Actually my old 22" stopped working earlier and i had to switch some 10 years old 17" i had been saving in storage just in case. I have to say it felt painful until i later bought current 24". Actually, if i had not had gift card to Apple store i probably would have bought one of those 27" ones from ebay - Apple/Eizo 27" are so ridiculously expensive that it does not make any sense and except for the Eizos' the Apple store didnt really have anything i wanted. It was weird - 300€ gift card that just couldnt buy anything useful by itself.

No expensive mechanical keyboard, no premium headsets, no GPU's...as i dont use Apple products myself - that was surprisingly difficult gift card to use.

Higher resolutions allow you to see more of the game on the screen if the game supports that, which can be quite nice with many games. With other games the amount shown in the viewport is the same but they may use higher detail in the models. Or they might use a combination of the two, it really depends on the specific game in question.

My primary display is a Dell U3011 30" @ 2560x1600 (16:10), and for games that support the native resolution of my display it is quite breathtaking to behold. I've got 2 Dell 2405FPWs @ 24" 1920x1200 as well, which is what I used for gaming previously and it was very good as well for games that support the native resolution.

For games that are lower resolution it is nice to have on a bigger display though too even at the lower resolution, and the monitor scales things up better the more pixels there are in the hardware.

Of course what you say about higher pixels per inch being sharper is true at an equal distance from the eye. The larger screen gives a wider field of view though at equal distance and DPI which is nice.

As for a larger display being necessary, well.. I'd say that playing games isn't a necessity nor is even owning a computer necessary really. ;o) Buying a bigger or higher resolution display isn't about it needing to be necessary, it's about perceiving it to give benefits that are considered a worthy return for the money spent. When I bought my 24" displays the benefits it gave to gaming were fantastic. Necessary? Not at all. Enjoyable and worth every penny? You bet! Earlier this year when Dell put the 30" U3011 on sale it allowed me to stroke that piece of hardware off my perpetual wishlist, and I have to say that I wasn't prepared for the level of awesomeness that ensued with gaming. Massive eyegasms that must be experienced and can't be conveyed in words. ;o)

As for computer hardware, I had been loafing along with 10 year old hardware that was running on fumes and I decided it was time to build a new PC in February. Not just for gaming mind you but for a variety of other stuff that is CPU intensive, etc. as well. I put together a new system with an AMD FX8350, ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2, Radeon HD7850, 32GB of Corsair Venegeance RAM @1866, and various other odds and ends for about $1000 total, well within my $1200 budget. The rest of the hardware I already owned, and the new monitor was a separate purchase before that (and not just for gaming either).

Having said all of that, I would agree with you that it is a bit expensive to spend a lot of money per year just for gaming alone and I wouldn't spend that kind of money on gaming either. In my case I needed new hardware and bought according to my computing needs (not just gaming). This machine will probably last a decade modulo a couple random upgrades here and there, so money well spent.

If someone has $1000 burning a hole in their pocket though and watches Dell's "days of deals" when they come around, and picks up a U3011 display, as long as your CPU and video hardware are capable of pushing 2560x1600 I guarantee you will foam at the mouth and start twitching from how awesome the gaming experience is. :) But yeah, kind of crazy to spend the money JUST for gaming. Fortunately I have other reasons for it so the gaming just bonused out from those. :)

Take care. I can say categorically that whenever you do end up able to indulge yourself in a 30" display, it's going to blow your mind. I am still in a daze and I've had it now for 4 months. :)

1280x1024 is 5:4 which is indeed one of the strange ones. I always opt to use 1280x960 (4:3) if I have to use 1280. I keep resolution as the last thing to lower as well.

I couldn't agree more. Another problem with high resolutions is my eyesight has taken a hit. Now I need to wear reading glasses because over the years I had to have "The highest resolution possible". Well said +1

My rig is over 5 years old and still lets me play @high/max settings (with very rare exceptions). That's because rendering resolution is 1280x1024. Of course I had an opportunity to plug a 1080p display (23" or something). Nothing impressive or actually the other way around - disappointing. Say level of detail is the same=max, I see what can be treated as a circle more or less (@1280x1024) and you see hell knows what which is too rough around the edges (@1920x1080). Game geometry is not yet ready.

People who build monster rigs are hobbyists; their behavior doesn't have anything to do with how much "bang for the buck" they can get ;p

Nitpick: the resolution mentioned above - 1280x1024 - is not 4:3, it's 5:4. Its 4:3 equivalent would be 1280x960. As 1024 is not neatly divisible by 3, no 4:3 resolution exist with the same height but adjusted width, the closest below and above are 1364x1023 and 1368x1026, none of which I have seen, the closest I have seen is 1400x1050.

