The PS4 Pro supported 4K, but it was an all or nothing approach. Either your display output at 4K resolution, or it was 1080p - there was no support for anything in between.
Despite some reports to the contrary, it has now been confirmed that the PS5 is the same. There’s no support for 1440p right now, but it turns out that doesn’t have to be the case forever.
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Japanese site AV Watch learned this when speaking to Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Masayasu Ito and Hideaki Nishino. While Nishino indicated that there’s no technical issue with implementing 1440p in the future, Sony isn’t supporting it out of the box because it wanted to focus on TV support first. TVs, after all, typically max out at 1080p or 4K, rather than the middle ground of 1440p.
That’s not to say your 4K screen can’t support 1440p, and there are advantages to be had at running a console at lower resolution. For one, high resolution takes a lot of power and lowering it frees up some processing for other important features like higher frame rates and ray tracing.
And those advantages mean there is some demand for that. According to the Steam Hardware Survey for October 2020, the most popular display resolution is 1080p (1920 x 1080) which is used by a crazy 65.67% of gamers. That’s followed by 1366 x 768 used by 9.14% of users, and then 1440p with 6.75%. It’s not a huge figure, but that’s still an awful lot of people. Considerably more than the 2.3% that game in 4K too.
Microsoft also supports native 1440p gaming, and has done since the days of the Xbox One X. Needless to say the Xbox Series X and Series S both support it out of the box. Sadly seeing how many people use it isn’t quite as easy as it is on Steam.
But if you’re getting yourself a PS5, and would rather be playing it on a 1440p monitor rather than a 4K TV, then you need to make your voice heard and hope others are doing the same. Just be polite about it, because you know how some people can lose their temper when they don’t get what they want.
