Even if those "lower settings" are only a few minor tweaks, such as gameworks effects, or extreme tessellation that makes no difference to IQ?
I obviously run textures, shadows, lighting, HBAO etc all at max. Those are the main goodies IMO. They all look so much better at 1440P.
People often run maximum needlessly because they believe maxed means everything.
For a decade we've had games that have high settings that look terrible or reduce IQ and high settings that look great.
DOF/Blur, certain shadow settings, film grain/sun glare, a lot of effects cost performance and reduce IQ and frankly I have to laugh at people who insist on 'maxing' settings by enabling all these things and having less performance to do so.
The one thing I'm starting to really really dislike about game devs is constantly including settings that reduce IQ. I mean devs spend time screwing around with motion blur, enable it by default and 95% of people hate it. FXAA, how a single dev has ever included this in a game I don't know, how a single dev enables it as the default AA method is beyond comprehension. Using sweetfx to sharpen FXAA in for instance FO4 gives a night and day difference in IQ for almost invisible performance cost while they enable light rays that are frequently inaccurate and have a needlessly high performance sapping setting for it.
Gamers really aren't doing enough to be vocal about it, we should have petitions going that tell devs to stop using FXAA without sharpening it afterwards because it looks ****** terrible with the blur. Probably 90% of gamers, meh, 99%, won't go and mess with sweetfx and injecting settings into a game and are frankly not getting the experience they deserve. The mental thing is something like sharpening FXAA is going to be 20 mins work for a dev after maybe 5 years making a game... yet it's ignored.
I'd take 1440p, push for 70fps + average and disable DOF/blur/excessively performance killing shadows, awful post processing effects and terrible quality AA/glare/over the top effects over 1080p and setting everything to high with no regard for if it actually looks good or not.
So many people believe very high or ultra automatically looks better than high/medium because logically it should... in reality this isn't true for every effect and in most games these days.
