change that in any way, shape or form, and looks worse to boot![]()
Since TV and movies (the most realistic content we have) also stick to 1080p resolutions at this point, I don't think it's unfair to say that games sticking at 1080p and instead concentrating on delivering more realistic content is unreasonable.
