What games and resolution do you run out of curiosity?
Hi! I have two Gysnc displays, one 144hz 2560x1440 (competitive FPS, more *twitch* style gaming), and one 3440x1440 120hz for single player, more cinematic style games that support 21:9.
Personally I find framerate more important than some visual effects that are less noticably different in motion, if there is a trade-off to be made. Shadows are a big one of these for me, as well as excessive AA. Eye of the beholder and all that, but lower AA and shadows at say 130-140fps looks and feels better to me compared to say 60-90fps at max AA and ultra shadows.
And I find the differences can indeed often be that large. If you look at reviews of GPUs and you see lots of 1080p Ultra, 1440p Ultra, 4k Ultra framerates, what I observe is that often you can achieve the '1080p' level framerates or better at 1440p with mixed settings. Keeping Textures, draw distance, and things like AF and occlusion set to max, while finding some others to ease off on.
The implications for me personally are easing back from a GPU bottleneck back to a CPU one in many instances, even with a heavily OC 9900KS, I still cannot reach 144fps in a lot of titles even with completely stripped minimal settings. And of course settings that low are hideous to look at and only useful for seeing where the CPU limits are for a particular title.
One such example that I noticed most severely were the back to back AC entries : Origins and Odyssey. They are not alone however, there are a number of titles where it's difficult to lock 144 such as Hitman 2, Far Cry 5/New Dawn, Metro Exodus, Control, etc, and I can imagine Cyberpunk 2077, AC Valhalla, the PC release of Horizon Zero Dawn, etc will only continue this trend.
It's a very esoteric problem, as it's mostly a philosophical and subjective consideration. Many people will be totally fine with 60fps, hell many are ok with 30 and dips on consoles. I prefer to push further when I can, and that's led me to dumping a series of very good CPUs along the recent past, either by replacing them or using them for non-gaming roles, including 8086k, 2700x, 3700x, and 3900x, as they all fell short of my goals. 9900KS follows this trend, although at 5.2/5.3Ghz I don't think I can currently invest in any observably superior option until Zen3 and/or a future Intel release moves this bottleneck further up. I do only have 4133Mhz ram currently, well 4000@4133, so there is some potential there to perhaps shoot for 4400.
3000 series Nvidia will just make this more obvious, as raising the GPU bar will probably make the typical 1440p Ultra comparisons of tomorrow look like the 1080p Ultra comparisons of today, and for mixed settings framerate chasers such as myself, only slam into CPU walls all the sooner.
All of this is mostly academic if someone is running 4k, or any form of 60hz, or any GPU where they are more weighted towards GPU bottleneck earlier. I'd even say that's probably 99% of PC gamers period, if not 99.9% going by deeper analysis. Numbers of hardware configs to be practically chasing 144hz in AAA gaming are vanishingly small, and I have to imagine a significant portion of those will be connected to some form of 60hz display, or running 4k, which even with a 2080ti or Titan RTX is a hard ask. It's why I looked at the 4k/144hz monitors and although tempting to a degree, I don't think I would find enjoyment in having to cut settings far enough for my 2080ti to even hit 100fps in many titles. I'd have to imagine for eSports it would be amazing though, as a lot of those types of players play scalable titles with deliberately stripped settings which WOULD in fact make 4k/144 possible. Another niche of a niche of a niche.
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