To be fair I have never really understood what's so great about higher resolutions. The only reason why am I playing on 1080p is because it doesn't have any noticeable impact on my performance - the moment it does, resolutions goes down to 720p. And I can hardly see a difference. The picture is not as sharp and more pixelated, sure, but ... Well, that's that and I can't say I really care. What is important to me are effects like sunrays etc. and texture + model quality, if they can be adjusted. So first I decrease resolution, and only after that I tough any of the other settings.

Oh, since I'm playing on TV at 1080p, I do have a fairly hugeass screen so it's not like the pixelation would not be noticeable.

How do you know there's any correlation between those? I think old age and poor genes is 99.9% of the cause that gives you poor eye sight, not sitting in front of high resolution.

My bad, that's correct. Still, I wouldn't want 5:4 either.

How big of a benefit it is depends on the game and if and how the game takes advantage of it. With a game like Torchlight, it just looks more high definition and high quality, and fits a bit more on the screen. Doesn't impact game play in any major way but it is noticeably nicer. With FPS games however, like Far Cry, GRAW, GRAW2, and other FPS/TCS games that support the higher resolution one benefit that I get is an enemy at a given distance in the game is comprised of a certain number of pixels and the higher the resolution of your display the greater the number of pixels are present in everything on the screen, making things take on greater detail. Close up things just look better outright being greater detail, while things that are far away that might be only a few pixels at a great distance such as a potential long distance snipe are now a well defined human body instead of a black square. I can now spot enemies further away in-game with far greater clarity than ever before, and make some serious long distance snipes that much easier.

That should really be obvious though, take aerial photography or satellite photography of the planet surface for example. The higher the definition of the camera, the more detail you can make out of what is on the ground caught by the camera and the more likely you are to make out what it is.

All of those extra pixels and detail require more CPU and GPU horsepower to render, that's a given of course. But if your hardware is capable of the load that's not a problem. HIgher resolution is always better because it always provides a more detailed view, or a wider field of view or a combination of the two compared to low. Having said that though, an intermediate resolution may very well be considered awesome enough. I consider 1600x1200 to be the "sweet spot" where games take on a whole new level of realism where "pixelation" starts to become a thing of the past (even without anti-aliasing). But as you edge it upward to 1920x1200 and beyond to 2560x1600 and also enable the highest levels of anti-aliasing it starts to look like you are no longer even using a pixel addressed display anymore.

So if the question someone asks is "is it better?", well "better" is a subjective term but I would have to say categorically "yes". If the question is "is it worth it?", then it depends on the individual person's current computer capabilities and what it might cost them to ramp it up, what their income is and whether it is affordable or good use of the money, and many other individual factors. There is really no right or wrong here. Whatever an individual person thinks is awesome, or is "good enough" is truly what matters for them - whether or not something else out there could be perceived to be better or not. The more we scale things up, we reach a point of diminishing returns at exponentially increasing costs that make it not worth it.

For the average die hard gamer though, I would recommend a 24" 1920x1200 display, which is 16:10. They're available for super cheap all things considered and are the happy medium "sweet spot" IMHO if one has the coin and the video card capable of maxing it out (which isn't hard these days). Don't go breaking the bank just for gaming though, it can be an endless upgrade game. :)

OP, nobody is forcing you. Do as you please.

Lol oh I know no one is...and it's really just personal preference when it comes down to it.

I just don't understand some people's reasoning lol

Some people notice more than others. Same with "jaggies" and poor textures and whatever else. Everyone's different.

Personally I care more about having a perfectly crisp image than I do anything else, so high-res and AA are my big priorities. I turn other stuff off way before I lower resolution or AA.

Actually I quite love my 27" screen, it's still a bit small, but it's okay I guess.
The screen before had 24" with even more pixels. I would have used that still but the Problem was some Thysanoptera crawled behind the screen and died there.
First World Problems I guess.

Anyway, I'm playing some of the good old games on my 17" Laptop as well as on my gaming rig with 27" while most of the time the image feels crisper on the laptop it's still a pain in the ass-like too small for me.
That said, I have to agree with xyem's statement.

Before I started using a LCD high resolution monitor my eyesight was aces, 6 years later I'm wearing reading glasses. Sorry, I don't believe in coincidences. I've read somewhere that (most) computer users don't blink as much as they should while gaming. It might be older age, it might not. Only time and research will tell.