PS5 gamers are getting a cool graphics upgrade

If like many PS5 gamers you game on a PC monitor, such as one of the best gaming monitors or best curved gaming monitors, you're about to get an important graphics upgrade courtesy of a firmware update.

As Digital Foundry's Richard Leadbetter, published on  Eurogamer, reports, the latest firmware beta includes support for 1440p resolutions on compatible displays. 

That's important, because right now 1440p is the sweet spot for PC monitors: it's where you get the best balance of price, performance and power without having to cut corners or spend too much cash. And while 4K is more common among gamers who connect their consoles to the best TVs, 1440p is where it's at for PC gaming.

On PS5, 1440p won't affect performance

As Leadbetter points out, the 1440p changes the output resolution of the console, not the rendering – so in terms of performance, your games will run at the same speed as they would if you were outputting to a 4K display; in games that have different rendering profiles for different output resolutions, such as PS4 Pro games, they output in 4K and the GPU downscales to 1440p.

For now, VRR is only available in 1080p or 4K, not 1440p; hopefully that'll change before this beta becomes a finished release.

The new firmware also supports a range of key features in HDMI 2.0 TVs. Leadbetter has gone into an extraordinary amount of detail here and I won't even try to summarise it, but if you're a PS5 gamer who's frustrated that TV features that should work on your PS5 currently don't then you should find some reasons to be cheerful here.

Once that's out of the way, will the PS5 finally support 8K? Don't hold your breath. As I wrote back in May, while the PS5 mentions 8K on the box it isn't currently supported by the console; given how long it took Sony to add VRR, also mentioned on The Box Of Lies, this isn't a feature you should expect imminently.