this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2026
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I feel like that's not true. But you've gotta try. If you're streaming it, chances are it's not really any better. 4K Bluray (or rips of them...) though? Yeah it's good. And since film actually has 8K+ resolution old movies can be rescanned into high resolution if the original film exists.
Supposedly Sony Pictures Core is one streaming service that can push nearly 4K Bluray bitrates... but you've gotta have really good internet. Like pulling 50-80GB in the span of a movie runtime.
You're probably aware of this since you mentioned bitrate, but a lot of 4K streaming services use bitrates that are too low to capture much more detail at 4K compared to a lower resolution. A lot of games will recommend/effectively require upscaling (DLSS/FSR/XeSS) to achieve good performance at 4K. All of this is still maybe better than 1440p, but it shows 4K is still kind of hard to make full use of.
Witcher 3 is the bane of my existence at 4K. Even with DLSS it runs like ass on my 5070 ti.
I wish they didn't feel the need to fake it with upscaling. In my experience upscaling looks like shit every time, whether it's a video or game. Most of the time a good 1080p video with good bit rate will look way better than a 4k upscale.
For video, bitrate is definitely king. 4K high bitrate just gets insanely large. I opt for 1080p bluray quality when available over 4K usually. I looked into AI upscaling for video recently and it can be pretty good, but it's a technology that changes fast so I'd rather store the original resolution and upscale in real time later (if at all).
For games, I find even FSR2 upscaling from 1440p to 2160p is excellent as long as it's implemented properly (i.e. scaling the 3D world and not the UI), and FSR3/4 even better.
Not true on paper but true in practice. Most people don't buy/use Blurays (or any other physical media) anymore to the point that retailers aren't even bothering to stock them on the shelves these days. Their days are certainly numbered and then all we'll be left with is low quality 4k streaming.